I got this thing in my home. How can I turn this into a home server?
I have a similar tv box running on rk3328. You'll need to flash the rom and put armbian on it. Search by model and you'll find some guide on armbian forums. Mine had 4gb ram but uses only about 600mb running my hubzilla server on docker. And 30gh storage is decent for small projects.
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 1 day ago
Google the product name and Linux. If nothing turns up, you need to find the name of the SoC / processor and google that. Find out if it's supported by Linux and what other people did to install Linux. You might need additional hardware though, like a serial or JTAG adapter and a soldering iron. And I must warn you, that thing has 1 GB of RAM and 256MB(!) of flash storage. You won't be able to do much with those specs.
mrvictory1@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Why does it have more RAM than storage?
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 1 day ago
Well, it's a mass-produced, embedded device, designed to do one specific task. I guess lots of the video related stuff is assisted by hardware and they usually strip down the embedded Linux to the minimum needed. Because every Megabyte of storage costs extra and they need to hit some 99,- or 89,- price point. Furthermore, they don't want it to boot for 20 seconds, so these devices generally don't contain any extras. Similar things happen on wifi routers, the ones below $100 usually contain similar amounts of memory (or less). At least the last time I bought one.
adarza@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
it’s an iptv stb, it doesn’t need much. it’s not designed for subscriber customization or ‘app’ loading.