My DC-ROMA PAD II arrived today and I already bricked it multiple times. :D

Hi folks! I got my order of the now out of stock RISCV tablet DC-ROMA PAD II today.

Hardware It is decently manufactured, about 11 inches in size, has wifi, a small keyboard (ordered on top), headphone jack, 8 cores spacemit cpu, usbc connector and sd card slot (and maybe sim but unsure).

Operating System The device comes with ubuntu 24.04 on the internal storage and a micro sd card with debian. Both run decent oob but what comes next is rather peculiar

What happened so far The devices run patched everything as far as I can see. upgrading ubuntu bricked gnome shell so that it permanently maxxes out one core and makes the device unusable. Maybe I should have made a backup first but I didnt think it would go unusable asap. Pretty much the same happened to the debian system, which I did backup before updating. The real issue is that there are barely any riscv images out there and building them is quite the endeavor.

So for now I'll use the backup of the debian system until I have familiarized myself with the hardware enough to know what I can and cant do.

Fair warning To those thinking of purchasing this device, be careful. It is marketed as a developer device and even as a dev, it is very rough to use at this point. there is an online manual with 7 pages which explains how to turn the device on, thats it. no info about debugging tools AT ALL. You have been warned.

Future Of course I'm not done with it and will attempt to port postmarketOS to it as well as learn how to make reproducible images for other OSs. Let me know if you have any questions. Feel free to give advice if you are experienced. This is my first riscv device.