Install TightVNC Server on the Asus Tinker board

I’m making this post for my own reference, though you can obviously use it as you wish.
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install xfonts-base
sudo apt-get install tightvncserver
sudo apt-get install nano

Run: vncserver
Add a password
My preferred command line option is vncserver -geometry 1280x720 (this sets the resolution to 720P)

I’m currently running Asus Linaro 1.8 debian based OS from a 120GB SSD and a using it as a Plex media server, for the most part it seems to work just fine, though some high bit rate 1080p movies struggle a little. I’m investigating further.


Installing a solid state drive or USB drive is as easy as the Raspberry Pi with just one slight difference. Plex Media server, HTOP, Webmin, Nextcloud and more are exactly the same, they just run a little better with the extra CPU power and extra 1GB of RAM.

Setup Asus Tinkerboard to boot from a USB memory stick

I did try to install to a hard drive, but the extlinux bootloader doesn’t give the HDD enough time to spin up and linux just goes into a kernel panic.

Very much like the Raspberry Pi SSD tutorial, this is nearly the same, but this time I’ll use a USB memory stick instead of a SSD.

Same as before, run fdisk first.
sudo fdisk -l

remember the disk you need, probably /dev/sda1 or in my case /dev/sdb1

Now copy the contents of the microSD root partition to the memory stick.
sudo dd if=/dev/mmcblk0p2 of=/dev/sdb1 bs=512

Now fix the broken file structure on the MS as before:

sudo e2fsck -f /dev/sdb1

Resize the HDD back to full size:

sudo resize2fs /dev/sdb1


This time you need to edit a different file instead of cmdline.txt

sudo nano /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf

change /dev/mmcblk0p2 to /dev/sdb1

Now edit fstab

sudo nano /etc/fstab again change /mmcblk0p2 to /sdb1

reboot and you’re done

One thing I have noticed about the Tinkerboard is that it’s incredibly slow to copy from the microSD to the MS or SSD, I get roughly 3mb per second, where the Pi gives around 12mb per second, a huge difference, when you consider the Raspberry Pi only has USB 2 and the SD card, network and USB are all controlled through one port and the Tinkerboard supports separate controllers and has USB 3.0, this leaves me scratching my head why it should be so slow.


7605248+0 records in
7605248+0 records out
3893886976 bytes (3.9 GB) copied, 1308.77 s, 3.0 MB/s

As you can see, it’s very very slow????