DietPi -- an actually working and maintained Distro for Tinkerboard 2s

[DaveWK 0]

After being pretty disappointed with the ancient kernels that Asus/TB has been releasing, I finally found a well-maintained distro to put on the TB2. Yay!

https://dietpi.com/#downloadinfo

You can dd this directly to an SD card or to the onboard MMC, and it works including the USB ports, HDMI and Ethernet. I was able to get the wifi to scan and connect but did not have antennas which may be causing my weak signal. I also ordered a newer m.2 AX210NGW Wifi 6/Bluetooth 5.3 card to replace the RTL8822CE card so we'll see if that improves.

 

I also have been experimenting, and have been able to steal the u-boot and kernel from this image and set up Arch Linux as well. After successfully flashing the dietpi image and patching to the latest kernel, I deleted everything from the dietpi filesystem, extracted the Arch Arm rootfs, but kept the boot directory. I was then able to successfully boot into arch linux.

The "edge" kernel is at around v6.6.xx and surprisingly works very well. One thing I was not sure how to do was fetch and rebuild new kernels for Arch which include the TB2 DTB and put it in the right place.