Marketplaces and e-waste recycling centers are practically overflowing with the things: ARM-based streaming TV boxes that run some — usually very outdated and compromised — version of Android. While you can use them for their promised streaming purposes, they’re invariably poorly optimized and often lie about their true hardware specifications. Which leaves the most important question: can you install Linux on these SBCs and use them as a poor man’s Raspberry Pi alternative? The answer, according to [Oleksii’s Tech] on YouTube is ‘sorta’.
The commonly seen X96Q clone Android TV box that [Oleksii] bought for $10 is a good example. The clone advertises itself as based on a quad-core Cortex-A53 AllWinner H313 SoC, like the genuine X96Q, but actually has a Rockchip RK3229 inside with correspondingly far lower performance. After you have determined what the actual hardware inside the box is, you can get a copy of Armbian for that particular SoC. Here, the Rk322x-box minimal image was used, with the box booting straight off an SD card. Some Android TV boxes require much more complicated methods to even boot off external media, so this was a lucky break.
Continuing the hardware scam, it was advertised as having 2 GB of RAM and 16 GB of Flash, but it actually has just 1 GB of RAM and 8 GB of eMMC Flash. This was enough to get Armbian desktop up and running, but that’s about all you can do on the desktop. Desktop application performance was atrocious, mostly due to the CPU’s quad Cortex-A7 cores struggling to keep up.
As also suggested in the comments, the best use for these low-spec SBCs is probably to run light server applications on them, including Pi-Hole, Samba, an IRC bouncer, and so on. They’re pretty low-power, often have the requisite Ethernet built in, and it keeps another bit of potential e-waste from getting scrapped.
Has anyone tried to install FreeDOS or another very minimal open source OS on one of these?
Is it possible, with or without flashing the UEFI/BIOS?
Because of their price point (cheap or free), I’m thinking about using them in an elementary school, for simple coding and typing tutor.
FreeDOS still seems to be x86 centric, though some initiatives about porting to ARM seem to exist…
The basic functionality of DOS relies heavily on 16-bit instructions and interrupts of the x86 architecture. I think if you’re going to emulate that on ARM you might as well opt for Dosbox or QEMU
I’m speaking from experience with Android tablets, but hardware-wise these are pretty similar. First, bear in mind that these are ARM devices, so no standalone DOS, you would need a host OS and and x86 emulator. Also, these devices don’t have any standarized pre-OS environment, so this excludes anything like UEFI or BIOS. The bootloader & kernel need to be configured for a specific board, which involves “a little” or “a lot” of work depending on how much public information is available.
Unless you are willing to put in quite a bit of work, I would assume that other options would be a better match for your case. For example second-hand “thin terminals” as used in various corporate environments – these are low-end PCs that can run stock software. They are slightly more expensive though (a quick search on a Polish auction site shows these for an equivalent of 16eur).
This was meant as a reply to Andrew.
“a lot” of work
agree.
Getting DOS itself to boot would be fairly simple,
as it merely needs BIOS as a runtime and the basic 8086 instructions set.(With 80286 instructions set being highly recommended, 386+ instructions set would be ideal for DPMI/DOS4GW applications.)
As an analogy, the “old world” Power Macintoshs with the Mac’s Toolbox in ROM can serve here.:
It had an 68k emulator of ~40 KB size, I think, which was used by the classic Macintosh operating system in the PPC era.
(Later, if I understand correctly, the ROM content of “new world” models
went into a hard disk file to be loaded in RAM at runtime
and MacOS 9? itself got a dynamic 68k re-compiler.
The pyhsical ROM itself remained in use, but as a simple bootloader.)
https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Mac_68k_emulator
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_68k_emulator
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/mac/PPCSoftware/PPCSoftware-13.html
Something similar could be done for DOS, perhaps.
An x86 emulator with BIOS/VGA BIOS+VESA BIOS, as an UEFI payload. Maybe IBM 8514/A, too. It was being supported by a few graphics cards.
That would be good enough for booting MS-DOS 5 or 6.x, at very least.
Things like audio support would require Sound Blaster emulation,
since it was a de-facto standard (SB32/AWE32 would be ideal).
Though Covox SpeechThing/SoundMaster, PAS16, GUS, Windows Sound System (WSS) also had some relevance.
Mouse support would require MS Mouse emulation, maybe.
Or Genius/Mouse Systems emulation etc.
Seems the “fake” specs is the bigger problem in that space than E-waste.
“While you can use them for their promised streaming purposes, they’re invariably poorly optimized and often lie about their true hardware specifications.” What is this sentence trying to say? They don’t need to be optimized or honest, they need to play Netflix and Youtube or whatever. ??? I understand there may be problems using these for the intended purpose, but i would rather not write anything than just hand wave at it. Seems like there’s a story here about marketplace fraud that is being assumed instead of told? FWIW i’ve had mostly good luck at getting what’s advertised, in part because i eagerly buy things advertised to be pathetic. :)
Anyways i agree with Andrzej, it seems like a lot of work when relatively well-supported / well-documented boards in this same class are so common. Hard to justify purchasing one at random with so much uncertainty about how big the task will be. If i did already buy one, i’d probably be using it to run android apps on my tv and i wouldn’t want to break it for that purpose?
Anyways i’m not terribly optimistic about finding an aftermarket use for my nvidia shield tv when it is no longer suitable for its intended use.
I guess it could quite easily make a MAME box.