Does the AML-S905X-CC (Le Potato) board have a future?
in AML-S905X-CC
Last time I tried this board I was building a RetroPi system, the Lakka image failed to give me HDMI audio, the Xubuntu image failed to give me anything over HDMI and one of the USB ports is unusable. I put the AML-S905X-CC in a drawer, bought a Raspberry Pi 3 and set it up without a hitch. Meanwhile, there have been NO NEW RELEASES for this board, yet I see Libre Computer has spent a good bit of time running new benchmarks against the RPi 3 B+. As someone with a Le Potato in my hand, I'm looking at another RPi3 purchase because it doesn't matter that the Potato is faster, it's not worth the hassle on the software side. I'm disappointed to see that fresh marketing material is more important than functional images.
Comments
I received this board recently.
I'm am also concerned for the support.
Because they said they will be releasing some features at the beginning of the year and none has come.
I want to use the board as a central media hub, and also for some internet browsing with ubuntu.
I hope they keep to their promises
In the meanwhile there is dust on it, I putted the Le Potato into a cupboard about two months ago. I gave up waiting for full-working images...
Official feedback would be enough.
Even if it was "no more support" kind of feedback.
At least, we wouldn't hope on something useless.
AML-S905X-CC is a long term support board and by far the best mainline Linux board. There is a boatload of work going into mainline Linux in preparation for Ubuntu 18.04. If you watch the github, there's significant kernel work. Not having images released does not mean there's no progress. If you are interested, we recommend the mailing list: http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-amlogic
A side note is that mainline Linux does not work like vendor Linux. There's a thorough vetting process so everything is slow and expensive. Libre Computer has already commited a quarter million dollars in software development for various open source projects for this board. Thats more than 5x what this board raised in funding for the hardware alone. However, good software work cannot be completed in one day.
Ok
That's the kind of feedback we wanted. Thank you.
It is very good to know that you're working in the mainline Linux for Ubuntu 18.04, meaning that we will have a good LTS for this board. Good software always takes time, I agree.
Just keep posting some notes
@loverpi thank you very much for this feedback!
As @WerBn said, I also agree that software engineering takes a lot of time. For now we **know ** that the devs are working on it. The main problem for me was, that we rarely heard anything about the progress.
If we can help with feedbacks on nightly/testing builds let us know
This is for this image libre-computer-aml-s905x-cc-ubuntu-bionic-retropie-4.19.23-02688-g18236d345948-dirty-2019-02-18.zip Here
Obviously your le Potato will need internet for this. Once you've booted see the bit about EmulationStation not being found, you're dropped to a Bash prompt do:
then:
From here you will select "Manage packages", then "Manage core packages", then "emulationstation", then "Update from source" It seemed to take less than 10 min for me.
Restart and you should be on your way.