Checking the numbers

Doghouse – Devices

Article from Issue 302/2026
Author(s):

Component changes can affect functionality; the answer lies in checking and tracking serial numbers.

Recently I met with a group of students who were trying to "upgrade" some Android computers to run GNU/Linux. They were trying to use a general Linux distribution that was ARM based to run on these small boxes and were having troubles.

They would put the distribution on one box and the USB keyboard and mouse wouldn't work. Then they put the same distribution on another box, and while the USB keyboard and mouse would work, the video wouldn't work at all. On a third box, the video, mouse, and keyboard would work, but the storage wouldn't show up.

They didn't know what was going on. The model numbers of all of the boxes were the same. Why wouldn't the distribution work across all of them?

[...]

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