All the official OS images are like 10 months old per the web page? But if you look at the actual images files many of the images are like March or April 2023!
Is IndieDroid NOVA no longer supported? I realize the vendor does not support any of the OSes, and I know the OSes are community supported, but really, it does some like a ball has been dropped here?
Trying to understand if there is any merit in recommending the IndieDroid NOVA if the support is just not there?
“Is IndieDroid NOVA no longer supported?” - it was never officially supported. This is just a rebranded chinese 9tripod board which was meant to have “documentation and support based in U.S.A” - whatever that means, given that most chinese boards are actually doing better than this and the bar is super low.
What happened in reality is: they sent out the lowest spec boards to a few developers in the community with the hope that they would provide support for free. They have indeed provided some initial images and then moved on with their lives.
They aren’t paying anyone to work on software, as such you cannot expect updates or any kind of support.
When it comes to such boards, I’d suggest sticking to popular ones. I won’t name any brands here so it isn’t considered advertisement, but you can google them. They’re cheaper, have much better I/O (e.g. M.2 slots) and benefit from greater community interest.
It’s a shame because if ameriDroid put a bit of thought into this and considered paying/hiring 1-2 people rather than wasting all money on dev samples trying to support dozens of half-working distros (jack of all trades, master of none), they could’ve had an excellent official OS image and documentation. Even if the board is technically inferior in terms of I/O to other offerings, having good software support is a huge selling point and people wouldn’t even care as much about pricing.
Thanks for your feedback.
We’ve been involved in the SBC market for more than 12 years. We looked at what the foreign manufacturers were doing and noted the things we thought we could do better, and decided to have a go at it. We had a specific budget that we could allocate. If we were unsuccessful, losing those funds would definitely hurt, but not cause us to go bankrupt unless other unforeseen circumstances came along. As with most things, reality is much more complicated than it comes across to the “armchair quarterback”. While we had a lot of experience with the game, we were still somewhat in that “armchair quarterback” position.
We have put – and continue to put – a lot of thought, strategy and investment into this project. Although the timeline from conception to completion extended beyond our initial expectations and costs were higher than anticipated, we remained committed throughout. After the initial significant investment to get the project rolling, we faced challenges with extremely limited control over the design process and communication issues with 9tripod. By the time our board overcame numerous unexplained delays and was ready for the market, competitors had introduced similar products at lower prices, creating a highly competitive environment.
Despite these hurdles, we continued to push forward. We distributed engineering samples to developers, many of whom are our friends in the dev community. Their collaboration and support were invaluable. We financially compensated several developers several thousand dollars each due to their dedicated OS development efforts, in addition to a representative agent in China. In addition to the astronomical inventory investment, we invested around $50,000 in developing OS images and documentation for the Nova, along with significant investments from our internal team.
As a US-based company entering the market with our first board, we faced stiff competition from established players, particularly those based in China with better access to suppliers and factories. Additionally, import tariffs of approximately 30% further impacted our price competitiveness. Most Chinese board manufacturers avoid these tariffs by selling direct-to-consumer.
While we hoped for more support from US-based companies finding value in us developing a natively-supported line of SBCs, we understand that several external factors influenced our journey. Despite the challenges, we remain dedicated to exploring opportunities and overcoming obstacles in this dynamic market, and we continue to invest in the Nova.
At this point, it is obvious that we need to redesign our OS downloads page to highlight specific distros that are particularly complete and/or actively developed, while still allowing our users to download any of the numerous distros that our dev community has produced.
Nice, very politically correct response. But it does not address the core question, is there any active supprot for the Nova? Apparently not. So the Nova is basically a failed SBC platform, since there is not on going support, at the OS level, for example. This is a shame, because it is wonderful hardware. But great hardware is useless without current supported software. How can anyone recommend such hardware without active software support?
The above response is a very transparent look into the process we went through and the challenges we encountered.
There is still active support for the Nova, such as BredOS (Arch Linux derivative).
In addition, we just posted a couple of articles on running an LLM on the Nova: Introducing the Rockchip RKNN Toolkit: NPU-Accelerated Large Language — ameriDroid and How to run LLMs on the NPU | Indiedroid Wiki
We continue to work with the community to see further advancements.
How about you encourage and promote that the community keeps the OS limages current. I tried BredOS… is very much incomplete and has stability issues. With all the old images on kernel 5.1.x, major security and stability issues are missing from all of the listed OS images. You really need to impress on the community this situation needs to be addressed. You have the ability to encourage this, though various means, fund them, provide free hardware, etc. Surely you can see how this situation is hurting your business. How did the Raspberry Pi gain acceptance and greater appeal? The Pi foundation actively, consistently, pushed themselves and the resulting community to greater results. I suggest you consider this. One new, incomplete OS image is fine, but the published list of OSes needs support, plain and simple. Or is your only focus now LLM for NOVA? I cannot see that as your realistic goal, given the NOVA design. But maybe that is where you plan to go.
The Downloads page has been updated with a few images.
According to developer macromorgan, the Nova only needs the HDMI to be validated in order to have full mainline support, and he has a fix for that.
We’ve started making some suggestions on how to motivate the developers, and we’ve already seen some progress, as you can hopefully now see.
Yes. Thank you. Really appreciate this.
Well now/soon they will be I’m really hoping i can pickup the nova and give it the love it deserves. PS I’m the developer of BredOS
Just downloaded the new image for Noble 24.04 desktop and tried to write it to the 64GB emmc that came with my Nova. Balena etcher seems to be able to write the image, but it fails validation. I checked SHA256 match, and it was good. I downloaded it 2 more times, checked SHA256 match (again) on each. I even tried using a different computer to image the emmc module. I thought maybe the image was OK even if not validated, so installed it in the Nova each time. Nova does not boot with this image.
Has anyone else had success with this image? Maybe my card is bad?
Maybe emmc writer is bad?
Hello, I suspect either your eMMC or eMMC adapter might be damaged, I just flashed the image into my Nova eMMC and it was validated correctly and I’m able to boot without any problems. Do you have another eMMC adapter or another eMMC?
Would this image also work on a microSD?
Yes, that image also works with microSD
That is what I feared. The emmc drive is bad. I have another, but it has a working image of Ubuntu 22.04, so I don’t want to overwrite it. I think I will try the SD card route. I completely forgot about that option.
Thanks!!
Ubuntu 24.04 on SD card now. Nice to have newer kernel (6.1). So far most hardware devices are working (USB, GPU, sound, ethernet, SD card, emmc, cooling fan). But neither WiFi nor bluetooth work. They both worked with older Ubuntu 22.04. So I guess drivers are not merged into 6.1 kernel?
Any ideas for getting it to work? Anywhere to download drivers? My mouse and keyboard are bluetooth, and I prefer not to have ethernet cable dangling out.
The drivers are not included in this kernel although they formerly were, but devs are working to correct that.
You may have to go with the previous kernel version until the issue is fixed (hopefully in 6.2). I personally haven’t tried hunting for the drivers to use with 6.1.
Good to hear. I will check back from time to time by installing this SD card and updating. Or will it be a whole new image?
By the way, Balena Etcher was the problem with writing the image to emmc. Writing image to SD card also failed validation and would not boot. I used Rufus instead of Etcher and image was correctly written the first time.
That’s good to know. We’ve had a few failures and we generally use Balena Etcher, so we should probably try some other methods when we run across an issue in the future.
