Rikomagic has been selling MK802III LE and MK802IV LE dual and quad core HDMI TV sticks based on RK3066 and RK3188 running Linux (PicUntu) for a little over half a year. The company has now announced a full size box with MK902 LE powered by Rockchip RK3188 with 2GB RAM and up to 16 GB Flash.
The specifications appear to be the same as MK902 Android TV box:
- SoC – Rockchip RK3188 quad core ARM Cortex-A9 processor with Mali-400MP4
- System Memory – 2GB RAM
- Storage – 8GB or 16GB NAND Flash + microSD slot up to 32GB
- Video Output – HDMI, AV out
- Audio – HDMI, AV, optical S/PDIF
- Connectivity – 802.11n WiFi, 10/100M Ethernet
- Camera – 5MP
- USB – 4x USB host ports
The device is sold with HDMI and AV cables, a power adapter, and a user’s manual. The 8GB version costs £94.99 (~$158), and the 16GB version £99.99 (~$167) on Cloudsto, or £5 more (~$8) than the same devices with Android.
You could also save some money and install PicUntu 4.5, or even other Linux distributions, by yourself by getting the device from shops like Geekbuying, or DealExtreme for $100 and up. However, if you plan to use to device as a media player/center, you should really keep using Android, as 2D/3D graphics acceleration, and hardware video decoding are not working at all in RK3188 based devices because Rockchip is not interested in Linux, so games, video playback, YouTube, and anything using Adobe Flash are basically unusable, or mind-blowingly slow.
Via Liliputing
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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funny, Amlogic are much more open with their sources yet no-one’s interested in releasing a ubuntu release for it.
Closest we’ve got is xbmclinux!
@Craig Whitcombe
You can “start” full ubuntu on this device but what else?
It is slow and whole gfx are really really slow (x.org and gfx driver problem)
raspberry pi with wayland compositor is faster and look much better.
It is useless for real work
They say this one (dual core) plays HD:
http://www.cloudsto.com/mk802iii-le-mini-linux-pc/cloudsto-edge-arm-thin-client-detail.html
Anyone recognise it?
@onebir
Interesting… So here’s what it says.
“Full HD Video Playback is now possible with the Cloudsto Edge using our specially designed media player, after installing the media player software its as simple as clicking on the media file of choice and Cloudsto Edge will stream HD video direct to the display.”
It’s a thin client, so I wonder if some kind of transcoding is done on the server, and the send back the video using a codec that can software decode 1080p easily. Or they’ve done something to use the Android libs in Linux. If so, they would probably have advertised it for the Linux Editions.
@cnxsoft I guess it might even just run Android with a thin client app (or a customised version of Android for thin client use). Didn’t think of that 🙁
@m][sko
Its actually perfect to be used as a thin client, for light web browsing, general office tasks, file server, for digital signage, POS Terminal………the list goes on!
@onebir
No it actually runs a very cut down version of linux with a QT X11 based front end which serves as a control panel to configure the RDP connection easily.