MK802 Media PC Review

I recently made a post comparing the specs of the A10 based MK802 to the RaspBerry Pi. For those who are unaware the MK802 is a low cost, Android based media PC you can pick up on Amazon for less than 40 USD. A little over a month ago I replaced my desktop sized media computer with an MK802 - today I would like to share with you my thoughts on the device.

The Hardware:

The MK802 is a little bit larger than a flash drive and the package includes a power adapter, HDMI mini to HDMI cable, a user manual and a few USB cables:

Now, the MK802 has only a single USB port, which means unless you have a keyboard/mouse combination you are going to want to be sure to pick up a USB hub to go with this device so you can attach multiple peripheralsto it.

I have read reviews that said this little device is prone to over heating - I do not believe such reviews. I've left my MK802 powered on for over a week straight and playing hours of video in a single sitting without issues. It is a little trooper.

The Software:

The default operating system that comes with the MK802 is a fairly stock version of Android 4.0. So much in fact that it is very clearly designed for a tablet computer - not a media center PC. Still, the GUI functions well enough with a USB keyboard/mouse and with a few minor tweaks it is near perfect.

The first thing I did on the device was disable the on-screen keyboard. It seemed terribly silly to have a giant keyboard take up half my TV screen every time I clicked into a text box. This issue is quickly solved by installing and configuring the Null Keyboard application from the Play Store.

Speaking of the Play Store, I've installed several applications from there and most of them have worked fine - however not all of them. For example Google's Chrome for Android does not support the device.

One nice thing about the device is that the version of Android on it is rooted by default and the device knows what to do with an APK file when you click on it in the file manager.

In terms of speed the MK802 isn't going to win and records. The 1.5ghz single core processor runs most applications fast enough, but there is a noticeablespeed reduction when using multiple applications on the device simultaneously.If you are interested in the full specs of the device I would direct you to my post here.

Wrapping Up:

Over all I've been very happy with my purchase of the MK802. It has aptly replaced my media PC at a low cost, while using much less power. I would highly recommend this device to anyone looking for a cost effective media PC device.

As an aside I haven't been successful in booting an alternative operating system on the device - but I'm not giving up yet. Bodhi Linux will be booting on this thing before the end of the user.

~Jeff Hoogland

HOWTO: Check Hard Drive Health with Linux

I've been experiencing full system lockups on my netbook off and on for the last few weeks now. Up until recently though they had been few and far between so I'd just been ignoring the issue. A few days ago however they got bad enough to the point where I had to restart my system three times in the same hour.

Needless to say shortly after that I started running system checks. A quick boot into memtest showed that my RAM was A-OK (which is good considering one stick of RAM is stuck to the netbook's mother board). The next piece of hardware I checked was my netbook's SSD. Almost all modern hard drives have "SMART" controls today to allow you to check their current health status.

I booted my netbook from a Bodhi live USB drive and did a quick:

sudo apt-get install gsmartcontrol

GSmartControl is a GUI front end for smartmontools - a library that lets you interface with your drive's SMART controls and run various health checks on the drive. The interface is fairly straight forward and right clicking on one of the displayed drives gives you the ability to begin checking it.

There are options for a short test (which takes a minute or two) or a longer test (which can take up to several hours on larger drives to complete - depends on the size of your drive).

After my netbook finished the longer test I was greeted with some bad news - my SSD was failing in one area and getting close to failing in others:

At any rate GSmartControl is a fantastic tool for checking the health of your drive that is fairly easy to use. Hopefully the results of your drive check will be better than my own!

~Jeff Hoogland

Two Years of Bodhi, Three Years of Blogging

This year has flown by. My entire life - both on the internet and off the internet has been moving at a rapid pace and I have enjoyed almost every moment of it. I've been so focused on my last semester of graduate work that I completely forgot to make two posts I've been making every year.

The first is that Bodhi is two years old now! It was on November 16th, 2010 that I first announced the project I had started with a couple of friends. The project advanced rapidly and the team that we gathered was very pleased with where we were after just twelve months. Take a moment to look at the data graph in that previous link - in a nine month time span our highest throughput on the package server was under 1.5TB worth of data. We have made leaps and bounds since that point - in fact earlier this year we moved the main Bodhi package server from a VPS to a dedicated server because we had been consistently serving up over 5TB of packages each month. Beyond that our ISO image has been seeing over 25,000 downloads a month, over twice the number we saw in our first year.

The best part about all of this? Even with our increased overhead costs we have managed to stay 100% funded by user donations - meaning our main website and forums have been able to stay ad free (which I prefer). If you enjoy the Bodhi project I would ask that you please help support us by becoming a member, ordering some goodies or making a one time donation.

On a non-Bodhi related note, I've been publishing articles here on Thoughts on Technology for not one, not two, but three years now! I plan to continue publishing articles for many more years to come.

Cheers,
~Jeff Hoogland

Raspberry Pi vs MK802

There has been a ton on news in the open source world revolving around the Raspberry Pi. It was one of the first low cost, ARM computers to be targeted at the hobbyist and educational markets. I've owned a Raspberry Pi for many months now and while it does an alright job at playing media files and acting as a small server - for most computing tasks it simply didn't have enough resources available to be useful.

My dedicated x86 media PC I'd been using for some time died a few months back and I had been searching for a low cost replacement for the system - I finally found it in the ARM powered MK802 device.

I've been using the MK802 almost daily for close to a month now and it shocks me that this awesome device hasn't gotten more press in the FOSS world. I plan to write a formal review of the device in the next week, but for now I would like to simply do a comparison between the MK802 and the latest RPI Model B device:

	MK802	Raspberry Model B
Processor	1.5ghz	1.0ghz
RAM	1 gig	512 meg
Internal Storage	4 gig	None
USB Ports	One	Two
Networking	Wireless	Wired
Video Out	HDMI Mini	HDMI, RCA
Audio Out	HDMI	HDMI, 3.5m
Storage	Micro SD	SDHC
Size	8.8 x 3.5 x 1.2 cm	8.560 cm × 5.4 cm
Cost+Shipping to US	38.50	43.33

In addition to having superior specs at a lower price point than the RPI Model B, the MK802 also included an HDMI mini to HDMI cord, power adapter, and the device is in a case by default instead of just being a raw board. Needless to say I am impressed with the little device. For those interested in picking up an MK802 I got mine from Amazon here.

~Jeff Hoogland

Linux FUD in College Education

My fiance started a new class this week - an MIS (Management Information Systems) class. While we were having dinner tonight she brought up the fact there are some - lets say - colorful definitions of Linux in her wonderful "Experiencing MIS" text book.

Under a section titled "What Does a Manager Need to Know About Software?" there are a number of things presented to the reader as "facts" that I just have to disagree with. It starts with a nice table describing that describes typical users for Windows, OSX, Unix and Linux desktop users. What is the description of a typical Linux user you ask?

"rare - used where budget is very limited"

That is right - the only reason to use Linux on the desktop is when you are strapped for cash. I guess Google never got that memo. The extra kick in the pants? Apparently the only commonly used application Linux has is:

"Open Office (Microsoft Office look-alike)"

Never mind that Open Office contains a sane menu interface instead of "ribbons".

In case the avid reader is curious about who created Linux - that information is here as well. Linux is developed by the "open-source community" which is described as:

"a loosely coupled group of programmers who mostly volunteer their time"

I guess they never got the memo that nearly 75% of kernel work is done by paid developers.

This is what is holding Linux back on the desktop folks. Not a lack of hardware support. Not a lack of user friendliness. Just good old fashion Linux FUD. The best thing you can do to fight things like this is to speak up and let the people spreading the FUD know it is not OK to spread misinformation. Although I must say it really irks me seeing information like this appearing in a higher education setting.

What is this wonderful text book you ask? As mentioned above it is titled "Experiencing MIS", written by a man named "David Kroenke", and published by none other than Pearson Education.

~Jeff Hoogland

Giving Android a Chance...

It has been about six weeks since I have posted anything - and even longer than that since I posted non-Bodhi related content. I'm currently working through my final semester of graduate school and what little time I have extra has been going towards working on Bodhi things of the late.

Today however, I am bothered enough by something to share my feelings about it. If you have been by my blog here before then you might know that I am not a fan of Google's Android operating system. In fact in the past I have written why I feel it is removed from other Linux operating systems. As of the Linux 3.3 series kernel though a pile of the Android changes where merged back into the main line kernel.

Because of this re-merging and the fact that it had been sometime since I last tried Android in any form I felt I should give it another chance. I know a good amount of people that tout it's virtues and would not use anything else on their mobile devices. The recent death of the computer I'd been using as a media PC for the last three years sent me searching for a new toy. The combination of my wanting to try a recent Android release and the need to replace my media PC lead me to pick up a MK802 Android PC.

I got my little device in the mail today. I ripped open the box, plugged in all the cables and soon had Android booting on my TV! I have three needs from a media PC:

1. Light Web Browsing
2. Pandora Internet Radio
3. Play Media from my External Hard Drive

The MK802 did the first two with ease - the web browser loaded right up and I was soon viewing the Bodhi forums without issues. To take care of my second need, I popped open the Google Play store and installed the Pandora application. 

The issues started when I attempted to play some media files from my external hard drive. I plugged in my drive to the USB port and popped open the file manager - I poked around in all the options but the drive was nowhere to be found. Then I noticed a notification in the lower right corner of the screen, it read:

Damaged USB Storage - You may have to reformat it.

I'd never seen this message on a system powered by a Linux kernel before. I'd seen it a couple of times when friends had tried using my external on their Windows or OSX PCs. My drive is formatted to EXT4 you see. Apparently this file system isn't support on my Android device. That is right, this "Linux" PC doesn't support my Linux file system.

The solution to this issue? I've been told I need to compile a custom kernel module to add ext4 support. If I am going to spend that much effort getting Android to work I would rather devote that effort towards getting Debian to boot on the MK802 instead. So much for Android being easy.

~Jeff Hoogland

Bodhi Linux 2.1.0 Released

I'm happy to release to everyone our first scheduled update release of Bodhi Linux's 2.x.y branch - version 2.1.0. For those that want to get straight to the disc images you can find them in 32bit flavor here and 64bit here. There are a number of wonderful changes/improvements to this disc over our 2.0.1 disc released a couple of months ago. I'm going to outline the more important of the changes in this post, but you can always find our full change log here.

Before I dive into the changes - I'd like to just remind all existing Bodhi users that since this is simply an update release, you can easily update existing 2.x.y installs to these changes via the package manager.

Profiles and Themes:
The first thing you will notice are four fresh themes along with the elegant E17 Black and White theme appearing on this version of Bodhi's LiveCD:

Software:
We have a fresh build of Enlightenment and Terminology pre-installed on the disc. Beyond that our repositories contain the latest LibreOffice 3.6.1, Firefox 15 and Chromium 21 among a number of other current applications. The default kernel for this release is based on Linux 3.5

Two major software changes I'd like to highlight. First is that this build is now utilizing a much more recent version of the LXDM display manager. This updated version compiled from LXDM's GIT sources fixes a long standing issue with passwords that contain spaces and also adds support for user lists at the login screen:

This version of LXDM also comes with a very nice configuration tool:

Second, the PCManFM file manager has been dropped in favor of the Enlightenment native EFM:

This file manager lacks some advanced features (such as connecting to network shares), but it does support some nice features such as image and video previews. Those users still wanting PCManFM will be able to easily install it via the package manager.

Finally, if you have any issues with this live CD or Bodhi in general please open a support request on our user forums. The comment section of this post is not the best place to trouble shoot things.

~Jeff Hoogland