I was interested in installing Debian/Ubuntu on these devices. Because there are so many clones and some of images do not work, I struggled for a while and eventually find some sourses to make them boot. Not perfect but seemed working. I think it might be useful to share my experience.
For MK802, I bought from Amazon but they couldn't boot the images that I downloaded at all. I had to return them thanks to Amazon's great return policy. (BTW these were the first times that I returned anything from Amazon. :-) Eventually, I bought a MK802ii from Taobao in China. The seller claim they are geniune and it indeed works. The problem was I had a hardtime to get the wifi working. The wifi chip in the device is rtl8188eu and most of the images only include drivers for rtl892cu. Eventually, I found the images provided in here. I used v4 but substituted the 3.0.62+ kernel which include the 8188eu driver. After doing a "depmod -a" and a "modprobe 8188eu", the wifi worked. I am happy to say that this setup is very stable.
For MK808, it was even more difficult. Some of the images cannot even boot on my MK808 (not 808b). Eventually, I found the images provided here works well. (I found directly downloading the remix images did work well but downloading the homeio_rc1 rootfs and then putting it on a formated microsd card worked.) The only issue was again about wifi. Following the instructions given by the author, I made it working. However, even though it can detected the available wifi, it still take many trials to lock in. There are some other inconvenience but it at least it works.
I did some benchmarking on these two devices to compare with Dockstar. I used sysbench cpu test. You can install sysbench using apt-get. The command I used was "sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=10000 run". The results I got were:
Dockstar 744 seconds.
MK802 274 seconds,
MK808 239 seconds (single thread) and 123 seconds (two threads).
Hope this will save some time for people want to do the samething.
For MK802, I bought from Amazon but they couldn't boot the images that I downloaded at all. I had to return them thanks to Amazon's great return policy. (BTW these were the first times that I returned anything from Amazon. :-) Eventually, I bought a MK802ii from Taobao in China. The seller claim they are geniune and it indeed works. The problem was I had a hardtime to get the wifi working. The wifi chip in the device is rtl8188eu and most of the images only include drivers for rtl892cu. Eventually, I found the images provided in here. I used v4 but substituted the 3.0.62+ kernel which include the 8188eu driver. After doing a "depmod -a" and a "modprobe 8188eu", the wifi worked. I am happy to say that this setup is very stable.
For MK808, it was even more difficult. Some of the images cannot even boot on my MK808 (not 808b). Eventually, I found the images provided here works well. (I found directly downloading the remix images did work well but downloading the homeio_rc1 rootfs and then putting it on a formated microsd card worked.) The only issue was again about wifi. Following the instructions given by the author, I made it working. However, even though it can detected the available wifi, it still take many trials to lock in. There are some other inconvenience but it at least it works.
I did some benchmarking on these two devices to compare with Dockstar. I used sysbench cpu test. You can install sysbench using apt-get. The command I used was "sysbench --test=cpu --cpu-max-prime=10000 run". The results I got were:
Dockstar 744 seconds.
MK802 274 seconds,
MK808 239 seconds (single thread) and 123 seconds (two threads).
Hope this will save some time for people want to do the samething.