Android Mini PC MK802+

It was somewhere between 2012 and 2013 when I bumped to this thing. I was browsing Shenzhen Electronic Market and there it was: a mini “all-in-one” PC with Android 4.0. I was intrigued and thought that this could be something to sell, and so I purchased 10 of this. I managed to sell/give/lost/throw away 4 of this because as of today I have 6 on my hand.

Ricomagic MK802+, I think what this product was called, or at least that name what came out when I googled it. The specifications were:

• CPU Single Core Allwinner A10 SoC @ 1Ghz
• Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n (Realtek RTL8188CTV)
• RAM 1GiB DDR3 @ 480MHz
• Storage (NAND) 4Gb
• 1x USB Type-A
• 1x USB OTG (Mini USB)
• 1x Mini HDMI
• 1x Micro SD Slot

Interesting thing about this mini PC was its ability to boot Linux. Although Android OS lived in the NAND Storage, you could burn Linux image to micro-sd and put it in the slot. There were alot of tutorials on how to compile and create your own custom Linux image on the web, but I prefered the easy way. Image!

It turned out that for desktop use the performance was poor! Android 4.0 was OK when you start fresh (from reset), which got me intrigued on the first time. But then, after you installed couple programs, it started to lag and froze. Linux distributions which were circulating around at that time were no help either. Because most of them were shipped with a desktop environment which was to much to handle for the Mali 400 GPU.

Somewhere along the way, I came across this website romanrm.net which were doing a headless Debian for MK802+. I started to try it and play with it, and it was PERFECT (at that time).

Roman only works on 2 images: Debian Wheezy (7) which He released on 2014 and Debian Jessie (8) on 2018. But then when I tried to install Docker, I found out from Docker website that their support for Debian starts with Debian Stretch (9) and Debian Buster (10).

Next venture is with Armbian. Armbian releases with the latest Ubuntu and Debian distributions, PERFECT! Well, not really. The distribution does not support my MK802+ directly, but luckily there is a model that came close. Cubieboard has pretty much similar hardware configuration with my MK802+ and it is supported by Armbian. Once I downloaded, burn, and pop it into micro-sd slot, the shell is asking for login (joyful tears).

Couple things that do not work:

1. USB OTG port (fixed)
2. CPU frequency reading on htop
3. CPU temperature reading on htop