Today I’m starting a new ‘serie’ of post, along of the server, but for another Linux project. It’s a totally different context. Let me explain…
I have two Android TV box, running a custom manufacturer Android 4.4.2. One is branded under the name “Polar” with no model name, with an Amlogic S805 CPU and display a board name of “MXQ” in the Android system settings, while the other one is branded under the name ‘Polar 4K Arctic’, and display a board name of “MXIII” in the settings.
As they have a really old Android version (so outdated sob), I wanted to install Linux and use them for cool stuff (example a NAS or just some experimentation machines). Sadly, after my research, nearly all the links that I found for downloading the images (mainly from Armbian’s forum, a port of Linux for ARM devices) are either dead or they have been deleted.
Then I found out a LibreELEC images working on both my S805 and S802, thanks to the incredible port of dtechsrv on GitHub. I was able to fully verify my device’s specs (and to get some motivation!). As initially thought, they are respectiviely an S805 and an S802 boards. It was one of the only Linux images that aren’t deleted for the aml s802/s805 boxes.
LibreELEC (short for Libre Embedded Linux Entertainment Center) is a non-profit fork of OpenELEC as an open source software appliance, a Linux-based Just enough operating system for the Kodi media player. This fork of OpenELEC announced in March 2016 as a split from the OpenELEC team after “creative differences”, taking most of its active developers at the time to join the new LibreELEC project. Source: Wikipedia ———————————————————————–
UART Mode Enabled
After finding a tutorial explaining how to use UART on an S802 device, I bought an USB-to-TTL converter, from Prolific. After I plugged it in the correct pins on my S802 device (Remember, the ‘Arctic 4K’ MXIII model ), I could use screen or minicom to see what’s happening.
I was able to see the boot logs! But then I found out I can interrupt the boot process to get a shell by pressing keys like space, return, escape, etc. Here’s a few info I got from it :
root@k200_MXIII_1G:/data # uname -a
Linux localhost 3.10.33 #1 SMP PREEMPT Sat Aug 15 11:45:15 CST 2015 armv7l GNU/Linux
root@k200_MXIII_1G:/data # free -m
total used free shared buffers
Mem: 1599 724 874 0 22
-/+ buffers: 702 896
Swap: 499 0 499
UART connected to the S802 board
Weirdly enough when plugged on my S805 board I got no boot logs, so I wasn’t able to test on that one sadly.
But now I have more information :
- One of the box is a MXIII S802 with 1GB of ram, which I found was made under the “k200” name, thanks to dtechserv’s repo.
- It uses a custom kernel 3.10.33, from around 2010-2015, built by Amlogic, containing proprietary pilots.
- The other one is a MXQ (HD18Q?) S805, 1GB too.
- Both have booted with LibreELEC (S805 was this one, and S802 with that one)
- There was a port of some Linux on them (again, LibreELEC), built with kernel 3.10.
Well… I`m a little bit more advanced but not that much. Still no Debian/Ubuntu/Armbian images in sight.
I definitely need some work to reach my goal. If it’s even possible… (SPOILER: it is possible… )
Stay tuned to know where this will go!
Hash-AK