TinkerOS 1.4 Released

UPDATE: We made an announcement about the beta release of TinkerOS 1.6. Read more here.

There’s a new release of TinkerOS available to download on Asus’s website. TinkerOS is a Linux distribution for the Asus Tinker Board based on Debian. Not heard of the Asus Tinker Board? Read our two page review.

Asus don’t appear to have published any information on their website about the new release. So what’s changed in TinkerOS 1.4? It’s a fairly minor maintenance update. However, the boot time has been impressively reduced. Version 1.3 took 24 seconds to get to the desktop whereas version 1.4 now only takes a mere 13 seconds.

In terms of features, there doesn’t appear to be many additions. But Asus has added ntp (Network Time Protocol daemon and utility programs), the Synaptic package manager, and a few new libraries such as the Wacom model feature query library. There are some minor updates to other libraries and the X server.

You’re in for a disappointment if you’re hoping the latest release of TinkerOS includes the Rockchip video player. It doesn’t. The Tinker Board has an integrated ARM-based Mali T764 GPU with H.264 and H.265 hardware decoder, and the Rockchip player will offer native hardware decoding for HD/UHD video content. While it’s not ready yet, Asus say there’ll be an update soon.

You can download TinkerOS 1.4 from Asus’s website.

I’ve compiled a package list showing all the packages that come supplied with TinkerOS Version 1.4. There’s also a package list after running an update.

Package List – TinkerOS 1.4

Package List – TinkerOS 1.4 after updating