Rikomagic MK802 IV LE mini PC with Ubuntu

November 20, 2013

Rikomagic MK802 IV LE is one of the first devices of its type to come with Ubuntu pre-loaded.

First look at the MK802 IV LE presented Brad Linder of liliputing.com.

The MK802 IV LE features a Rockchip RK3188 ARM Cortex-A9 quad-core processor with ARM Mali 400 graphics, 2GB of RAM, and 8GB to 16GB of storage. It has 2 micro USB ports (one of which is used as a power supply), 1 full-sized USB port, an HDMI connector, and a microSD card slot.

Rikomagic also includes a USB OTG adapter so you can use one of the small ports as a full-sized USB port and an HDMI adapter cable in case you can’t plug the stick-shaped computer straight into the HDMI port on your TV or monitor.

The device curently ships with a custom version of Ubuntu 13.04 called PicUntu. You can install PicUntu yourself on many Android TV boxes with Rockchip’s latest processors, but you may run into problems with WiFi or other hardware.

Almost all the MK802 IV LE hardware is supported out of the box — the exception is hardware-accelerated graphics. That means that while you can watch videos or play 3D games, there’s no GPU acceleration.

The mini PC will instead rely wholly on CPU power, which means that some games may run very slowly and some videos may look choppy — “I watched a few YouTube videos at 360p without problems, but blowing them up to full screen or increasing the resolution turned them into slideshows” – writes Brand Linder.