I oute also as a total Linux beginner who has sought with this little project an introduction to this strange world. For this purpose I have bought in addition the book 'Introduction to Linux' by Galileo Computing, which explains some important basic concepts that are important for the use of Cubieboard (eg rights management of the file system, processes, etc.). So far I did not come beyond the installation of various' You take center XYZ Linux Ûm' booklet CDs that brought little as they wanted me to pretend to me that Linux will be something like Windows. In order to shorten it: Linux is quite different, and that's a good thing! Therefore, I have the Cubian not even install Animal T with an X Window System, but from the outset with the shell (and install the Image "Cubian Nano").
A disadvantage of the Cubietruck are in my opinion two things:
1. There is no accompanying documentation, not even a handout for assembly. Although there is a community in various Internet forums, but every buyer must be aware that a good deal of initiative is in demand - it is in every respect to a developer board. Here common boards like the Raspberry Pi are more much better position, with tons of specific literature and a large Internet community. The various tutorials on the web for the Cubietruck refer often to older versions of the board (eg the Cubieboard 2) or other Linux distributions. As a beginner, you have here an extremely high frustration tolerance applied to the day, otherwise you will fail early and thoroughly. This disadvantage is not attributable to the Board itself, but so far only the low penetration - this is quite aware.
2. The supplied blue housing, however, is a real cheek that mocks the quality of Cubietruck. In particular, the two buttons for reset and FEL (for starting a special recovery mode) to solve the corresponding switch on the board of more bad than good. The summit is that the Board so minimal shifts after installing a hard drive because of the stubborn SATA connection cable, one of the two buttons is pressed after screwing together permanently. This results in that the board in the housing no longer boots, whereas it decomposes on the table is working properly. There is now also a metal housing to buy, which may be processed better. I run the board now in blue case, but I've omitted those two buttons - one needs this anyway only in exceptional cases.
Another note to the speed of possible storage media: the built-in flash memory - which is equipped in the factory with an Android installation - has the lowest transmission rate of all tested by me media: I have measured Cubian following values (read files with dd on the respective medium and write to / dev / null):
- SD card (mini SD Sandisk Ultra 8GB, Class 10): 29MByte / s
- Built-in NAND flash memory: 9,7MByte / s
- 2.5 "Hard Drive Samsung HM641JI SATA connector on: 91MByte / s (here limits the plate - the SATA II connection with 3Gb / s specified).
I'm a little scared given the low transmission power of NAND and can only recommend to retrofit for serious applications an HDD or an SSD better.
For further experience, I am happy to help, especially in the context ownCloud.
