What this all is about?

What this site/blog is about?

It all started just recently, in July 2022 when I bought my one and only SBC (Single Board Computer) called "Orange Pi 4 LTS". At first I wanted to buy Raspbery Pi 4, but price tags on those were like $500, at around that time. This sounded like a bad joke to me and I decided to take my chance and buy what I thought would be a cheap Chineese replacement - Orange PI 4 LTS. 

It had the same 4 Gb of ram, but better GPU, quite decent amount of communication ports, including USB 3.0 and there was a nice option to get it with 8Gb of EMMC chip-on-board and original metal case, which is transferring heat out of it to a surrounding atmosphere in a very efficient way. Device is staying silent, as no active coolers are involved, and cool. At total it costed me like less than hundred of bucks including delivery. Oh yeah, I decided to go cheap and not to buy the original power brick, so I bought 3A USB TypeC charger instead.

When I first got my hands on the device, I tried to play with the Debian Linux it was coming with. They called it "Orange PI OS". Given I wasn't that much experienced with desktop linuxes, I miserably failed

Then I decided to take my chance with Armbian, and it was bit better, but still I hit a good amount of issues, I didn't  know how to deal with rather than googling. And I googled, googled, googled a lot.

Finally I found my sweetspot in a form of custom build/mesh of Armbian and Retrioue, made by a guy, named Arnaldo Valente (Rearm.it)

I initially started this blog as just my own notes, but then I realized I want to squeeze all the juice out of this machine. So I decided to pack my distribution with as many useful feature as I can, while still keeping it tiny, fast and secure. 

In my blog posts I'm covering various configuration topics during this journey. As this might be interesting to someone else, so I added some tags to them. Go check out the right hand side panel of this site to see all articles on specific topic.

What is already working

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Here, soon will be some short video showing what I have built. And if you'll follow this blog you'll be able to build the same, or even better. 

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In short:

• the project is meant to provide a self-contained, secure and fully open source device to replace proprietary Amazon Echo / Apple HomePod / Yandex Station where it comes to content consumption, self-hosted applications and gaming. It can be connected to your TV in a living room, has its own loud speaker and microphone
  
  
• device is booting up directly into EmulationStation taken from RetroPi project. It's awesome retrogaming fullscreen app which is emulating lots of consoles and you can buy two cheap bluetooth gamepads and play together with your kids in games they never seen
  
  
• tiered of gaming? close ES and then you get into KDE - a nice looking desktop environment where your wife / kids can watch some youtube videos, surf internet and do whatever they usually do on their laptops / iPads / phones, but on a big 65" screen in your living room. So you can watch them behind their shoulder :)
  
  
• when you tiered of KDE, you can jump to something much more respsonsive fore real multitasking, like DWM and do your advanced stuff. Like fine tuning your system, developing, exploring new technologies, sorting photos, making videos - whatever you might be interested in 
  
  
• the device is running a Tor, so you can browse safely bypassing all the territorial restrictions. You can browse from your phone using it as a proxy. No need to pay for VPN any longer
  
  
• it can be used as a backup for whatever your data (e.g. photos from Android phone) as a SFTP NAS. Like for instance, I set it up in a way my photos are synced wirelessly (+over internet) directly to it, so I don't have to pay for Google Photos any longer
  
  
• you can connect to it remotely (and securely) via SSH, VNC or even RDP (yes, yes, from the Windows Remote Desktop - mstcs) from anywhere in the world, even if it will be running behind two NAT and cgNAT with using Tor Hidden Services or Tailscale (more options are supported)
  
  
• It has built-in voice assistant with speech recognition and text-to-speech configured. You can say "Orange, let's do some work" and it will finish your EmulationStation session and open KDE. Or you can say "Orange, let's play some games" and it will start EmulationStation. You can program it whatever you like -  as it to google something for you, or read you an article from wikipedia. Or ask to download your favorite AAA blockbuster new Linux distro from Torrents
  
  
• It is storage-upgradable. If you need more space, you just buy a bigger SD card and migrate your device to it. It is also OS-hackable, you can jump from Debian 11 Stable to Debian Testing - this is how you can do it
  
  
• It was carefully tailored, to reduce the SD card hammering and resource wastage:
• https://orange-pi-4-lts.blogspot.com/2022/08/retropie-rearmit-edition-quick-guide.html
• https://orange-pi-4-lts.blogspot.com/2022/08/debloating-your-linux-even-further.html
• https://orange-pi-4-lts.blogspot.com/2022/02/ultimate-cleanup-of-debianubuntu.html
• https://orange-pi-4-lts.blogspot.com/2023/01/debloat-fedora-37-gnome.html
  
  
• it has BitTorrent client and you can use via GUI, Web or even Voice interface. Like if you decided to pirate some new AAA blockbuster download a new Linux kernel while being at office, you can securely and privately access your box @ home, set that thing for downloading, and it will be waiting for you, when you return home
  
  
• it is running Jellyfin, so you can collect your own music and video library and access it from any point in the world from your phone, laptop or a TV. Don't need to pay for YouTube Premium, YouTube Music / Spotify / Apple Music / Netflix or any other streaming services. 

What's in the TODO

Soon I'll cover next topics:

• turn to a completely offline speech recognition using Mozilla's DeepSpeech. See this amazing video and some technical details of how one talented guy used that.
  
  Our second option will be this one, but I'm yet skeptical about it.
  
  And this will be our fallback option #2, if we want to sell our soul to devil google:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEMzN5RgXbw
  
  
• home assistant
  
  
• nextcloud
  
  
• we'll troubleshoot couple of the problems we have and learn where to search for them and how to solve them. things like dmesg, journalctl, /var/log/messages
  
  
• how to build your own replacement of Google Photos to sync photos from your mobile device securely, over internet, to your backup location - like to a linux PC, hdd attached to it. How to access them so you could have all the things you used in Google Photos:
  
  https://orange-pi-4-lts.blogspot.com/2022/08/how-to-access-your-home-server-if-its.html
  
  xx
  
  
• how to sort out OpenGL / video acceleration issues and configure our browser so it won't be hiking-up while playing YouTube

https://forum.armbian.com/topic/17187-understanding-hardware-accelerated-video-decoding/#comment-120703

https://youtu.be/cUDwmaCrKD8

• we'll touch a topic of Linux kernels. Like why you might need to install newer kernel or rebuild existing one and how to do that safely
  
  
• we'll learn advanced vim technics - like how to use multi-cursors there. We'll also give MS Visual Studio Code a try under Linux to see how well (or bad) that will be. But still my heart is with Kate right now
  
  
• we'll try to install Arduino IDE on Linux and even try to pair it with some microcontroller to upload some sketch - I do have a bunch of ESP8, ESP32, AtMega168 and AtMega328
  
  
• we're going to test some x86 / x86_64 emulation with using nice projects box86 / box64 and FEX-EMU. So we could download appImages created for x86_64/amd64 and run them, without waiting for aarch64 appImages to appear
  
  
• we'll run some Windows software on our aarch64 machine, probably even the whole Windows 7 or something. In emulator off course. Qemu + virt-manager
  

 

What's the final goal?

For the lazy guys who don't want to get too deep into Linux I'll make an image out of everything I will build, so you will be able to download it, flash it to your SD card, plug it to your Orange Pi 4 LTS and just enjoy everything without the need of following all my steps.