My Experience with the Renegade ROC-RK3328-CC
So, I ordered a Renegade ROC-RK3328-CC in January this year (2025) to get into home-servers and tinker around a bit.
I did expect that I would have to inform myself and that not everything would just work. But I didn’t expect for literally just about nothing to work.
I first tried downloading the officially supported distros without success. Specifically, I first tried
- Debian
- Ubuntu
- Raspbian
- LibreELEC
and found out that none of them worked.
Then I found out that the board apparently uses u-boot and that there is a Libre Computer Flash Tool, with which I could apparently flash the correct bootloader onto the sd-card.
So I tried again, this time I used the Libre Computer Flash Tool first and then flashed each of the aforementioned distro images, to no avail.
Then I tried it the (I believe correct) other way around, flashing the distros image first and then using the Libre Computer Flash Tool, which also did not work.
That’s when I gave up on the project for about half a month, before I, again, set out to get it working. This time I just focused on trying to get one distro working, which I decided should be LibreELEC.
After searching through the depths of the internet, I found the site of some awesome Russian, who apparently patches u-boot for many boards himself and uploads them to a Russian equivalent site like mega.nz or Google Drive.
Sadly, I didn’t save the link to the website and don’t remember the name of the person and also don’t know, how I found it, as I found the link on a Russian blog site.
That u-boot patch actually worked! at least for LibreELEC it did. But since LibreELEC is not really the distro for my use case, I set out to get either Raspbian or Debian or any normal distro working, again, without success.
That’s when I gave up the second time. This time for probably two months, if not longer.
Then I got the great Idea to try installing NixOS, because I thought, as I already have it running on my Laptop, it shouldn’t be too hard to find a working image.
Well, I was wrong. I tried so many different ways to install it, but just didn’t get it working. See my other post on this hub, where I go over everything I tried.
Then, I took another break until today, where I tried the other officially supported distros. See this post here.
It might be entirely possible, that I am the idiot, that just does something categorically wrong, but I also did not find any info on what I should have done differently.