[BozemanLUG] March Meeting topic aquired

[Scott Dowdle]

Greetings,

David wrote:

Converting an Android TV box to a Linux Desktop.

Freedom comes when manufacturers only care about selling hardware. Cheap Chinese Android TV boxes come basically pre-rooted. If you install a terminal and type "su -", you are root. From there, you need to figure out what processor and what gpu you have. The cpu is from /proc/cpuinfo.  The gpu is more difficult.  The kernel boot line helps there.  Armbian does not support the particular chipset for the box I got, but there is a fork that does:  https://github.com/150balbes/Build-Armbian .  Armbian only builds on a very specific version of Ubuntu 18.04.  It is not recommended that you build it on a native install, but from a virtual machine, as the build makes changes to the build system.  The build takes the better part of a day on my machine.  You can boot from either an sdcard or a thumb drive.  The sdcard boot requires more modification to the bootloader scripts, so I went with the easier thumb drive boot.  There's a couple of boot scripts that need to be modified to set up networking and to configure the gpu.  After that, it's pretty painless.  So for around $20, you can have a fully functional quad core arm Linux desktop.

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
704 Church Street
Belgrade, MT 59714
(406)388-0827 [home]
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