balltrader

Thank you for your replies. Becuz I am a new user here, I needed to wait 24 hours before I could post a follow up. @JMCC, thanks for your note that I can achieve both scenarios 1 & 2 using Android itself. My biggest issue roadblock was researching a remote control like VNC to work on android, everything I read said it couldn't be done. I tried using ScrCpy on an android tablet, to allow control from a pc, but I could not get it to work, perhaps the usb cable I was using was not made for data transfer. I will get a different cable and try again. Once I can get that to work over tcpip, I can do NAT on my parent's router to map the port to the device, and that should work for remote control. The other aspects of VNC was for tranfsering files to the android box. But now I suppose I could setup an FTP server on the Android tv box, and use that to transfer files to it from a pc. I just searched and found a few videos on youtube about it, so I will explore that concept. Thanks to @balbes150 also for the work they have done in making things work up to October. I guess I will not be moving forward with the Armbian idea, as it seems I can try playing around with Android TV Box to see how it fits my scenarios. I guess I had this dream that a $30 ATV box could take the place of a $100 rasp pi 4, which looking back now, I deserved to be slapped, ouch. I hope I did not waste anyone's time. Thank you again.

Hi, I am new to this site, so far I have not been able to find a newbie list of what type of hardware to start with. I do not have any device yet. I have been looking at the android tv boxes on amazon, and I want to start with a $30 box, to be able to load linux on it, and have a graphical interface (ie like a Gnome/KDE desktop view) and then be able to install a vnc server, so the device can be controlled remotely. I have two projects in mind: 1. a chromium based browser install, for viewing webpages and playing any videos embedded in those webpages. 2. later on, perhaps with different more robust hardware?, add the capacity to install a media player type interface, ie Kodi, so my elderly parents could watch home movies, or view photos, and listen to their aac music. The vnc desire/requirement is so that I could connect over the internet and upload new content to their storage device, and assist them with any problems they were having. If this forum has a topic that you can point me to, to understand what types of device I should start looking at, without getting too overwhelmed for a newbie, I would appreciate it. Otherwise, if you know of an Android tv box in the $30 price range that will work for project #1, please recommend it in the reply. and if you also have recommendations for project #2, i.e. what type of hardware device upgrade should I consider for movie playback (it is not 4k, even 720 or 1080 is good enough), I would also appreciate that, or even your commentary if there is no hardware upgrade needed. Thank you.