In my search for a replacement for my boxeebox that is closing in on its final days, the Z83 mini PC (sometime branded beelink) came up as a really cheap mini PC with great performance. Or maybe not so great, but for the price it is great. You get the point.
Anyway. It comes prepared with a windows 10 installation but I have no interest in using that. I intend to use a NFS share to deliver media to the box and that takes windows out of the game fairly quickly.
It turns out putting Ubuntu on this machine is tricky, possibly impossible. It has a 32-bit UEFI system and Ubuntu does not distribute 32-bit UEFI installers. In fact, the particular chipset configuration based on the Intel Atom X5 Cherry Trail has quite a few pages about linux if you start searching for info. It seems mainly destined for tablets, but this Mini PC is a good application as well I suppose.
The closest I got to completing the install was using these instructions. By building this Ubunty/Debian 32/64-bit hybrid Live USB the system would actually boot from it. And work quite well. However, the installation failed giving an error about how uefi-boot-32 failed to install (quite accurate for an error message for once).
I turned away from Ubuntu for the first time in many years. And turned to Debian. Debian which provided the uefi capability to let the Ubuntu image boot in the instructions above. I used the amd64/i386 netinst image. And it just works. I installed the MATE desktop environment. It is fast, and it just works. A bit ugly, but that's ok.
Now, my only problem is that the projected screen doesn't fit the TV screen which makes menus invisible. But I'll get to that. Oh, and the wireless network doesn't work either.
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