Cubieboard not displaying anything.

[Connor Irwin]

So I have noticed an issue with my cubieboard. When I first got the cubieboard I was aware that it should boot into android off the the bat. However it didn't seem to work. The board powered on and displayed a red and green light. My monitor has a light on it that is orange when there is no signal and turns blue when there is. When I booted the board the light turned blue but nothing was displayed.

I decided to try berryboot to see if that would work and it worked just fine. I could install raspbian without any issues. I was not a fan of raspbian and decided to try a different distro. This is where my frustration comes in. I have tried every possible distrobution that could work on my device and nothing would boot. The board would power on and that blue light on my display with turn on. BUT NOTHING WOULD BE DISPLAYED! ARG! 

I am wondering if something on the NAND doesn't like my monitor. I came to this theory after reading another post that said: 

" I have yet to confirm it yet, but there is a 'rootkit' image for the Nand Flash.  That may have the SDcard boot the system.  If so, Berryboot provides images for the SDcard for multiple Linux OSes. In other words, The Cubieboard is going to always look first at Nand flash and if there is a bootstrap firmware to pass the boot proceedure on to the SDcard, it will do so."

What should I do? Should I try another display like my TV?

[Floris Bos]

On 02/13/2013 02:54 AM, Connor Irwin wrote:
> I decided to try berryboot to see if that would work and it worked
> just fine. I could install raspbian without any issues. I was not a
> fan of raspbian and decided to try a different distro. This is where
> my frustration comes in. I have tried every possible distrobution that
> could work on my device and nothing would boot.

Can add your own distributions to Berrboot as well, if you don't like
the standard ones offered.

Or try if you can get EDID to work on the images offered by others.
Topic has come up before on this list. All you need is the right
uEnv.txt settings and a recent kernel.


Yours sincerely,

Floris Bos

[Roman Mamedov]

On Tue, 12 Feb 2013 17:54:04 -0800 (PST)
Connor Irwin <cirwi...@gmail.com> wrote:

> What should I do? Should I try another display like my TV?

To answer that it would perhaps be helpful if you would mention what
kind of display are you trying with in the first place (and no, "a computer
monitor" is not nearly specific enough).

--
With respect,
Roman

[Connor Irwin]

Whoops can't believe I left that important tidbit out. I have a 1920x1080 60hz led LCD Acer display. It has a VGA and dvi input. I am currently using a HDMI to dvi cable.

[Connor Irwin]

How would I update that file or change the kernel?

[Roman Mamedov]

On Tue, 12 Feb 2013 17:54:04 -0800 (PST)
Connor Irwin <cirwi...@gmail.com> wrote:

> I decided to try berryboot to see if that would work and it worked just
> fine. I could install raspbian without any issues.

"Worked just fine" means it could actually display stuff on your monitor? Then
probably it is not a DVI/HDMI or a monitor problem.

--
With respect,
Roman

[Connor Irwin]

Now I don't know too much on this sort of stuff so I could be totally wrong. Don't be afraid to correct me.

I think berry boot has it's own boot loader so it worked fine. Now when I use a different image I don't think it has that so it has to go through the NAND flash for some sort of "approval" to boot from the SD rather than the NAND. If this is the case then something in that NAND does not seem to like my display. This would explains why berry boot worked.

[Michal Suchanek]

The pre-installed system simply has old driver which cannot handle your monitor.

HTH

Michal

[Connor Irwin]

How would I go about fixing this then? Does the pre-installed driver not able to use 1080p?

[Floris Bos]

On 02/13/2013 06:00 AM, Roman Mamedov wrote:
>> I decided to try berryboot to see if that would work and it worked just
>> fine. I could install raspbian without any issues.
> "Worked just fine" means it could actually display stuff on your monitor? Then
> probably it is not a DVI/HDMI or a monitor problem.
>

It IS a DVI problem, or rather the problem that some images are not
configured properly to work with DVI monitors.

The Berryboot image is configured to auto-detect the capabilities of the
monitor using EDID, and will work.

Most other images are hard coded to always send a HDMI signal with 720p
resolution and HDMI audio data added to the same signal, and that will
simply not work properly with DVI monitors who where not designed to
deal with that.
If you want the images you create to work properly for folks with normal
pc monitors, you need to create a uEnv.txt with the right kernel
parameters to enable EDID.
See my message with a sample file from a couple days ago.

--

Yours sincerely,

Floris Bos

[Connor Irwin]

Ok I saw how you would create the file. But how would you put that on a bootable sd card? 

[Floris Bos]

On 02/14/2013 04:30 AM, Connor Irwin wrote:
> Ok I saw how you would create the file. But how would you put that on
> a bootable sd card?
>

The FAT partition with the boot files should be visible as a normal
drive on your normal computer.

Just use any plain text editor on your regular computer (e.g. notepad++
under Windows) to write the file.
Click "save" icon -> select SD card -> enter "uEnv.txt" as name.

It's that simple, as long as the image you are using already has a
recent kernel.
If not, I would not bother, and go for a more recent image.


Yours sincerely,

Floris Bos

[Connor Irwin]

Ok so i fixed the issue. It seems that the device doesn't like DVI. I pluged the cibieboard into my TV (kinda inconvenient) and it works just fine. 

[Bastiaan van den Berg]

On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 9:25 PM, Connor Irwin <cirwi...@gmail.com> wrote:

Ok so i fixed the issue. It seems that the device doesn't like DVI. I pluged the cibieboard into my TV (kinda inconvenient) and it works just fine.

No, the other way around, many DVI screens dont like the resolution the cubieboard is outputting by default.