Installing EDE on an MK802 device

The MK802 is a small and cheap ARM powered mini PC with HDMI output, designed for playing media, browsing the internet or to be put to general use.

By default MK802 comes with the Android OS, but this tutorial will show you how to run EDE on Linux (to be precise, (L)Ubuntu) compiled and prepared for MK802. This tutorial is written using an MK802+ model (Allwinner A10 CPU, DDR3 1GB RAM and 4GB ROM), but is applicable for all newer MK802 versions.

Here is an image of one of the available models:

Assuming you already have an MK802 as well as a MicroSD card (this is where Ubuntu will be installed as we are not going to overwrite the default Android installation on device ROM), first go to this page and download the Lubuntu version which matches your device memory size, then follow the instructions (written on the same page) on how to install it on the MicroSD card.

Note: You can also use an external USB drive instead of a MicroSD card; this will make things work considerably faster.

It is advised you use a 720p version as graphics will be faster.

By default, the image is intended for plugging the MK802 device in a TV. In case you are going to plug the device in a computer, make sure to download the zipped evh.bin files from here and replace the version on your MicroSD card with the appropriate one from there.

Now plug in the card and you should have a running Ubuntu system with the LXDE environment (password for logging in is miniand).

After you have Ubuntu running, installing the required packages is simple; just run these commands:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install g++ jam libfltk1.3-dev libdbus-1-dev

From here on installing EDE from source code should not be a problem; please read InstallingFromSource for further instructions. However, if you get an error like:

C++ applets/clock/Clock.o 
Link applets/clock/clock.so 
/usr/bin/ld: /opt/ede/lib/libedelib.a(Debug.o): relocation R_ARM_THM_MOVW_ABS_NC against `a local symbol' can not be used when making a shared object; recompile with -fPIC
/opt/ede/lib/libedelib.a: could not read symbols: Bad value
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

this is a known Ubuntu bug. In this case make sure to recompile edelib as a shared library (running ./configure –enable-shared in the edelib folder will do it).