Networking started as not-working
The Ethernet Port
The default setup of the Armbian OS (based on Debian Linux) didn't have proper configuration for the ethernet subsystem to properly work with a 1-Gigabit network switch. It apparently has to do with some low level driver stuff in the various builds of the Armbian kernel. To get it to work at all I eventually found out that it would negotiate the connection only if I forced it to 10/100 mode, which is usable enough. It's possible I could have found some other Linux kernel that was available for ARM that did actually have proper 1-Gigabit Ethernet driver configuration, but I was too far into my customization of my Armbian setup to want to switch. Regardless, even though I don't have the full gigabit networking, 100Mbps is fine for what I'll need most of the time.
Once I had Ethernet working I was able to update all packages, download apps, and generally begin the customization of this PINE A64-LTS v2 based single board computer.
The Wifi Daughter-Board
This plug-in board for the A64 only supports 2.4 GHz networks, which is fine as my router has both 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz WiFi networks configured. The problem was, though, that the Armbian distro image that had been built specifically for the SOPINE and PINE A64-LTS hardware which that I installed wasn't set up properly to support WiFi.
It showed that there was “Wireless” in the network manager, however it never enumerated a list of WiFi network SSIDs. It just showed a completely blank list, whereas it should be showing about a dozen WiFi networks in the area with mine being at the top of the list. Even configuring it to force the SSID, WPA protocol, and password manually did not yield a good result.
It turns out the cause was that this Armbian distrubtion only had "staging" drivers there for the WiFi board, which functioned just enough to make it look like it would work within the Network Manager, but wasn’t fully functional to actually operate entirely. I eventually had to download the full set of firmware drivers for everything to find support for the WiFi daughter-board's RealTek chipset:
armbian-firmware-full
Information out there on this was scarce -- I had to piece together things to figure out the final solution. Is it possible that not many folks use this PINE A64-LTS V2 board with WiFi? Wish I knew the answer.
Anyway after getting the full firmware installed, the Network Manager in the desktop environment now properly recognized my WiFi network and I was able to connect.
And now finally I could detach the Ethernet cable altogether, because what good is a laptop that only has wired networking?
