Vero 4k+ general purpose

Hi,

As the Vero 4k+ is not supported anymore, and my Vero V is on its way, I would like to know if it’s possible to use the Vero 4k+ hardware as a general purpose computer (e.g. a small docker host, with mosquitto and home assistant containers).

I’ve found some tips in other threads (e.g. What to do with Vero 4K+ when Vero V arrives?), but I just would like to know if there’s a way to install some kind of basic operating system on Vero 4k+, similar to the Lite version of the Raspberry Pi OS. I would like to have an OS with long term support, so Debain Bookworm is preferred.

Thank you!

Well, I do understand the wish for a newer release of Debian if you were going to run it as a “surf box”, But you are also saying docker and home assistant. I’m currently running docker on my Verok4k(aarch64), I made a modified bash installer for docker, where the normal one will just install armhf.

Currently running these dockers Dashy(some old version), Portainer, pi-alert, Duckdns-client and watchtower. I’ve never played around with Home Assistant. , so I don’t know how well it would run on a 2 gb ram machine.

I would liken getting bookworm to vero4k, as justified as getting win11 running on default install on pentium133 hardware. It would steal a lot of dev.time from getting Vero5 optimized for aarch64, and believe me it’s not a small change. Since I know how much work the team has put into previous Debian upgrade and Kodi upgrade, this will mean all that plus making sure that the OSMC build environment is also patched to aarch64.

I would think that when the worst rush to get aarch64 on all OSMC platforms has settled, and there isn’t any major Kodi update. There might be some “spare dev/enthusiast time” to throw together a “general purpose OS”. No promises, but i find it likely that someone would put their skills into it.

Anyway, if you’d like to have a look at the docker install script, I’ll put it up on github for you.

Thanks for your remarks, I can see the development issues and priorities more clearly now.

Actually, I don’t mind staying on Bullseye, as long as it is updated regularly. Unfortunately the OSMC updates hide the underlying OS package updates, so I don’t really know if we miss the critical changes. Now I ran an apt update and apt list --upgradable, and it seems to be not bad at all… :star_struck:

I run my test Home Assistant system on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W with 512MB RAM, so the memory is not a bottleneck here (I don’t use too much modules or automation anyway).

Yes, please! I would like to see it and try! Could you share a link, please?