DietPi the Orange Pi R1 Plus LTS

General Discussion
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Hi All,
Been tinkering with DietPi on a few different boards (Tinker 2s, VisionFive2, Orange Pi 5b) and been pretty impressed with the reliability and how a lot of things “just work” out of the box.

I have an Orange Pi R1 Plus LTS which the “official” images have unfortunately not been maintained and are effectively broken and out of date. The Armbian image also is broken in several ways, and there seems to be a lot of out of date packages that don’t play well with each other.

While not “officially” supported, I noticed DietPi does support the NanoPi r2s out of the box. The only major difference I have seen reported is the dual Ethernet Adapters, which on the Orange Pi R1 LTS are the Motorcomm YT8531 drivers.

Originally I thought I would need to mess with the dtb for the NanoPi, but lo and behold, when I flashed the image, I noticed that in /boot/dtb there was already a dtb – rockchip/rk3328-orangepi-r1-plus-lts.dtb ! WooHoo!

So I changed dietPiEnv.txt file to:
fdtfile=rockchip/rk3328-orangepi-r1-plus-lts.dtb

and booted it up.

Miraculously, it booted :tada: and was able to get a DHCP lease on eth0 and complete the setup! Hooray! After that, I was able to plug in a cheap 802.11ac USB WiFi:
0bda:b812 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL88x2bu [AC1200 Techkey]

This is awesome. I had been pulling my hair out attempting to make this work on Armbian and the ancient OrangePi images, but between the images including broken firmware and broken WiFi HotSpot packages, none of them worked. DietPi didn’t even have a mention of this board (or my cheapo USB) and I was able to set up a simple Wifi Hotspot and bridge in under an hour.

The one thing I noticed does not work seems to be the secondary Ethernet adapter, however this didn’t work on any of the other distros I tried either.

So 2 questions I had were:

  • If I want to debug the issue with the second onboard Ethernet further, I would need to dump the r1-plus-lts.dtb back into a dts, since I have a hunch the device tree has an issue. Is there an easy way to iterate over dumping and rebuilding the dtb (or even just an overlay for the second eth)?

  • Is there a plan in the works to include an 802.11s “easy button” like for a singleton wifi hotspot? or are there any known issues?

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I’m not sure that someone will be able to answer your question. At least from our end we don’t maintain overlays and experience might be limited.

Regards the button, I’m not aware on such a planning

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