One step forward, two steps back, one step forward again…

So, I’d been working to get VARA* running on my Pi 5. I reported some successes here (and will begin testing with IC-7200 on dummy load later today).

This morning, I ran an apt-get upgrade and saw box64 was updated. Oh noes! Sure enough, VARA had stopped working.

So, I poked around a bit. Turns out, there are numerous versions of box64 in the Raspberry Pi distro. (To be fair, I haven’t checked which package repository each of these came from.)

I tried a couple of them, booting with both the 8 kb page kernel and the 16 kb kernel. Eventually, I found one that works fine.

Note the package used here (below). “box64-rpi4arm64”. The box-64-generic-arm ones seem to be for 32 bit ARM CPUs, though I’m just guessing based on the names.

If anyone here has insight into what’s going on with these packages, please share. They seem to getting active updates right now.

In any case, VARA is running again here. Will report back on my hardware testing. *REALLY* hoping to decommission my Windows box I use for running my rig.