Successfully got this android set top box from 2018 running Ubuntu. Arm64 quad core and 1GB of memory but it's got two USB ports and lots of connectivity so it's a neat little thing to have running a desktop OS.
- replies
- 1
- announces
- 0
- likes
- 3
It's a generic android set top box running on a p281 reference board, apparently using an s905x chip.
Normally you'd press a reset button with a paperclip or toothpick to get it to try to boot off the SD card, but I ended up writing the sd card dozens of times trying to get it going so I drilled the reset button hole and printed a little button (the blue thing sticking out of the side).
Two distributions generally work on these out of the box: CoreELECT which provides a basic experience with kodi, and armbian which provides Ubuntu or debian support.
Neither worked out of the box for me. The armbian distribution written by the armbian app had a lot of complexity but didn't work, and the coreelect didn't either. What I eventually found was ta LibreElec-Generic-S905-9.2.8.19.img file which didn't work out of the box but did hard lock on boot up (which was progress -- the two behaviors before that were either skipping SD booting altogether and loading the android update app or boot looping). I found out that on that one you have to pull the correct .dtb file and copy it to dtb.img on the root of the card, and that one worked, which was a big deal.
That dts file seems really critical. Arm isn't standardized so before you even load a kernel it describes the way stuff is laid out. Finding a working dts file ended up being a key to getting it to boot at all.
Shortly afterwards I found amlogix-s9xxx-armbian by ophub on GitHub, and it didn't work directly but I was able to get an image from that repo to write and then boot using the dts file I got from the libreElect distribution. It seems to support basically all the hardware, after I got everything set up using the ethernet port I was able to get it onto my house WiFi.
It all works, but the 1GB of memory, limited CPU, and the fact everything is running off an SD card means it doesn't feel very snappy. However, the fact that this tiny little box is now a functioning PC is very cool to me, and if I take the SD card out, it returns to being an android set top box.
Normally you'd press a reset button with a paperclip or toothpick to get it to try to boot off the SD card, but I ended up writing the sd card dozens of times trying to get it going so I drilled the reset button hole and printed a little button (the blue thing sticking out of the side).
Two distributions generally work on these out of the box: CoreELECT which provides a basic experience with kodi, and armbian which provides Ubuntu or debian support.
Neither worked out of the box for me. The armbian distribution written by the armbian app had a lot of complexity but didn't work, and the coreelect didn't either. What I eventually found was ta LibreElec-Generic-S905-9.2.8.19.img file which didn't work out of the box but did hard lock on boot up (which was progress -- the two behaviors before that were either skipping SD booting altogether and loading the android update app or boot looping). I found out that on that one you have to pull the correct .dtb file and copy it to dtb.img on the root of the card, and that one worked, which was a big deal.
That dts file seems really critical. Arm isn't standardized so before you even load a kernel it describes the way stuff is laid out. Finding a working dts file ended up being a key to getting it to boot at all.
Shortly afterwards I found amlogix-s9xxx-armbian by ophub on GitHub, and it didn't work directly but I was able to get an image from that repo to write and then boot using the dts file I got from the libreElect distribution. It seems to support basically all the hardware, after I got everything set up using the ethernet port I was able to get it onto my house WiFi.
It all works, but the 1GB of memory, limited CPU, and the fact everything is running off an SD card means it doesn't feel very snappy. However, the fact that this tiny little box is now a functioning PC is very cool to me, and if I take the SD card out, it returns to being an android set top box.
