Bought the Odroid XU4

As I seem to be getting serious about developing on the ARM platform, I decided that I want an ARM board that is powerful enough for native compiling.

I recently posted about the Hard Kernel Odroid XU4:
http://bkhome.org/news/201609/odroid-xu4-looks-good.html

Well, I bought it, arrived today.

First impressions, it is beautiful:


I bought a 64GB eMMC, which is very fast Flash storage, with Ubuntu Mate preinstalled. Plugged in the eMMC, put it into the little case, powered up, it works.

There is a switch, to boot from either eMMC or micro-SD, and my intention is to boot Quirky on the micro-SD and use the 64GB eMMC for general storage.
Then there's those two lovely USB3 sockets, into which I plan to plug one or two terabyte-size hard drives.
To power the load of up to two external hard drives, I bought the 6A power supply -- it is massive -- in fact, with a micro-USB-plug adaptor it would make a good supply for the Pis -- never have low-voltage again!

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Comments

I downloaded an Ubuntu 16.04 image for the XU4, wrote it to a micro-SD card, running it now.

Why is it, whenever I try Ubuntu, I find so many things wrong?

People might say that I am biased, perhaps, but I do have an expectation that the product performs reasonably well.

I am looking forward to when I have Quirky running, and don't have to run Ubuntu Mate.

Firstly, the wifi adaptor. Plugging it in after bootup, it detected my network, but did not offer an entry box to enter my password. Instead brought up another window asking lots of unnecessary things.
I rebooted with the adaptor plugged in, then it came up with a simple window asking for a password.
I have encountered this before, it is weird.

Then the is the package manager. I want to install 'git'. It informed me that the local package database is out of date, and I need to update. I did so, it showed a download progress bar briefly, then just dumped me back onto the desktop.

That's it, nothing. No busy indication, nothing. Yet it is obviously doing something, as the blue light on the Odroid board is flickering away.

I waited awhile, then tried to restart the package manager, but it wouldn't start, just dropped me back to the desktop after showing the initial selection of online databases.

It seems that I just have to wait, watching the blue light flashing.

Well, in the meantime, I am posting this.

Awhile back, a month or two, I compared the installation of Debian with Ubuntu on my laptop, and Ubuntu came off a very poor second.

I was thinking of compiling the kernel, but won't bother. Will do it after I get Quirky running.

Another thing, startup of everything in Ubuntu Mate is so sluggish.

Tags: linux