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ASUS Tinker Board’s Debian and Kodi Linux Images, Schematics and Documentation

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21–30 of 37 posts

Re: ASUS Tinker Board’s Debian and Kodi Linux Images, Schematics and Documentation

#22
post #9

Honest question: Can somebody explain to me why I would want to get this instead of a Raspberry Pi or a Beagle Bone?

Double the ram, twice as fast, gigabit ethernet. 4k. Still usb 2.0 though. Much riskier on OS and software support/community though. If starting out I would go Rpi. But this is defo a very well specced little board.

it is still pretty hard to find ARM with USB3 these days for DIY

Re: ASUS Tinker Board’s Debian and Kodi Linux Images, Schematics and Documentation

#23
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Double the ram, twice as fast, gigabit ethernet. 4k. Still usb 2.0 though. Much riskier on OS and software support/community though. If starting out I would go Rpi. But this is defo a very well specced little board.

it is still pretty hard to find ARM with USB3 these days for DIY

I had the same issue (no ARM+USB3+gigabit boards) so I had to build a board that had all of that plus mSata and minipcie.

Re: ASUS Tinker Board’s Debian and Kodi Linux Images, Schematics and Documentation

#24
post #8
post #3

Rockchip has reputation for not following through with drivers for their ARM SoCs. I wonder if this will suffer the same fate or if perhaps ASUS will pick up the ball.

I've done some kernel and Linux on Amlogic and Rockchip. This is the number one issue to me. For instance the ODROID C2 with non standard Linux kernel 3.14.... Even on Android you're stuck with old kernels and versions because SoC providers only ship binary blobs for old kernels (and sometimes old forked kernels)

ODROID C2 has a quite OK mainline-kernel booting, check out the linux-meson.org project. Or latest build status: https://kernelci.org/boot/meson-gxbb-odroidc2/

Re: ASUS Tinker Board’s Debian and Kodi Linux Images, Schematics and Documentation

#25
I got burned with kodi on an arm unit, the ODROID (C1 or C2, don't remember which) was capable of playing many things with the hardware decoder. But it would fall short on anything other than basic MP4 and MPEG. The ODROID was far more capable than the bananapi, raspberry pi, and other ARM units with HDMI out.

Re: ASUS Tinker Board’s Debian and Kodi Linux Images, Schematics and Documentation

#26
post #9

Honest question: Can somebody explain to me why I would want to get this instead of a Raspberry Pi or a Beagle Bone?

Double the ram, twice as fast, gigabit ethernet. 4k. Still usb 2.0 though. Much riskier on OS and software support/community though. If starting out I would go Rpi. But this is defo a very well specced little board.

The specs might be great, but without proper (DKMS) drivers and/or source code you can't make the chips do anything. Especially when the vendor decides to drop software support a year from now...

Re: ASUS Tinker Board’s Debian and Kodi Linux Images, Schematics and Documentation

#28

Nearly all the dev boards with the exception on the Pi are on old kernels. A lot of things especially gpu related don't work well. Even the Pi was booting with a gpu blob untill a few months ago. All these SOCs including the Rockchip 3288 and the newer 3399 work perfectly on Android and Chrome seen in the Asus Flipbooks and the Samsung Chromebook Pros. So perfectly good drivers that work on Linux exist. Yet something…

How do they get around the GPL license?

Re: ASUS Tinker Board’s Debian and Kodi Linux Images, Schematics and Documentation

#29
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it is still pretty hard to find ARM with USB3 these days for DIY

I had the same issue (no ARM+USB3+gigabit boards) so I had to build a board that had all of that plus mSata and minipcie.

I just use celeron boards (mini-itx) that has everything I need and is still low-power
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