So, out of curiousity, I wanted to see if Companion would run on a different SBC instead of the usual Raspberry PI.
I liked the RockPIe because it has 2 Ethernet ports on it, and is very small and fairly inexpensive.
Tried with the factory images of Ubuntu and Debian to install Companion, but ran into lots of strange errors. Neither was better than the other.
Thought that maybe it just wasn’t going to work, but then ran across something called “Armbian” which is an open-source image for SBCs OTHER than the RPI.
It has a build for a later version of Ubuntu, version 20.04 called “Focal Fossa” and looked interesting. The RockPI’s factory build of Ubuntu is 18.04, called “Bionic Beaver” and is likely too old for Companion’s setup.
Loaded up the Armbian Focal build, and started to install Companion. Other than a couple of little tweaks due to the fact that I have only 1g of RAM on this card, it seems to work quite well.
Because it has 2 NICs on it, I have to tell it which one to use for the GUI, and I haven’t quite figured out how to use the other one to connect to the console, but I’m working on it.
All in all, a fun little experiment!
Here’s the RockPi-E page:
https://wiki.radxa.com/RockpiE
Here’s what it looks like:
