Cubox Lives Again

I had an idea to set up my cubox as an Android station to sync/operate all my bluetooth wearables. But neither the Android image (4.4?!) nor the Ignition installer would boot. Just sat there, glowing a red LED at me. I found their official builds server, and the only image up there for cubox is Debian. Which also doesn't work.

Okay so. *rolls up sleeves in dramatic fashion*

Cuboxes come with serial on by default, over the micro-USB cable.
Find the device name;
sudo dmesg
Connect to serial;
sudo screen /dev/ttyUSB0 1115200
(If you are in Windows it's the same procedure as for Raspberry Pi.)

U-Boot 2009.08-dirty (Jan 21 2013 - 10:57:40) Marvell version: 5.4.4 NQ SR1

BootROM:
       Version on chip: 2.33
       Status: OK
       Retries #: 0
Board: CuBox
SoC:   88AP510 (A1)
CPU:   Marvell Sheeva (Rev 5)
       CPU @ 800Mhz, L2 @ 400Mhz
       DDR3 @ 400Mhz, TClock @ 166Mhz
PEX 0: interface detected no Link.
PEX 1: interface detected no Link.
DRAM:   2 GB
       CS 0: base 0x00000000 size  1 GB
       CS 1: base 0x40000000 size  1 GB
       Addresses 60M - 0M are saved for the U-Boot usage.
SF: Detected W25Q32 with page size  4 kB, total  4 MB

Streaming disabled 
L2 Cache Prefetch disabled
L2 Cache ECC disabled
Modifying CPU/CORE/DDR power rails to 1.0(-2.5%) / 1.0(-5%) / 1.5(-5%)
USB 0: Host Mode
USB 1: Host Mode
Setting VPU power OFF.
Setting GPU power ON.
MMC:   MV_SDHCI: 0, MV_SDHCI: 1
Net:   egiga0 [PRIME]
Hit any key to stop autoboot:  0 
===> Executing ext4load usb 0:1 0x02000000 /boot.scr
(Re)start USB...
USB:   Register 10011 NbrPorts 1
USB EHCI 1.00
scanning bus for devices... 1 USB Device(s) found
...
** Unable to use ide 0:2 for fatload **
===> Executing ext4load ide 0:2 0x02000000 /boot/boot.scr
** Bad partition 2 **
===> Executing fatload ide 0:2 0x02000000 /boot/boot.scr
Error No HD connection 
** Can't read from device 0 **

** Unable to use ide 0:2 for fatload **

egiga0 no link
Using egiga0 device
TFTP from server 192.168.15.100; our IP address is 192.168.15.223
Filename 'boot.scr'.
Load address: 0x2000000
Loading: T T T T T T T T T T 
Retry count exceeded; starting again

Oh no. The very first line delivers the bad news. This machine is old. Older than I'd thought. Turns out there are two kinds of cubox; Marvell/Armada 510 CPU, and Freescale imx6 cubox-i. The former is the one I have, the latter is the only one currently supported.

As my hardware has been abandoned by the manufacturer I'm left with Kali, Arch, or Geexbox/Kodi.

Kali;
Download cubox version, e.g. kali-2017.3-cubox-i.img.xz
Extract; unxz kali-2017.3-cubox.img.xz
Write; sudo dd if=kali-2017.3-cubox.img of=/dev/sdcard bs=512k
Finally use gparted to expand partition to whole sdcard
And as if by magic, the cubox boots up into Kali! (I find this especially humourous as I recently tried to create a Kali LiveUSB stick for my laptop, and couldn't get it to boot, it appears due to a lack of hardware support.)

It doesn't help me build my Android station, but, thank you Community, for helping keep this hardware from obsolescence.