An ARM64 (aarch64) machine which sat idle on the workbench amidst other inert items has finally returned to service. Many years ago I purchased a HoneyComb LX2 ARM workstation with the hopes that it would become the desktop counterpart to the Pinebook Pro which also graced my junk heap. The earlier days of Linux/aarch64 were quite unpleasant with a hodgepodge of driver support and other problems. A lot of hardware support improvements have landed upstream in the Linux kernel since I first purchased this machine and I was able to install a stock Debian image without too much difficulty.
Not too much.
It still was not terribly simple but at least I now have something functioning in the rack servicing aarch64 builds!
Linux honeycomb 6.12.101+deb13-arm64 #1 SMP Debian 6.12.101-1 (2026-08-05) aarch64 GNU/Linux
There are a number of useful hobbyist resources I relied on, which I wanted to link for posterity here:
I found this repository to be incredibly helpful as a confirmation of some install procedures and hardware support. [This Honeycomb[(https://github.com/evilrobot-01/HoneyComb) repository popped in my searching as well, while not as thorough as Wooty’s it has some useful UEFI shell invocations that helped me muddle through using the shell.
SolidRun has this quickstart guide which didn’t exist when I bought this board originally. It was a handy reference for some basics.
Installing Ubuntu on SolidRun HoneyComb LX2
This was a very helpful blog post to refer back to because the original author included screenshots of some of the UEFI bios settings! This was really helpful to confirm what was correct versus incorrect as I got started.
openSUSE wiki page on HoneyComb LX2K
I found this useful mostly to confirm that the system should be generally well supported these days. When it was originally released there were all kinds of kernel and driver hacks that were needed to bring the machine online.
First experiences with Honeycomb LX2k
Not terribly useful or detailed, but another confirmation “from the field” of some things I had in mind. This reminded me about the jumpers for the boot sequencing:
Make sure the firmware source jumpers are set off-ON-ON-ON-ON-off (or otherwise as indicated by silkscreen on board).