# Orange Pi

Orange Pi (One) is a minimalist computer built for the ARMv7-A architecture. More information about this project.

Note: The device is not officially supported by the ALARM project, i.e. please refrain from submitting patches, feature requests or bug reports for it.

This article is strongly based on Banana Pi. Moreover this article is not meant to be an exhaustive setup guide and assumes that the reader has setup an Arch system before.

## Installation

### Using original ArchLinuxARM tarball

This method will install unmodified ArchLinuxARM armv7 basesystem to your Orange Pi One, meaning you'll have the latest mainline kernel running. It will probably also work on other H3 Orange Pis with mainline support.

#### Install basesystem to a SD card

Zero the beginning of the SD card:

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=1M count=8

Use fdisk to partition the SD card, and format it with `mkfs.ext4 -O ^metadata_csum,^64bit /dev/sdX1`.

Mount the ext4 filesystem, replacing `sda1` with the formatted partition:

    # mkdir mnt
    # mount /dev/sda1 mnt

Download and extract the root filesystem:

    # wget http://archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM-armv7-latest.tar.gz
    # bsdtar -xpf ArchLinuxARM-armv7-latest.tar.gz -C mnt/

Create a file with the following boot script

    boot.cmd

    part uuid ${devtype} ${devnum}:${bootpart} uuid
    setenv bootargs console=${console} root=PARTUUID=${uuid} rw rootwait

    if load ${devtype} ${devnum}:${bootpart} ${kernel_addr_r} /boot/zImage; then
      if load ${devtype} ${devnum}:${bootpart} ${fdt_addr_r} /boot/dtbs/${fdtfile}; then
        if load ${devtype} ${devnum}:${bootpart} ${ramdisk_addr_r} /boot/initramfs-linux.img; then
          bootz ${kernel_addr_r} ${ramdisk_addr_r}:${filesize} ${fdt_addr_r};
        else
          bootz ${kernel_addr_r} - ${fdt_addr_r};
        fi;
      fi;
    fi

    if load ${devtype} ${devnum}:${bootpart} 0x48000000 /boot/uImage; then
      if load ${devtype} ${devnum}:${bootpart} 0x43000000 /boot/script.bin; then
        setenv bootm_boot_mode sec;
        bootm 0x48000000;
      fi;
    fi

Compile it and write it to the SD-card using the package uboot-tools

    # mkimage -A arm -O linux -T script -C none -a 0 -e 0 -n "Orange Pi One boot script" -d boot.cmd mnt/boot/boot.scr
    # umount mnt

#### Compile and copy U-Boot bootloader

The next step is creating a u-boot image. Make sure you have arm-none-eabi-gcc, dtc, git and uboot-tools installed on your system. If you compile for a different H3 Orange Pi than the One, replace orangepi_one_config accordingly. Then clone the u-boot source code and compile a Orange Pi image:

    $ git clone --depth 1 -b v2016.09.01 git://git.denx.de/u-boot.git
    $ cd u-boot
    $ make -j4 ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-none-eabi- orangepi_one_defconfig
    $ make -j4 ARCH=arm CROSS_COMPILE=arm-none-eabi-

If everything went fine you should have an U-Boot image: u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin. Now dd the image to your sdcard, where /dev/sdX is your sdcard.

    # dd if=u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin of=/dev/sdX bs=1024 seek=8

#### Login / SSH

SSH login for root is disabled by default. Login with the default user account and use su.

Type | Username | Password
--- | --- | ---
Root | `root` | `root`
User | `alarm` | `alarm`

## See also

- "Just another Geek's" blog about installing Linux

Category:

- ARM architecture