Killing the Desktop GUI (Off with it's head!)
I'm getting my Ubuntu builds from Here. It appears that Firefly is using the lightdm desktop manager. I'm trying to create a NAS replacement device, so I don't want a desktop. After a bunch of digging, this appears to be the fastest was do disable the desktop:
sudo systemctl disable lightdm.service
sudo shutdown -r 0
Now my idle draw is 285mA which is on par with my RPi 3.
FYI: I read that Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu Desktop Ubuntu use the same kernel (https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/difference-ubuntu-desktop-ubuntu-server/).
Hope that helps!
Comments
If you use the ubunutu kernel images, you will be missing a lot of the rockchip drivers and you will not be using their xserver. Their xserver for the roc-rk3328-cc has built-in hardware acceleration. It is very difficult to build the xserver from the firefly git repos.
If you want to go down the Ubuntu route without using the firefly build and you don't mind going headless, you should probably build the kernel yourself from the firefly git repo. Also, the firefly kernel configuration is nowhere near the same kernel as the ubuntu kernel. Ubuntu contains a lot more modules. The firefly kernel doesn't seem to use modules at all or install them in the proper directory.
@dburckh Those images are validated images from the Firefly team. Libre Computer will also roll out images based on mainline Linux (4.14+) instead of Linux 4.4. The Linux 4.4 by the Firefly team will have the best out-of-box experience as of right now.
Guys, thanks for responding, but I'm confused now.
1. The image I'm using is from (link follows). Should I be using another? http://share.loverpi.com/board/libre-computer-project/libre-computer-board-roc-rk3328-cc/image/ubuntu/
2. I don't want the xserver/desktop. I just want a headless device. It wasn't easy for me to find how to disable the GUI (lightdm?), so I wanted to share it with others.
It's really working great serving as a Samba server the moment, but any suggestions would be welcome.
@Redferne If you want mainline kernel, wait about another month. We will have mainline kernel images for the ROC-RK3328-CC for both desktop and headless. Currently all the images are by the Firefly team based on Linux 4.4 LTS.
Cool. I wanted to try NFS, but it looks like the kernel extension aren't in the current build. Samba is working, but it's a little wacky. I'm get about 65MB/s down and 100MB/s up, which seems really odd to me.