Ebrius Disputatios

I have a Rock64 made by the same company that makes my Pine Phone, Pine64, is the name of the company and their logo is a pine cone I believe. I bought the Rock64 because it had 4GB of RAM and cost only five dollars more than the latest Raspberry Pi at the time. Also, in those days, the Raspberry Pi's latest model was the Raspberry Pi 3B plus, and the device only boasted 1GB of RAM. The Rock64 seemed a decent kind of device, and it seemed that only one hacker predominated in all the different builds that I installed and tried. Ayufan, I think his name is. No matter what flavor of Linux that I installed and ran on the Rock64, that name would turn up. It turns out that he's a hell of a hacker and computer programmer in his own right. The Rock64 had very little support and one was lucky that anything at all was able to run on it.

Time went by and I enjoyed using my Rock64 even though it proved buggy at times, however, that can be expected, when devices are short on documentation and a large enough community that end up sharing ideas and hacks. I think that, after perhaps eighteen months later, the Raspberry Pi Foundation, introduced the Raspberry Pi 4B which had specifications ranging from 2GB RAM up to 8GB. I promptly bought myself a Raspberry Pi 4B, 8GB model and I was impressed at how far the little single board computer had advanced. With my new Pi on hand I quickly sidelined my Rock64 to lesser duties and it wasn't until quite recently, that I delegated it to being my new LibreELEC media server. A job which it seems to be good at.

Naturally both LibreELEC and the Rock64 are bleeding edge technologies, therefore, odd behavior is sometimes an often occurrence. However, that's to be expected in these cases. Theoretically, a 4GB, of RAM, with a 1.5GHz CPU is muscle enough to power any media center, which the Rock64 plainly does well, where the hiccups and buggy behavior comes in, I think, is mostly due to software that's, for now a little rough around the edges due to the many unknowns surrounding the hardware nature of the device. At least that's my opinion of things, anyway. I have been know to have wrong opinions at times, even when I'm blessed with plenty of information and intelligence. The reason I'm making an account of this is, I was using the stable version of the the latest incarnation of the LibELEC software and the package was so bug riddled that I sometimes joked with myself, in thought, wondering that, if this is indeed the stable version of things, what the hell must the unstable bits must be like. Well, I don't have to wonder any more. I got right fed up with the many unannounced reboots an erratic behavior and installed one of the nightly version builds. I made a back up of my previous copy, which include all my favorite settings and addons, which is a really good practice, unless one wishes to reinstall, reset and in some cases hunt down the names of all one's favorite channels and in my case I have nearly one hundred or more channels that I don't relish reentering, one at a time, until I'm all caught up.

So far, so good, knock on wood, everything seems a little smooth sailing right now and while it's still early in the game, I plan to monitor the situation. I've also saved the archive file containing this version, just in case it's any good and I want to keep it, in the event that I get foolish enough to try some other build and get a lemon, I can always replace it with my perceived, diamond in the rough.

It seems that I have found a flaw in our newly installed nightly version, this one freezes and restarts Kodi, whenever I want to play live streams. This is certainly a deal breaker here so I'll just have to reinstall the original, “stable” version and suck it up until either I can fix it in the code or the developers fix the new version.

Perhaps I should have titled this post, “RK3328, Rock64 SBC Hacking”, since I now wish to install the android port for this device and see if I, will appreciate using Android on a TV size screen instead. I wouldn't use the Google Store, of course, I prefer that open source and free software store called Fdroid and it's derivatives. I could still use LBRY, and PeerTube Too for that matter. There may even be an invidious App too. Although my live streaming opportunities my be impacted, unless there are apps available to mitigate that from happening. We'll see.

Well I tried some of the images listed as Android for the Rock64 and they took forever to boot up, well I shouldn't say that since none of them have booted up yet. Perhaps one day when I'm busy doing something else, then I'll just pop the SD card in and let the device sit there all day and perhaps it will boot up and show me a screen. There is a disclaimer, claiming to allow 3-5 minutes for boot up but I clearly waited for over 20 minutes and nothing happened. Perhaps, this is the very reason why I've never tried Android on any of these devices before. Well, that's not entirely accurate, I think I did set up Android on a Raspberri Pi once and there were many irregularities, which I did not record so I don't remember what behaviors exactly, turned me off, of installing Android, on Single Board computers.