Ubuntu on Linkstar-K68K

BigRon · February 19, 2023, 9:40pm

Agreed on all accounts. Have the same challenge on my end with no response from anyone at Seeed regarding an updated OpenWrt image.

AvertEuphemism · February 20, 2023, 4:41am

The eMMC is just a flash storage device like any block device. You can manipulate it like any device with parted, fdisk, or dd commands. If you boot from TF then ssh into the OpenWRT instance you will see a /dev/mmcblk0. You can manipulate it as you wish without fear of bricking the device. Imagine it as another TF card or hard drive. I’ve repartitioned and dd different images to the eMMC and was able to recover just fine. From my tests and observations the device is just a PC or raspberryPi. From their documentation the boot order is TF then eMMC; so that means if you screw up the eMMC you can still boot from the TF card.

I’ve documented the way to flash OpenWRT to eMMC without Windows and Rockchip dev tools.

AvertEuphemism · February 20, 2023, 5:05am

I was an avid PiHole user, but after finding out about AdGuardHome I never looked back.Deployment is easy since it consists of a single binary. Since it is written in golang it supports many hardware platforms. I’ve deployed it to RaspberryPi, Ubiquiti Routers, Asuswrt-Merlin Routers, OpenWRT, and containerize.

I have multiple instances at different locations so this sync is awesome.

trippme:

Thanks for the great response and the details.

My primary goal of running a linux OS is to run PFSense and portainer so I can run some of the tools I want to like PiHole among other things. The reason I want Ubuntu is it was the selling point SeedStudio used to cause me to buy it and their documentation is sadly lacking right now.

So setting up Ubuntu isn’t the issue it’s getting it running on the LinkStar that is an unknown to me and like you mentioned I don’t want to brick my new toy. On my Pi I’m using the RPi memory card imager so you click click click and you have a working/usable Pi. For the LinkStar Google has no useful links for this install specifically (just points back to SeedStudio which says “coming soon”).

I’ll take a look at the guide for the Pi you linked to and try it out when I get back home from a trip next week.

Seeed-Liu · February 22, 2023, 10:05am

Hi, just to let everyone know, we already have ubuntu support, but this is a beta version and we will continue to make updates and the stable version will be released in March.

trippme · April 14, 2023, 2:20am

We’re in April now, what is the status of the Ubuntu release? I feel a bit duped for buying this for Ubuntu and you have yet to release a fully featured update.

robotman321 · April 14, 2023, 4:06pm

I am also struggling with properly flashing an OS. I followed the steps to flash ubuntu. I am able to boot the K68 to a login screen. I cannot get past the login screen because I can’t figure out the password.

I tried flashing the openwrt image to the K68 but the K68 does not boot after flashing. It appears other people have the same issue here. Are there any updates on the ubuntu login?

Jason_Gyorog · May 3, 2023, 4:40pm

I was able to install Lubuntu and log in:

default Username: linkstar, Password: linkstar
Root Username: root, Root Password: root
(from the “Install Operating System” page linked above by Seeed-Liu)

However, only eth0 and eth1 are available. Neither the 2.5G (eth2 and eth3) nor the wifi seems to be available. I upgraded to Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS and upgraded all software packages as much as possible, but it’s still using a 4.19.219 kernel.

The wifi appears to need kernel version 5.12 or newer, according to MediaTek MT7921 802.11ax PCI Express Wireless Network Adapter

The 2.5G Ethernet appears to need kernel version 5.4 or newer, according to Realtek RTL 8125 - LinuxReviews