I finally assembled my new secondary computer, another Radxa Rock 5B. The primary has been used for quite a while but I haven’t had enough courage to mess with it because it… well …is my primary computer.
The two systems are almost identical. The only difference is that the primary is equipped with an Intel AX200 wifi6/bluetooth m.2 card. The secondary only has wired networking.
Gear used in the process:
- USB to SD adapter
You should have one too. A really useful tool. - 2 × SD memory card
(Bought as a twin 32GB pack at a local store).
NOTE
Downloading the images and writing to the SD memory cards was done on the primary computer while the installation was done on the empty secondary unit.
This is why I keep two computers around. One can do the stuff necessary to get the other one working properly.
Process overview
- Sat down at my primary computer.
- Downloaded EDK2 for Rock 5B image from GitHub.
- Wrote the EDK2 image to a SD memory using the USB adapter and Gnome Disks.
- Downloaded Agama DVD image for AArch64 from the openSUSE site.
- wrote the Agama image to the second SD memory using the USB adapter and Gnome Disks.
- Carried the installation gear over to the secondary computer.
- Inserted the EDK2 SD card into the SD slot of the Rock 5B.
- Inserted the Agama SD card into the USB adapter and then inserted it into one of the USB3 sockets of the Rock 5B.
- Booted the Rock 5B and entered settings by pressing ESC while the progress bar was visible.
- Changed the ACPI setting to use Device Tree Mode and saved settings:
- Continued with start-up that starts the Agama installer.
I chose Tumbleweed, made sure I wrote the system to the installed NVMe SSD, added a /home catalogue and chose Gnome as my desktop environment.
The installed system starts normally via EDK2 (with a Radxa logotype), Grub2, Login screen and finally lands in a hardware accelerated Gnome environment.
I tested if playback would be smooth even with CPU speed set to mimimal in the EDK2 settings. The Rock 5B ran fine and kept within safe parameters on my passively cooled system, so I decided to keep the CPU speed at that setting.