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MyPasswordSucks | 8 months ago
Waking up from sleep has about a 1/3 chance of success, the other 2/3rds of the time the whole thing just hard-freezes and needs a full reboot, which leads into the two biggest issues I had with it:
1. When booting up on a "dirty" filesystem, there's a prompt to power down or press any key to bypass the integrity check. This has a two minute timeout, which is just a ridiculous amount of time to wait. (Also, pressing buttons doesn't actually seem to work to bypass the integrity check)
2. After a power cycle - regardless of whether the power-down was clean or dirty - you lose everything on the microSD other than the OS itself. All settings, all downloaded themes, all ROMs completely wiped. It's as if it's booting from a recovery partition or something. I tried numerous times (gracefully shutting down via the Start-button menu) and each time, it boots back up all wiped clean. Reimaged and started over from scratch - still the same issue.
The sleep issue seems to be a known thing and newer version will fix this by... removing the ability to sleep (see https://github.com/ROCKNIX/distribution/issues/1609).
Didn't see anything about the "clean" (more like "forcibly-sterilized") slate after power cycling.
Not ready for the big leagues, at least not on the CubeXX.
LaurensBER|8 months ago
Unfortunately we're often limited by whatever blobs the manufacturer provides and whatever is supported by the mainline kernel, as you can imagine there's not a whole lot of people experimenting with the latest and the greatest on these devices so the project often runs into regressions when upgrading. I wish the situation was better but given the prices these devices are going for it's a small wonder they work as well as they do ;) Having (some) mainline support does mean that we'll see updates for years and years so with a bit of luck the situation will improve over time!
For reference the Rockchip devices (RK3266 and RK3566) have been supported for longer and offer a general smooth experience. I've had pretty good luck with my Powkiddy X55!
With regards to 2, just like bazzite and some other distros Rocknix uses a read-only filesystem, you can use mounts to allow certain paths to be overwritten. The default configuration strives to find a balance between allowing some customization and stability.
What you're describing does sound like a bug, it might be that some flag is set incorrectly. I would recommend dropping in at the Discord.
MyPasswordSucks|8 months ago
And yeah, I was aware that H700 is the new kid on the block as it pertains to Rocknix. It's just a bit frustrating, especially because (imo) the Anbernic H700 devices are the ones most deeply in need of a solid custom firmware / OS option. The version of Retroarch included in the stock OS is lacking some pretty standard cores (no INTV, no Colecovision, no Speccy, no 3DO, and that's just the "tier 2"s that come to mind, not doing a deep dive into the even-more obscure stuff like the Sharp systems or CDi). And the default Ambernic OS itself is, charitably, "not-great" (why are there two entirely-separate menus to browse games from, why can't I re-scan without rebooting, the list goes on and on and on...)
> What you're describing does sound like a bug, it might be that some flag is set incorrectly.
Yeah, hopefully this isn't intended behavior. :) The ROMs are being samba'd right into the appropriate directories (I tried both "roms-internal" and the third option that isn't "roms-external" - forgot the name and already wiped the card). I can play them fine as long as I don't ever reboot, so it's not like they're just not copying. The themes are downloaded and installed solely through the frontend, I'm not doing anything too obscure or beardy.
It even does this on a fresh install, so the default theme is immediately replaced with the... even-more-default...? theme. That definitely threw me for a loop on the first go-round. The "more-default-than-default" theme actually doesn't look too bad (sort of has a Cosmic Smash [1] vibe), but a lot of text breaks outside the confines of its boxes and it lacks any cursor highlighting in menus, so without screenshots you have no idea which option (or game) you're selecting.
> I would recommend dropping in at the Discord.
I don't use Discord, but I'm happy to file Github issues as long as you think it'd be non-redundant / a productive use of my time. Otherwise, by all means feel free to link my comments in the Discord!
[1] https://imgur.com/a/xQdepbN