Intro
A while ago, I mean, quite a while, in 2012, I bought an
Odroid U2 from Hardkernel. I liked the feature set and also the form factor, which reminded me of a mini
NeXTcube. So my original plan was to get
FreeBSD and then
GNUstep for that thingie, not knowing at that time that every SoC (in this case the
Samsung Exynos 4412) needed a special port to be supported by an OS (I thought ARMv7 support to be generic, like
Darwin 1.4.1 x86 did run on my AMD Box in the days, when Mac OS X for Intel was still far away). However, this never became a reality, despite asking several times on the
FreeBSD-Arm mailing list. So I lost interest in this and the poor Odroid settled dust buried somewhere in my stowage …
… until lately. Something reminded me that I still had an Odroid. I wanted to play with it and scrambled my whole stowage until I found it. It came with some rather vintage Android installed on it's microSD card (hence the name Odroid), which I didn't like from the beginning. I needed something more recent, like let's say
Ubuntu 18.04. Here I have to mention that the Odroid U2 is EOLed for quite a while now and Hardkernels support has never been the best. But I still had hope an finally found
this thread, however, the
offered minimal Ubuntu 18.04 image did not work for me (and others). So, after a while browsing
the Odroid forum, I found
this post, which inspired me to try the same.
How I did this
Download the minimal Ubuntu 16.04 image and install it
#!/bin/bash
fdisk_first() {
p2_start=`fdisk -l /dev/mmcblk0 | grep mmcblk0p2 | awk '{print $2}'`
echo "Found the start point of mmcblk0p2: $p2_start"
fdisk /dev/mmcblk0 << __EOF__ >> /dev/null
d
2
n
p
2
$p2_start
p
w
__EOF__
sync
touch /root/.resize
echo "Ok, Partition resized, please reboot now"
echo "Once the reboot is completed please run this script again"
}
resize_fs() {
echo "Activating the new size"
resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p2 >> /dev/null
echo "Done!"
echo "Enjoy your new space!"
rm -rf /root/.resize
}
if [ -f /root/.resize ]; then
resize_fs
else
fdisk_first
fi
- log in onto your odroid using
ssh root@
from your Laptop/Desktop and then paste the above script into vi
,nano
or whatever editor you prefer. Save the script as resize.sh
- then run the script before and after a reboot:
chmod +x resize.sh
./resize.sh
reboot
./resize.sh
Upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04
sudo apt install ubuntu-release-upgrader-core
sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo reboot
sudo do-release-upgrade -d
sudo reboot
From Server to Desktop
(see also:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/322122/switching-from-server-to-desktop)
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install tasksel
sudo tasksel
sudo reboot
Some additional things
For some reasons unknown to me
gnome-terminal is not working, it crashes on launch. To solve this problem I just installed xterm:
sudo apt-get install xterm
When examining the first image I created in a hex editor, I found that a lot of clutter from deleted Android files was still there (which probably was a leftover of the original Odroid Android from the 16.04 image I downloaded) So I decided to remove this by first defragmenting the disk and then wiping the free disk space:
sudo apt-get install e2fsprogs
sudo apt-get install secure-delete
sudo e4defrag -c /
sudo e4defrag -v /
sudo sfill -llz -v /
sudo sfill -llz -v /media/boot
This also resulted in a smaller xz compressed image file since free space is so much easier to compress … :)
Some things for you to do
- Download a readymade Ubuntu 18.04 Desktop Odroid U2 / U3 Image for a 128GB microSDXC card here.
- It is strongly recommended to disable remote ssh login for the user
root
since this makes remote attacks much harder! ssh login for root
came in handy during the installation process and is enabled in the minimal Ubuntu 16.04 image I used as a starting point.
- You might want to pin the MAC address of your Odroid to a fixed value so you don't get always a new IP address after each reboot. I found this: https://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=77&t=30654#p245732 a working solution (the way like the first solution offered in this thread (post 11) did not work for me)
- When you created the image file yourself (instead of using mine) you might experience a file system damage on the minimal Ubuntu 16.04 image. The boot partition (FAT16) had a damage, which I later repaired (the downloadable image should be fine). You can repair such images using a second SD-Card to boot from and then plug in an the SD-Card you want to repair using an USB-Adapter.
- Report back to me whether this image works on a Odroid U3 or X2.
- Have fun!