A step‑by‑step installation guide shows how to replace the stock firmware on ZTE B860H V1/V2 set‑top boxes with Armbian, stressing that V5 is a different hardware platform. Required items are a PC (preferably Linux) with a microSD slot, a class‑10 microSD card, and a specially wired HDMI “boot” dongle (or a premade one). The process uses an s905x/b860h Armbian image and the HG680P U‑Boot binary: decompress the chosen Armbian image, write it to the microSD with dd (recommend bs=4M), then write u‑boot.bin into the card at precise offsets (dd bs=1 count=442 and dd bs=512 skip=1 seek=1). Windows users can use AMLOGIC BOOTCARD MAKER instead. The guide includes precautions (verify target device with lsblk, back up data) and notes that the HG680P U‑Boot is required.
The HDMI dongle is used to trigger the board’s bootloader into SD boot: verify the dongle with i2c-tools (expect an I²C device at 0x50 and the string "boot@SDC"), insert the flashed card, attach the dongle, power on and watch for an orange LED (~15s) before switching to an HDMI display. After initial Armbian setup (keyboard or SSH, default root password 1234), make U‑Boot permanent by scp’ing u‑boot.bin to the board and dd’ing it to the eMMC device (e.g., /dev/mmcblk2) - a destructive operation that will overwrite Android. armbian-install can then install Armbian to eMMC and select the meson‑gxl‑s905x‑b860h DTB; the guide also mentions it works on some HG680P boxes and includes extras like zram and irqbalance tips.
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