Yoka TV kb2 pro installation instructions

[Jamie Swoish]

The purpose in this guide is to make installation simple for those who wish to follow what I did. This is specifically for the Yoka TV KB2 Pro which uses the S912 chipset with 3GB RAM and 32 GB ROM. It was successful and works for setting up windows mapped drives just fine with Samba. (for example Z:\) I am using it off the SD card, I left Android 7.1 on the EMMC.

 

Notes: My intentions are to use it for a file server for use with USB 2.0 drives I have laying around that are old but still technically usable. The file transfer speed is only expected to be around 30% of the 1GBPS wired network. The bottleneck will definitely be the USB 2.0, but for what I am using it for, it should work just fine. Leaving it on 24/7 is only slightly more power than a Raspberry PI 4, so very low cost. The Wireless and Bluetooth do not work as is, I am not sure if you can get the drivers to make them work, I did not try. The 1GBPS network port works just fine. There is also no GPU/VPU acceleration, but for a file server who cares?

 

This was done with windows 11 and win32diskimager (note the original website is https://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/) the other links are not what you are looking for and likely viruses and malware. Balena Etcher did not like the image file, win32diskimager had no issues once I extracted the .img file.

 

Head to https://www.armbian.com/amlogic-s9xx-tv-box/

 

Download the Armbian 26.2.0-trunk.22 Noble Gnome - I did not test any of the other images.

 

Burn it to an SD card - note (it says it will only work with up to 32GB micro SD cards. My 64GB amazon micro SD card worked just fine after upgrading my Yoka TV KB2 PRO to android 7.1 earlier, go figure.) I would suggest for this get a name brand SD card that is 32GB or less (the image uses around 2GB)

 

At the boot partition you have to rename the file u-boot-s905x-s912 to u-boot.ext

 

Now you have to edit the /extlinux/extlinux.conf file, look for the line that says FDT /dtb/meson-something (and change it to say FDT /dtb/meson-gxm-q200.dtb save the file

 

This lets it know what chipset/model you are using, this is for the S912 chip that is in your Yoka TV kb2 pro

 

You will need a usb keyboard and mouse, you also have to have it plugged into an HDMI cord that runs to a monitor or TV.

 

Now for booting it in multiboot mode - hold the reset button (between AV and HDMI ports, this button is inside and very small, google suggests a toothpick, I used a phone sim remover tool) for 10 seconds before and while powering it on, do not let go until you hit 10 seconds. Now every time you restart it, it defaults to SD card first. It may take 2 or 3 attempts, but it does work. To boot to Android, just remove the SD card.

 

First boot username and password is root and 1234, it will force you to change the password.

 

When it asks for bash or zsh, I chose bash because I am way more familiar with it.

 

When it asks for locale I used en_US.UTF-8

 

Time zone is based on wherever you are I used America/Chicago

 

It will also ask you to create a new user account (non-root) and a password)

 

This should get you up and running. The button to access everything is in the upper left corner, then you can access all your apps.

 

There are tutorials to upgrade it to android 7.1 - it does work and well documented. I upgraded mine to android 7.1 it worked just fine. Do Not try to upgrade to android 9 slimBOXtv, there are no successful attempts proven, just bricked devices. I did not see a single picture of anyone having it running. I did however see plenty of complaints for bricked devices. Good enough for me to steer clear.

 

I know this is rather long, but it will get you through the entire process, be safe, and hope you enjoy this how-to guide.

 

[Atorres]

I followed your tutorial, and it works! I did it with a server image instead.

But I was not able to make Wifi work. Did you manage to connect to the Wifi?