I’ve had my Vero 4k on the sidelines for quite some time and was thinking on repurposing it with a desktop linux distro. I’m aware of few arm64 distros but not how compatible they are with this specific SOC. Any thoughts?
Has anyone had any luck installing a debian, manjaro or something else?
Thanks!
edit: typos
Maybe start with OSMC, remove/disable mediacenter and read this:
Vero 4K is S905X
4K+ is S905D
There are compatible distributions and the easiest one to install may be Armbian.
However we can’t provide support for this. If you’re happy with Debian, install latest OSMC and disable Kodi as @grahamh suggested.
Cheers
Sam
Ok, but Vero4K uses a 32bit user-space and 64bit Kernel-space, so your solution is not always practicable or the best…
In my case I stopped to use Vero4k as Mediacenter and I use it for Home Automation (with HomeAssistant) but this limit of 32bit user-space is very boring because I cannot install 64bit version of Database or Python so all datetime/timestamps will be broken in one decade when a 32bit cannot handle Dates anymore.
We will move to 64-bit userland and kernel in the near future.
Sam
Good to know that.
I’ve tried using a 64bit toolchain and running on installations “inside” it but it’s very annoying and hard to use/maintain.
Will “old” Vero4k (without the Plus “+”) updated as well? (I bought it many years ago and I updated to Kernel 4.9.269 using an “unofficial” repository/procedure to have newest APT packages and all is working fine)
sudo apt-get install aarch64-toolchain-osmc should be sufficient.
Yes – but 4.9.269 is the stable kernel now for about a year. There is no separate repository needed for this.
Just installing a 64bit toolchain it’s not sufficient to run all installations and binaries on that 64bit. Any “apt install” command will run in the normal 32bit and the same happens while running Python or other binaries.
It’s passed many time from when I dismiss this toolchain solution, but I remember I should used special command/prefix to execute an Unix command “inside” that 64bit toolchain environment/folder instead of 32 and in that way all installations and binaries where installed in toolchain’s default folders and can be use from all 64bit binaries.
Unfortunately running 64bit Python VirtualEnv scripts inside a toolchain (using that command-prefix behavior) is very hard and I surrended after many days of tries.
Maybe “now” the 4.9.269 Kernel is the normal one, but at that time (many years ago) it was stucked at 3.14 and update to 4.9 was possible only by adding a (beta?) repository before running an APT upgrade.
We started testing the 4.9 kernel in early 2020 and it has been released as stable for a couple of years now. Our next focus is to target 5.15 LTS.
My suggestion is to run dockers of the 64 bit softwares, if possible.
Docker is the fastest solution to bypass many problem, but I don’t use it if I don’t have to.
It has obliviously an overhead, adds harder complexity for Storage/Data to let persist them across container runs, unusual hardware is harder to connect to it when binaries need it (I.e. an USB antenna for Zigbee/ZWave networks), run a single command (expecially in python virtual env) from “outside” could be a pain in the… because it requires a complex command and it’s too waste of time everytime I need to exec something.