When I "broke" the Alfawise S92 TV Box by accidentally overwriting Android on its eMMC flash memory, I scrambled to purchase another TV box. I settled on another Amlogic S192 based box that seemed equivalent to the Alfawise, but much cheaper. The old adage is true, you get what you pay for... or less. A rebadged Kodi was preinstalled and it did work. Maybe I could log into my Amazon Prime account, but Netflix would definitely not run at a resolution of 1080p; perhaps not all, I don't remember. The fact is, the cheap Android TV Box experience is too frustrating and the new box was hardly ever used. Nevertheless, two weeks ago I purchased a third, newer generation, TV Box which meant that conversion of the second box into a Linux appliance could be attempted.

This will be the first of two parts describing how to install Armbian on this device. In this first version, an image from the Armbian TV Boxes community is installed. In the projected second post, an image from the Armbian for Amlogic TV Boxes repository by ophub will be installed. This may illustrate the difference between these two versions of Armbian.

Table of Content

1. Know Thy TV Box
2. Installing Armbian
3. Serial Debug Port
4. First Boot
5. Next

Know Thy TV Box

The Android TV box market is a jungle. It is not always clear what is being sold. Over the years, numerous producers have offered many models of TV boxes of varying quality. To complicate things even more, it does seem as if counterfeit products are being offered by less than scrupulous companies, although it is hard to decide if the blame is to be put on the manufacturer, the retailer, or both. The TV box which is the subject of this post is a case in point. The seller, a store on Aliexpress, is still in operation, but it no longer offers Amlogic S912 TV boxes. However a short description of the device was preserved in my AliExpress history.

As we shall see that description is not accurate. Less some think that things have improved, here is a photograph of my device alongside the image of a box with the same logo currently offered by a wholesaler on Alibaba. The table contains the complete description of the device provided by the seller.

Apparently the firm can deliver 10,000 or more units at $US 17.22 per unit. So perhaps the TX95 Pro is still being sold, but what is in the box? Does it have a quad-core Amlogic S905W processor or an octo-core S912? By the way, even if the currently available device from this wholesaler is based on the S912, it is not exactly the same as my TX95 box. If the manufacturer's image can be trusted, the LED indicator is quite different. It looks very much as if I purchased a "knockoff" of the discontinued Tanix TX9 Pro in terms of the appearance of the box. The only visible external difference is the top logo which is TX9 Pro instead of Tanix. What's inside the boxes differs considerably. The seller's description of the machine corresponds much more to the no longer available Tanix, while in truth the (fake) TX9 has a WiFi radio that only operates at 2.8 GHz, the Ethernet runs at 100 Mb/s and there is no Bluetooth capability. Here are some more details.

Here is some more info obtained with the Android app AIDA64 (I am preserving Android in the "ROM" with care for the time being).

Much of that data was gathered after Armbian was installed, but it would have been better to have done it before hand.

Installing Armbian

Follow the Installation Instructions for TV Boxes with Amlogic CPUs and if one is lucky, everything will work fine. Actually, getting the above information about the TV box was more work than installing Armbian. Basically, the steps involved are as follows.

1. Download the correct Armbian image.
2. Burn the image file onto a good µSD card.
3. Mount the armbi_boot partition
4. Modify a configuration file and create a boot loader file as per the instructions.
5. Place the µSD card in the TV Box SD reader and boot into Armbian

2.1 Getting the Armbian Image

Get the latest stable built from the community archive. In December 2023, that was a compressed file named Armbian_23.11.1_Aml-s9xx-box_bookworm_current_6.1.63.img.xz. Note that this is a "server" image which is the equivalent to the "Lite" edition of Raspberry Pi OS. There are desktop versions, but I am not interested in running a desktop on such a puny system. Interestingly, there is an even smaller minimal version (Armbian_23.11.1_Aml-s9xx-box_bookworm_current_6.1.63_minimal.img.xz) which I have not looked into.

The repository also contains a text file (Armbian_23.11.1_Aml-s9xx-box_bookworm_current_6.1.63.img.txt) which reproduces the GPL licence and provides additional information.

As explained there are two other files that should be used to verify the integrity of the downloaded compressed image file.

2.2 Burn the Image File on to a Micro SD Card

I used Etcher from balena to copy the image file onto a good quality µSD card. There are plenty of tutorials on the Web on how to do this. There's probably more than one on my own site, but I would not dare classify them as better than any other.

It can't be stressed enough that the SD card must be of good quality. I have certainly learned my lesson and will no longer waste time with iffy cards. With that said, I did use a no-name 8 GByte µSD card for this exercise without problems.

2.3 Mount the Boot Partition

The additional information showed that the image contains two partitions. The first one is a "boot" partition of type FAT which can be read and altered with most if not all operating systems. This is the same configuration found on Raspberry Pi OS images. The Linux OS on my desktop mounted the two partitions created on the SD card as soon as Etcher complete its task. Check with the file browser to see if it is the case. On my system the partitions are named armbi_boot and armbi_root. I suspect that on Windows systems, only the boot partition would be mounted because it does not handle EXT4 partitions.

To continue it is necessary to modify files in the boot partition. If the boot partition is not mounted, try removing the SD card and then reinserting it in the SD card reader of the desktop machine.

2.4 Configure the Image

First thing to do is to select the correct devicetree blob (dtb) which is a binary representation of the devicetree describing the system hardware. Think of it as the BIOS of the system, minus the pretty GUI to modify the settings. The file extlinux/extlinux.conf has a line specifying the name of the dtb to be used. This is the default file.

It contains the wrong file. The correct dtb file for my fake TX95 is meson-gxm-q201.dtb. So this how I modified the file with a text editor (Geany, but it could be anything else, even nano).

The other thing was to set up the correct boot loader. I did this from a terminal.

Of course the boot partition could be mounted elsewhere in your system. If you are using a different Amlogic CPU, then another bootloader may be needed. Again SteeMan is your guide. He has an exhaustive list of which one of three boot loaders to use depending on the CPU.

2.5 Boot into Armbian via the "toothpick" method

It is always best to unmount the partitions on the SD card before removing the card from the desktop machine. I can do this from a terminal. First find out where the partitions are mounted and then unmount each using its device location or its mount point.

This can be easily and quickly done from the file browser in Linux Mint MATE by clicking on a couple of icons.

Now insert the µSD into the TV box SD reader. There is a small hole between SPDIF connector and the stacked USB-2 connectors. This is where a toothpick must be inserted in order to depress a boot button on the motherboard.

With the boot button depressed, power up the TV Box. Keep the boot button depressed for a few seconds. Before doing that, it is best to have the box connected to the local network with an Ethernet cable and probably easier to connect a monitor or TV with an HDMI cable to see what is happening. Also connecting a USB keyboard will help, but a mouse is not needed. If all goes well, the TV box will boot into Linux off the SD card. After a considerable amount of time, while the file system is expanded to take all available space on the µSD card, the following screen should appear.

Of course, you might not be so lucky. Perhaps an error was made during the configuration, perhaps different components were used or an entirely different motherboard is in the enclosure. This is where running a utility such as AIDA64 in Android beforehand is a good idea. The µSD card can be retrieved from the TV box and reinserted into the SD reader of the desktop. It should be possible to check that extlinux.conf is correctly configured and to check that the correct boot loader is used. Presumably, you could change the FDT value in extlinux.conf to point to another DTB file and try booting again. This gets old very quickly if you are having problems so I suggest connecting to the serial debug port.

Serial Debug Port

In theory, if the instructions are followed to the letter and if the correct configuration is created in step 4, then there is no need to open up the TV Box. You could always give it a try and if that fails and you don't know what to do next, then it will be a good idea to open the box in order to connect to the debug serial port. With that connection, it will be possible to see what is going on while the box boots and it will be possible to open a session even if the Wi-Fi and Ethernet interfaces are not working.

The physical constraint in my home makes it much more convenient to use the serial debug port, because I don't have a free HDMI monitor, older DVI monitors will not work (strange because they do work with the Raspberry Pi) and I am too lazy to disconnect one of my two desktop monitors. On the other hand, if the TV box is connected to the TV, there is no Ethernet available unless I run a long cable across the room which is not appreciated by all. Once, I connected the TV box HDMI out signal to a USB port on a portable computer via a USB HDMI capture dongle and I could see the TV box video output with VLC on the portable. But it is so much simpler to use the serial debug port, if it's available. As it happens it is present on the two S192 based TV boxes that I happen to possess.

Opening the TV box can be a bit difficult. There is a YouTube video entitled TANIX TX3 Mini and TX9 Pro Opening Android TV BOX Amlogic S905W and S912 which shows how to do it in detail. There are four screws under the corner rubber feet. The segment about the TX9 Pro starts at 2m50s mark into the 13-minute video.

Once the bottom is removed, the serial port is easily identified in the corner between the SD card reader and the SPDIF connector. The TX and RX signals are identified with upside down labels, but the electrons still flow in the correct direction as well known YouTubers would say. Use a USB to TTL converter to connect to the port. As usual for serial UART ports, the motherboard TX signal must be connected to the adapter's RX line and the motherboard RX signal goes to the TX pin on the USB-serial adapter. DO NOT CONNECT the USB-serial adapter Vcc output to the 3.3V pin on the motherboard, but DO CONNECT the grounds together. The spacing and size of the holes is perfect for a 3 pin Dupont male connector. There is no need to solder anything and it is not necessary to remove the circuit board from the case. Plug in the USB serial adapter to the desktop and find the tty device created and open a terminal to connect to it.

Many other programs such as miniterm, minicom, or screen could be used instead of cu which is admittedly rather old and rarely used now.

First Boot

The first boot of Armbian is unusual. The root password must be set and a user account must be created. That first session is reproduced next, but be aware that if this is done through the serial debug port, the system will display its messages to the port regardless of what the user may be entering. It can be disconcerting if it happens when entering a password or a user name. Such messages have been expunged below.

Of course, you will probably want a different user name and the detected time zone will in all likelihood not be the same as mine. Eventhough English is not the language of my desktop machine and my keyboard does not have a QWERTY layout, my headless servers are not localized, but you may decide otherwise of course.

Let's check the state of the system.

The status=17 exit code means that there's no devices to monitor. Makes sense as there is no drive on the system. If none will ever be connected, then the service could just be disabled.

However it may be better to change the configuration just in case a spinning or solid state drive is ever added to the system.

My solution, based on two bug reports (Debian Bug report logs - #1006630 and Bug#1029210: smartmontools.service fails since bookworm), was to revert to the old Debian behaviour until the next release of smartmontools,

Adding the -q never parameter to the ExecStart line was all that was needed.

On rebooting the system, I opened an SSH session as user jeeves. If the TV box connects to the local network, recourse to the serial debug port should not be necessary from this point on.

This does seem to indicate that there will be a useless check of 0 devices at four hour intervals. So it may be better to just disable the service.

I recall that the Ubuntu image (Armbian_23.11.1_Aml-s9xx-box_jammy_current_6.1.63.img) does not require this adjustment of the service file because jammy contains an older version smartmontools compared to the version in bookworm.

So systemd is happy, all services work and checking on the network interfaces shows that both the ethernet and Wi-Fi are available, although only the Ethernet interface is up.

Use the nmtui tool to define and enable a wireless connection if desired. I did that and it does work.

Now the first thing to do should be to update the system.

This may take a long time. A good proportion of that time is explained by the difference between a 1 Gb/s interface on the Alfawise S92 and a 100 Mb/s on the TX9 Pro. Again one gets what one pays for.

Next

It does appear that the TV Box can function as a Linux appliance/server because the major peripherals do seem to work. There is one annoying exception; the front LED display is stuck at boot. The linux_openvfd project by Arthur Liberman can handle the onboard FD628 LED driver, but it is not clear to me how to integrate it into the system short of adding it to the source code and building the Armbian image. That is beyond my pay scale. However, amlogic-s9xxx-armbian does integrate openvfd. That flavour of Armbian (specifically Armbian 23.11.0-trunk Lunar with Linux 6.1.60-ophub) is running on my Alfawise S92 where I could enable the LED display.

Too bad that there's no LED display on the old Alfawise TV Box. Obviously, the next step is to install that version of Armbian on the TX9 Pro to see if the LED display can be turned into a clock. In the meantime, a piece of black electrical tape will solve the problem nicely. There was already Kapton tape over the display that was much too bright otherwise.