Getting the Q+/Q Plus to work with armbian

[Paul Richards]

This is just a FYI, tips for anyone who has a Q+/Q Plus and wants to get armbian running on it.

 

For my Q+/Q Plus box (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07MR7YVRM?ref_=pe_1811570_143775280_E_ReturnReceived_Asin_Title), I had to use a SD Card (which is fine since I had a micro SD Card, and a micro SD Card to SD Card convertor laying around) but it did successfully install to the internal MMC.

 

I have tried multiple images of armbian, started with older ones from different internet sources, and none of them would boot from an usb drive.

 

I used the unofficial armbian bullseye image from https://www.inovato.net/Armbian/ and it is working well. The inovato image is the best image I have found for the Q+. I am not affilated with this project it's just my experience, but than I hear different images might work for different people, but this is also one of the most recent images out there.

 

I ordered the Q+ in Canada 2-3 years ago but my old TV died and the new TV is a smart TV so I'm going to use the Q+ as a file server.

 

Lots of the older Q+ linux images across the internet did not work well for me. There was another older armbian image I found on the internet that would seriously take like 10 minutes to process the shell command `apt search firefox`, and some older ones that had no wifi or ethernet support, weird screen display issues, or would not reboot.

 

 

I have been playing around with this and it seems good enough, just the gpu software is laggy on the Q+, and that's the same with all the armbian images I've used. Videos in general in firefox stutter a lot and aren't smooth, including youtube, pages with ads with videos can take long to load, so keep the android image on your Q+ if you intend to do a lot of movie watching or web surfing. For linux hobby projects and stuff, file serving, writing documents in libreoffice, this seems good enough.

 

I noticed only 2 gb was recognized, so for anyone trying to run linux on the Q+, or Tx6, that has 4 gb of ram, change the mem=2048M parameter in /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf to 3072M. This is on the live filesystem, you do not need to rebuild the kernel or anything like that, just after you install the image. From what I understand even if there is actually 4gb or ram installed, but the cpu or something cannot actually access all 4 gb, so you are limited to 3 gb.

Edited April 10, 2023 by Paul Richards

[yakov-]

You can elaborate on the process?

do I need to press the reset button(inside the av port)?

What image exactly did you use?

And what changes to the file should be made?

Thanks in advance