UPDATE — JANUARY 2026
Since this Libre Le Potato board is still a good lower-cost alternative to RPis (especially for running Reactor), I pulled it out and did an update on the OS (Ubuntu 22.04.1). It had been in storage since I wrote the first post in November 2022, so it was... ahem... a little behind.
My first attempt at apt update semi-failed because a signature for one repository had changed, so that had to be fixed (easy):
wget https://deb.libre.computer/repo/pool/main/libr/libretech-keyring/libretech-keyring_2024.05.19_all.deb
dpkg -i libretech-keyring_2024.05.19_all.deb
From there, I was able to update the OS as usual. After the update, Ubuntu offered an upgrade to the current 24.04.3 LTS release. In the interest of science, I went for it (do-release-upgrade). That went less well. The system came up, but without networking and ssh access. I had to fix that with a locally-connected HDMI monitor and keyboard by adding (as root) a /etc/netplan/01-netcfg.yaml file as follows:
network:
version: 2
renderer: networkd
ethernets:
end0:
dhcp4: true
Then run (still in a shell as root) netplan apply to bring the network up (you should be able to ping something at that point), and then systemctl enable ssh to re-enable sshd at startup. I then rebooted the unit, and all was well and it was ssh accessible.
I then upgraded nodejs to the current v24 LTS, and ran Reactor, no problem.
As of this writing, the price of this board at that large, well-known online retailer is around US$45. A heatsink for the CPU may be needed.
An upgraded/newer Sweet Potato model AML-S905X-CC-V2 runs about US$60 (with 2GB RAM). Same CPU; changes include heatsink now included/installed, DDR4 RAM, UEFI BIOS, USB C power input (5V/3A), support for a PoE hat, and an eMMC 5.x SM interface. A 16GB eMMC (flash disk) 5.x module is available (same source) for around US$10. Direct OS support includes Debian 13 and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS).
Since eMMC 5.x modules are available for the Sweet Potato, I highly recommend it (I wasn't able to find a seller of eMMC 4.x modules compatible with the older Le Potato at this point). MicroSD cards are notoriously failure prone (they're not up to the sustained, frequent writes of general purpose OSs). The NAND flash will do much better and likely be faster. Alternately, you could use an overlay filesystem. Maybe I'll write a post about that separately, if anyone wants to know.