Bug Report: The system image does not run on Orange Pi 5 Plus

[grhgrmgrhrm]

What happened?

Hi! I downloaded different versions of the operating system for OrangePi 5 Plus and tried to burn them both to an SD card and a USB flash drive and also directly burn them to eMMC. The system does not start on OrangePi 5 Plus.
I've tried different flash drives, different versions of the system - 22.04 , 24.04, 24.19 - and desktop and server versions.
The system does not start in any way. At the same time, a competitive system (called Arm...) it starts on my board the first time. Also, I check the checksums of the image before writing it to a flash drive. The operating system I'm trying to burn the image from is Windows. Recording utilities - balenaEtcher, Rufus, Universal Usb installer.
Please take a look - maybe your images for this board are not being assembled correctly?

Kernel version

6.1.0-1020-rockchip

SBC model

Orange Pi 5 Plus

What operating system are you seeing this problem on?

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish), Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Nombat)

Relevant logs

No response

[dgdonovan]

See #1104

[kaosbeat]

also, I have no problem at all running the 24.04 on the OPi5-plus, what instructions did you follow to get it going? can you SSH into the system? maybe no HDMI but it still boots?

[grhgrmgrhrm]

also, I have no problem at all running the 24.04 on the OPi5-plus, what instructions did you follow to get it going? can you SSH into the system? maybe no HDMI but it still boots?

First of all, all attempts to start the board were through connection to a TV via HDMI port. Also I tried to follow this instruction - https://github.com/Joshua-Riek/ubuntu-rockchip?tab=readme-ov-file#installation
0) When recording an image using Belena, a verification error popped up after the recording itself. The image was downloaded as well as the url for downloading through the program. The image was additionally checked against checksums, but Belena never successfully verified the image recording. Tried to write with other utilities - ok, but:

1. SD card did not boot, black screen
2. from USB did not boot, black screen
3. I installed the system through the manufacturer's instructions, using the RKDevTool utility directly on the emmc memory - the same thing, black screen
4. I also tried to boot from the SD card to Armbian and then download the Ubuntu image from there to the nvme disk, which I then copied to emmc via the command line - the result of the download is a black screen.

The board seemed to boot itself, green LED was blinking and red LED was lit in parallel, but nothing was displayed on the screen. On the other hand, I performed exactly the same actions for Armbian - it starts up from the first time.

[ctshieh]

Same here

[MarcAndreWyss]

I had problems to write the compressed ubuntu-24.04-preinstalled-desktop-arm64-orangepi-5-plus.img.xz with balenaEtcher on Windows too. I then first extracted the image with xz-utils using an Ubuntu Live CD. Then writing the uncompressed ubuntu-24.04-preinstalled-desktop-arm64-orangepi-5-plus.img (not the missing xz at the end) with balenaEtcher on Windows worked without any problems. My Orange Pi 5 Plus actually works with the image above. I'm writing the comment here on this system.

Not sure if that is the same issue you have, but it somehow sounds similar.

[devdotnetorg]

@grhgrmgrhrm I use Armbian and Joshua-Riek images on SD card and SSD disk, everything is OK. I write images using balenaEtcher-Portable-1.18.11.exe and 16 GB microSD. Most likely you have a problem with writing the image to disk.

[ctshieh]

Thank you very much, I shall try when getting a new card, thanks again

[ctshieh]

I had tried several times and failed again and again.
I can install ubuntu 22.04 without any problem but I always got black screen while booting with ubuntu 24.xx.
I wonder if the problem is due to the board itself or the image. The ubuntu 24.xx image was written to a SD card under Mac OS system (by balenaEtcher).

[MarcAndreWyss]

If you are using 24.10 HDMI will not work. See here: https://github.com/Joshua-Riek/ubuntu-rockchip/wiki/Ubuntu-24.10

However 24.04 is working. At least for me as I wrote on November 27th 2024:

I had problems to write the compressed ubuntu-24.04-preinstalled-desktop-arm64-orangepi-5-plus.img.xz with balenaEtcher on Windows too. I then first extracted the image with xz-utils using an Ubuntu Live CD. Then writing the uncompressed ubuntu-24.04-preinstalled-desktop-arm64-orangepi-5-plus.img (not the missing xz at the end) with balenaEtcher on Windows worked without any problems. My Orange Pi 5 Plus actually works with the image above. I'm writing the comment here on this system.

Not sure if that is the same issue you have, but it somehow sounds similar.

[ctshieh]

Thanks very much. It works good under Ubuntu 24.04.1 . Thanks again.

[ewaldc]

Several versions of Balena Etcher on Windows/Mac have issues dealing with gzip and xz compressed archives (see here). Since all assets on this site are all xz compressed, there is a high chance of hitting this problem. Hence, as others have said, use other decompression tools e.g. 7z to decompress the assets first: e.g. "ubuntu-24.04-preinstalled-desktop-arm64-orangepi-5-plus.img.xz" into "ubuntu-24.04-preinstalled-desktop-arm64-orangepi-5-plus.img". Flashing the .img file will succeed (given a good SSD card), including verification.

I tested 22.04, 24.04 and 24.10 on Orange Pi 5+, all working fine, including HDMI on 24.10 (4K display, use the middle port) and boot from NVME/EMMC.