Out of the box?

brendankinney

I pledged for the "small meal with fries" so I wouldn't have to muck around with flashing, etc. I received my board recently, plugged in the eMMc module to the back of the board and...nothing. It starts to boot but then displays a series of error messages and just sits there. Any advice on what might be happening and how to fix?

brendankinney

Here's what I'm seeing on attempted boot....

DaveP

There seem to have been a number of reports that some of the "out of the box" packages were shipped with blank eMMc devices. Since the real software images haven't yet been released (today, if we are lucky) Libre may not have had any working images to flash to eMMc when they built the boards and started shipping packages several weeks ago.

At this point your best bet may be to wait a day or so until Libre published the "official" images... download the right one, flash to a USB stick, boot, log in, and then use the (presumably) included eMMc driver and migration tool to transfer the distribution from USB stick to eMMc.

Rob_Mohr

I can confirm that my "out of the box" kit does not boot from EMMC as supplied either.  I have booted the newly released ubunto xfce image, however so far I have not found a "migration tool".  I suspect that similar command line commands as used for the AML-S905X-CC will be used here also, i.e.:

sudo lc_redetect_emmc
sudo lc_distro_transfer libre-computer.aml-s805x-ac /dev/mmcblk0 image_name

where image_name is one of the following for Ubunto XFCE:

lc-ubunto-18.04-headless
lc-ubunto-18.04-xfce

Note: When I issue the second command above, I get no error, but no other response either.  As far as I can tell, its not booting from the EMMC, so there must be additional magic required.  The lc_redetect_emmc command does detect an enumerate the proper amount memory on the EMMC.

PS:  I haven't been able to mess around much with tracing down answers because the whole OS locks up and requires a hard reboot to get it back.  Seems to happen primarily if I walk away and leave the mouse alone for a few minutes.  It has happened in the middle of either typing or mousing however, so I'm not sure whats up.

TheLostBit

I have the same Problem , spend hours trying to get a booting System on EMMC.

russenterprises

I've been able to flash the emmc on mine several times, but there are a couple of tricks that I've picked up from this forum and other sources.  Here's what works for me:

Download one of the new images (I'm using the Ubuntu XFCE image primarily) and write to a USB drive with Win32DiskImager (or similar tool.)

Insert the USB drive in the USB port farthest from the GPIO header and power on the La Frite.  It should boot from the USB drive.  Note that the GUI images take a while to boot the first time.

If you are booting to a GUI, it will autologin as user libre, the password is computer.  Open a terminal window and you can run
sudo lc_distro_transfer libre-computer/aml-s805x-ac /dev/mmcblk0
and it should give you a list of the available distributions (probably just the one on the USB drive.)  Then you can add that to the command, so for my system here, the full command is:

sudo lc_distro_transfer libre-computer/aml-s805x-ac /dev/mmcblk0 lc-ubuntu-18.04-xfce
and it will transfer to the emmc.
At this point, I shut down the system, remove the USB drive, and move my keyboard to the port the USB drive was in.  On my system (and at least some others) if you boot with a keyboard in the USB port closest to the GPIO pins it will still try to boot from USB.

At this point, it should boot to the emmc image.

If you decide you want to try another image, or if you want to re-flash the same image, you can shut down the system and boot while holding down the ESC key.  Then after the Autoboot in 1 second message, you should see a => prompt for u-boot.  At this point, it doesn't matter which USB port the USB drive is in, I just enter:
setenv boot_targets usb0 usb1
followed by:
boot
And it will boot from USB and allow me to re-flash the emmc using the same procedure as above.