LeMaker Guitar Review
(click on image for larger version)
LeMaker needs to fix the lack of SMB networking ASAP.
Common Applications
I was disappointed that Chromium was not installed, and even more disappointed when I could not install it from the Lemuntu repo. Hopefully it will be available soon.
I then tried to install the other applications I normally use on Linux:
- sudo apt-get install scrot
- sudo apt-get install gedit
- sudo apt-get install xrdp
- sudo apt-get install remmina
They all installed without any issues.
I also installed gnome-screenshot
- sudo apt-get install gnome-screenshot
scrot and gedit worked fine, however I canot say the same for xrdp or remmina.
- xrdp simply did not accept rdp connections
- remmina only offered ssh and sftp connections
Best guess: Lemuntu did not compile the rdp library into xrdp or remmina – which hopefully will be fixed soon.
Normally, I’d also install LibreOfice, Gimp and SimpleIDE, however until I can resize the eMMC partition, or change to booting off SD cards, I cannot do so.
I will resize the eMMC only after all other tests are concluded, as I do not want to take a chance of not being able to complete the hardware tests.
WiFi
The Guitar Base Board rev.B has an on board WiFi module on the bottom.
The LeMaker Wiki provides instructions on how to configure the on-board WiFi.
On the Lemuntu installed on this board, I found wpagui under Internet on the start menu, however you can also manually edit /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
WiFi worked just fine 🙂
Bluetooth
The WiFi module also provides Bluetooth, and the WiKi has a page on configuring it. Everything seemed to go OK, but it did not discover my phone. I will investigate…
Pre-Release Growing Pains
The first Guitar + Base I received was a very early sample, and had some signals routed incorrectly for the SPI port on the 40 pin GPIO header, and USB3 did not work on it – which led me to discover that it could not boot from an SD card, while being able to read/write it perfectly when booted of eMMC.
LeMaker was very helpful, and sent me a new firmware file that needed a special flasher under Windows – fortunately the second newer revision guitar arrived, and I was able to continue testing.
The second Guitar corrected the SPI problem. I will re-flash the first guitar soon, as I want to see if it will then boot of SD and perhaps work with USB3.0
I noticed that the camera and LCD connectors on the rev.B base board have 42 pins, as opposed to the 40 pin connectors used on the Banana Pi and Banana Pro.
Update Dec.18: Good news! I just read on the LeMaker forum that the connectors are for the 40 pin flex cables like on the Banana Pi & Pro! Apparently the Banana Pi Camera and the 7″ Banana Pro LCD is compatible with the Guitar Base Board. (The 3.5″ and 5″ displays are not compatible as they are not LVDS displays)
Article Index
- Introduction
- A Closer Look at LeMaker Guitar & Base Board
- Feature Comparison
- Operating Systems, Software Compatibility
- Common Applications, WiFi, Bluetooth
- Hardware Compatibility
- More on Hardware Compatibility
- Benchmarks: Booting&Apps, Compiling Emacs, Sysbench
- Benchmarks: iperf client & server, NBench, UnixBench
- Benchmarks: hdparm, dd, Documentation, Support, Conclusion
