LicheeRV Dock

The LicheeRV board can be used in different configurations. We currently only supply an image for the LicheeRV with Dock. Below you will find the instructions for installing the Ubuntu 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu) on the board.

Flash the Ubuntu image onto the SD card

Download the preinstalled server image for the LicheeRV Dock board. For Ubuntu 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu) it is available at https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/22.10/release/ubuntu-22.10-preinstalled-server-riscv64+licheerv.img.xz.

Copy it to an SD card with:

  $ xzcat ubuntu-22.10-preinstalled-server-riscv64+licheerv.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=1M conv=fsync

You will have to replace /dev/sdX by the actual device name of your SD card. Please, be especially cautious not to overwrite the wrong drive as this cannot be undone.

First boot

Insert the SD card and power on the board.

Don't be impatient when not seeing any output from the kernel for a few minutes. This is due to the board performance.

When booting the first time wait until you see an output line confirming that cloud-init has finished. Cloud init is responsible for generating the SSH keys and setting the default password. Cloud init itself will also need a few minutes. The line to wait for will look similar to

 [  291.932176] cloud-init[1282]: Cloud-init v. 22.3.4-0ubuntu1 finished at Thu, 20 Oct 2022 08:25:11 +0000. Datasource DataSourceNoCloud [seed=/var/lib/cloud/seed/nocloud-net][dsmode=net].  Up 291.79 seconds

Now you can login with user ubuntu and the default password ubuntu and will be asked to choose a new password.

WiFi Configuration

Install driver

This step is only needed prior to kernel 6.7. It is not needed for Ubuntu 24.04.

To enable WiFi the DKMS package licheerv-rtl8723ds-dkms is needed needed on lower kernel releases.

If your LicheeRV is connected to the network via a USB Ethernet adapter, that is easy:

  $ sudo apt-get update
  $ sudo apt-get install licheerv-rtl8723ds-dkms

If your LiccheRV is not connected to the network you have to download the licheerv-rtl8723ds-dkms_*.deb file from the https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/licheerv-rtl8723ds-dkms page and write it to the SD card.

Once you have booted the device the package can be installed with

  $ sudo dpkg -i licheerv-rtl8723ds-dkms_*.deb

The installation process requires building a kernel module and takes at least an hour.

Netplan

Configure Netplan to connect to your local network. Find below a simple example of a Netplan configuration file that must be stored in /etc/netplan directory with the extension *.yaml:

network:
  version: 2
  renderer: networkd
  wifis:
    wlan0:
      dhcp4: yes
      dhcp6: yes
      access-points:
        "YOUR_SSID":
          password: "YOUR_PASSWORD"

The file should be owned by root and chmod 600.

Either reboot or execute the following commands to load the kernel module and apply the configuration:

  $ sudo modprobe 8723ds
  $ sudo netplan apply
  $ sudo systemctl restart systemd-networkd.service

You should now be connected to your wireless network.

Known issues

• Microphone does not work.
• The following kernel modules are used for reading from SD card.
  • mmc-block
  • sunxi-mmc
  They must either be built into the kernel or must be included in the initial RAM disk via /etc/initramfs- tools/modules or via a file in /usr/share/initramfs-tools/modules.d/.