I got a cheap Android TV box off Amazon a while back and consolidated and it ended up being spare. One of the problems with these TV boxes is they don’t get OS updates after release and soon video apps stop working because of annoying DRM mods. I figured I’d try to switch one to Linux and see how it went. There are some complications in that these are ARM devices (not x86/x64) and getting ADB to connect is slightly complicated due to it not being a USB device. There are a few variations of the “ELEC” (Embedded Linux Entertainment Center), OpenELEC, LibreELEC, and CoreELEC (at least). CoreELEC focuses on ARM boxes and makes sense for the cheapest boxes.
What you get is a little linux-based device that boots to Kodi, runs an SMB server, and provides SSH access, basically an open source SmartTV that doesn’t spy on you. It is well suited to a media library you own, rather than rent, such as your DVD/Blu-Ray collection. Perhaps physical media will come back into vogue as the rent-to-watch streaming world fractures into a million individual subscriptions. Once moved to the FOSS world, there are regular updates and, generally, people committed to keeping things working and far better and far longer term support than OEM’s offer for random cheap android devices (or, even quite expensive ones).
A: Download the CoreELEC image:
You need to know the processor and RAM of your device – note that a lot of different brands are the same physical boxes. My “CoCoq M9C Pro” (not listed) is also sold as a “Bqeel M9C Pro” (listed) and the SOC (S905X) and RAM (1G) match, so the Bqeel image worked fine. The download helper at the bottom of the https://coreelec.org/ site got me the right file easily.
B: Image a uSD or USB device for your wee box:
I’m running Linux as my desktop so I used the LibreELEC Creator Tool and just selected the file downloaded previously. That part went easily. The only issue was that after imaging, Linux didn’t recognize the device and I had to systemctl --user restart gvfs-udisks2-volume-monitor before I could do the next step.
C: One manual file move for bootability:
ELEC systems use a “device tree” – a file with hardware descriptors that are device specific to get (most) of the random cheap peripherals working on these cheap boxes. You have to find the right one in the /Device Trees folder on your newly formatted uSD/USB device and copy it to the root directory and rename it dtb.img.
D: Awesome, now what?
Once you have your configured formatted bootable uSD/USB you have to get your box to boot off it. This is a bit harder without power/volume control buttons normally on Android devices. I have ADB set up to strip bloatware from phones. You just need one command to get this to work, reboot update, but to get it to your box is a bit of a trick.
Most of these boxes are supplied rooted, so you don’t need to do that, but you do need a command line tool and to enable ADB.
To enable ADB: navigate to the build number (usually Settings > System > About phone > Build number) and click it a bunch of times until it says “you’re a developer!” Then go to developer options and enable ADB. You can’t use it yet though because there’s no USB.
Install a Terminal Emulator for Android and enable ADB over TCP
su setprop service.adb.tcp.port 5555 stop adbd start adbd
Then check your IP with ifconfig and on your desktop computer run
adb connect dev.ip.add.ress:5555
(dev.ip.add.ress is the IP address of your device – like 192.168.100.46, but yours will be different)
Then execute adb reboot update from the desktop computer and the box should reboot then come up in CoreELEC.
Going back to android is as easy as disconnecting the boot media and rebooting, the android OS is still on the device.
Issue: WIFI support.
Many of these cheap devices use the cheapest WIFI chips they can and often the MFGs won’t share details with FOSS developers, so driver support is weak. Bummer, but the boxes have wired connections and wired works infinitely better anyway: it isn’t a phone, it’s attached to a TV that’s not moving around, run the damn wire and get a stable, reliable connection. If that’s not possible check the WIFI chips before buying or get a decent USB-WIFI adapter that is supported.
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