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vader

Member

Registered: 2019-05-07

Posts: 2  

Ideacentre stick pc

I recently bought a (cheap) compute stick and thought I'd install linux on it. It is an ideacentre stick 300, with quad core bay-trail atom, 2G ram and 32G flash. Not really that powerful, but at roughly the price of a raspberry pi, I gave it a go. I'm a long term linux user, and use devuan at work, so devuan was my first choice. The live usb booted even with the odd 32bit EFI / 64 bit OS combination. The only issue was that the intel SST drivers didn't work with the stock 4.9 kernel.

A bit of research turned up that the baytrail atom chip received proper support in later kernels. With 4.9, most things worked, except audio (HDMI), and built in WiFi. A quick backport later and 4.19 was installed and everything is working. I ended up not using the built in WiFi as it is quite poor - so a USB dongle I had was used instead. Combined with a wireless keyboard and a 24 inch HDMI monitor I had, and the system was up and running.

Now it is not a powerhouse by any means, but it is surprisingly usable. I credit devuan for getting the most out of the hardware with no or little overheads. I suppose I wanted to post in case anyone else had one of these devices and was having problems. A quick search didn't turn up anything. I've installed a few things like stellarium (which works surprisingly well), and a few plugins for firefox to enable streaming video from my subscribed service. In fact everything I have tried works well - just don't try to compile your own kernel.....

I am writing this on the "toy". Anyway, if anybody has a compute stick stuck in a cupboard, get it out and install devuan.

PedroReina

Member

From: Madrid, Spain

Registered: 2019-01-13

Posts: 269  

Website

Re: Ideacentre stick pc

Good to know, vader. Thank you. I always like to know about "toys" like this; even more if they can run Devuan

BTW, welcome to the forum.

Last edited by PedroReina (2019-05-07 14:22:01)