Mekotronics R58 mini PC + Unofficial Armbian from Monka is GREAT

Bas · March 26, 2023

Hello people I would like to share my experience with the Mekotronics R58 mini PC (RK3588 box, in my case with 8Gb RAM and 32Gb EMMC). For a more review like post see NicoD's video review here on the Armbian forum: he just reviewed the new MonkaArmbian on this board. I got the Download links from NicoD, and in the meantime they are also on the official Mekotronics support site. I just want to share my experiences with others.

So first I played a bit with Adroid 12, that came with the box. Android is the best supported OS for this box, performance wise. Video and emulated gaming seems to work great also 4K. But I wanted Linux on it, so I installed Debian from Mekotronics site. It works great, at least everything on the board works great: Open Office, Firefox, video playback. But I had some issues installing new software (software like VSCOde, CodeBlocks++, Gimp would not install or it won't run properly). So I eagerly waited for something new and also contacted Mekotronics, but no real luck.

Along comes MonkaBlyat the famous dev guy. He produced a personally developed Armbian (not official) that is quite stable. At first I thought performance suffered a bit compared with Mekotronics Debian, but I am glad I did not give up. First I installled Libre Office, it looks a bit crude and boxy and fonts were too smal. I then installed libreoffice-gtk3 BOOM problem solved, I then did a few updates and upgrades from terminal. Changed icon theme and suddenly the desktop transformed into a more Ubuntu like style and everything looks fantastic in dark mode, including LibreOffice, and works as fast as the original Debian from Mekotronics. It's GREAT! Open LibreSheet BOOM one second and you can start typing. Chromium: one second. Gimp: under 2 seconds. VSCode works great. Chromium youtube playback works great. It's so snappy I could really use this as a software development box and daily PC.

Few minor issues: if I open the SSD window or the garbagebin window something something hangs and I can't open the screen again. Work-around: option open in new window.

Personally I am very pleased to have a working Armbian now, even it it's not offical (yet) and a big thanks to MonkaBlyatt who made it possible! Bought my box for 120EUR and it's a lot more bang for buck than the RPI4 (5 times the performance, way better video, comes with built-in EMMC, wifi, charger and case, completely silent, no fan, yet it doesn't get hot so far). Next step for me is to get it headless with VNC server.

Kind regards,

Bas

Bas · April 6, 2023

Update: I managed to get RealVNC 7.0.1 ARM64 working on the R8 mini, so I can manage everything headless, just as I do for the Rpi4. I disabled Wayland to get this to work, so back to X11. This unofficial Monka Armbian build has been nothing but GREAT for me! Time to phase out my NUC server with this completely silent and cool (but more performant) R58 box.

Been playing a couple of weeks on the Mekatronics R58 box and it has been very stable. So stable in fact that you ask yourself: why not make it official? It is my impression that being a RK3588 board it has quite a bit of overlap with the Rock 5 board (in fact this Mekotronics armbian version seems to be copied initially from the Rock 5B builds).

I wish I could get in contact with other R58 users and/or Monkablyatt (to thank him and say it's a GREAT build!), but there does not seem a single Mekotronics RK3588 message board on the planet, including Armbian fora. How can I exchange experiences with fellow R58 users??

Kind regards,

Bas Hamstra