Ubuntu 20.04 LTS "focal" image from DLI works well on the APi

Really Good Support and Good JOB from Digital Loggers

The focal system image file (atomicpi-ubuntu-focal...img) that was made available on the DLI site early July 2020

https://www.digital-loggers.com/downloads/index.html#API_IMAGES

works very well on my AtomicPi. SUCCESS!

As far as I can see, this lubuntu version does not slow down the machine and does not short the ressources (disk , memory and cpu as well).
It Sounds perfectly, wifi perfectly too, and bluetooth from the first minute!!!

Beware that lubuntu 20.04 by default requires for many operations the administrator (root) password.
You may do ASAP:
$sudo passwd root
and enter twice and administrator pasword, this is it.

Greetings to Michael and Sergei, and all others at DLI,
as this move will insure a longer life to what we like to do with our APi.
just a sort of Yes, now, APi will make you happy ;-)

I have only had moderate success with any install. While the system does load into emmc, it does not recognize SOUND or ETHERNET or WLAN. Did you do anything special? I have two atomicpi units and neither will boot a system with these components working. I've also tried other atomicpi OSs but, still no luck.

Phillip Crane (@phillipcrane):
I have only had moderate success with any install. While the system does load into emmc, it does not recognize SOUND or ETHERNET or WLAN. Did you do anything special? I have two atomicpi units and neither will boot a system with these components working. I've also tried other atomicpi OSs but, still no luck.

I just wrote atomicpi_ubuntu_focal_lxqt_standalone_1.0.0.206.zip to an SD card with Balena Etcher and booted it.

Its crap. Video samples don't work although four /dev/video0-3 show up.

This is my 4th Atomic Pi.

The first one I quickly gave up on the pre-flashed image in the eEMC and Installed Ubuntu-Mate 16.04. This meant giving up the sound and camera, but didn't matter for my use. The other two I never even booted the eEMC images, immediately overwriting them with a normal Ubuntu-Mate amd64 (aka x86-64) image, 16.04 for one, 20.04 for the other. Again very happy but then I didn't need the camera or sound for either of these.

For the 4th, which I got to have as a spare, I'm playing around with it. I'm biased against Lubuntu and LXQT from past experience, but maybe I'll learn something.

The 18.04 that came pre-installed in the eEMC needed a lot of messing around with to get working, but still not as smooth as the stock Ubuntu 16.04 or 20.04 images, but it runs the guvcview.sh and mplayer.sh camera sample apps, but the gstreamer.sh app crashes the camera and I need to un-plug and re-plug the camera or reboot to get it back. Got nowhere with getting sound over hdmi to work.

I see there are a lot of updates to the lxqt 20.04 image, I'll install them and follow-up tomorrow. If the camera wasn't basically free with the Amazon Atomic Pi development kit I'd be PO'd. I expect kickstarters who got the much more expensive AI development kit are going to be very unhappy.

My suggestion for playing around with different images, use a 16GB SD card and if you get it to work the way you want, put the Ubuntu 20.04 flavor of your choice on a USB3 stick and boot it choosing try without installing. Then open a trminal and use sudo gparted to copy the SD card partitions to the eEMC.

Edit: wired Ethernet worked on the initial boot up. WiFi sees my two access points, but I haven't tried connecting to either, as my usage needs wired networking. HDMI sound played when I watched a youTube video in Chromium. We'll see if updates and a reboot get the camera module working. Getting the on-board amplifier and sound to work with external speakers will be important for the use I'm thinking of for this system.

If you bought the Atomic Pi for the extra hardware GPIO, camera, Bosch sensor and on-board sound, I think you have a right to be upset with all the LTS images provided. But if you can use a standard UVC webcam instead, and don't need the sound or extra hardware I've found normal Ubuntu 16.04 and 20.04 run fine on it.

Yves BARBIN (@yvesbarbin):
Really Good Support and Good JOB from Digital Loggers
The focal system image file (atomicpi-ubuntu-focal...img) that was made available on the DLI site early July 2020
https://www.digital-loggers.com/downloads/index.html#API_IMAGES
works very well on my AtomicPi. SUCCESS!
As far as I can see, this lubuntu version does not slow down the machine and does not short the ressources (disk , memory and cpu as well).
It Sounds perfectly, wifi perfectly too, and bluetooth from the first minute!!!
Beware that lubuntu 20.04 by default requires for many operations the administrator (root) password.
You may do ASAP:
$sudo passwd root
and enter twice and administrator pasword, this is it.
Greetings to Michael and Sergei, and all others at DLI,
as this move will insure a longer life to what we like to do with our APi.
just a sort of Yes, now, APi will make you happy ;-)

I call BS. None of the $HOME/samples/camera examples work.

In fact guvcview is not even installed in this image which is what guvcview.sh is supposed to use! Doh!

Here is yet another reason the atomicpi_ubuntu_focal_lxqt_standalone_1.0.0.206.zip image is less than good.

The system hangs on shutdown/reboot.

I found a fix, it seems the mei module is causing the lockups at shutdown/reboot.

I did sudo rmmod mei_hdcp mei_txe mei
next I edited /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and added:
blacklist mei
blacklist mei_txe
blacklist mei_hdcp
and rebooted.

Now a watchdog timer can detect a problem and automatically reboot the system -- pretty essential for IOT type usage. This is not confined to the DLI 20.04 LXQT image, its also in the stock 20.04 Ubuntu images with all current updates applied.

So far not noticed anything gone wrong without the mei modules loaded.

Another thing that is essential for IOT usage is autologin:
sudo nano /etc/sddm.conf
add:
[Autologin]
User=atomicpi
Session=lxqt.desktop

IMHO this should be the default in the DLI distributed images.

After installing guvcview the guvcview.sh usually works when executed as I mentioned earlier the image so mis-configured out of the box that if you execute in a terminal it fails because xterm is not installed. I've not stumbled on where to change the default terminal application to Qterminal in LXQT to fix this, not that it means much as there are an ungodly amount of errors and warnings as guvcview starts up, but it eventually usually displays a nice 720p image, 30 fps in good light, ~8 fps in poor light but with decent color, but the slow shutter has lot of motion blur if you move. The camera has potential if using it was documented.

When the camera does work (connection seems very flakey) the image seems quite nice but without actual examples of how to use it in OpenCV etc. its basically a useless, unreliable toy.

Did I mention that none of the gstreamer examples work. The mplayer example displays a full screen image, but unlike in the 18.04 Lubuntu DLI image it doesn't save a video file.

Edit:
Another issue, if you want audio over HDMI, the pavucontrol setting to change it from the default Mayfield analog stereo doesn't stick across reboots. I've no solution, but if my envisioned use for this 4th system come to fruition, I'll want the on-board amp and external speakers, as it'll be running headless after the initial development and testing, so I won't be searching for a solution.

I was able to verify that the Mayfield audio and built in Class-D amp works by jumpering +5V to +12V (loud enough for my needs at present), hooking up external 8 Ohm speakers, and playing a youTube music video in Chromium, sound was very good.

I'm still trying to install Focal to the eMMC Memory.
I now get an error on the eMMC memory having wrong file system.
EDIT got the Atomic Pi eMMC loaded and can boot on Focal. My networking still needs tending. Keeps dropping connection every 10 seconds or so. Seems I sawl somrthing in this forum about that. None the less progress on my first Linux build. Im an old DOS windows guy so / or \ still bytes me.
.
I created a boot image I believe using Escher. I put the tf into the reader and booted into Lubuntu 20... XLQT just find. I used a TF reader on the USB3 port that had the source image file. I followed the DD commands on the Readme file. It gave back all the nice messages that it worked.
Now when I reboot without any memory cards, it never boots. I boot from the TF card and it gives me an error about the eMMC files being corrupted with wrong type of file system.
I did have the ISO file on a 64G NTSF formated TF card when I used the USB3 port as the source. Don't know if that had anything to do with it but just in case, I got a 32G tf card formatted with EXT4.

But I'm not giving up just yet, still trying.
Bill from Benicia

sorry Dupe post so I edited and got rid of same as above