Bananapi M3

Preparation Make sure you have a good & reliable SD card and a proper power supply. Archives can be uncompressed with 7-Zip on Windows, Keka on OS X and 7z on Linux (apt-get install p7zip-full). RAW images can be written with Etcher (all OS). Where images are compressed with .xz you can wrtite them to the SD card with Etcher directly. Boot Insert the SD card into the slot, connect a cable to your network if possible or a display and power your board. (First) boot (with DHCP) takes up to 35 seconds with a class 10 SD Card. Login Log in as: root  Password: 1234. Then you are prompted to change this password (US-Keyboard setting). When done, you are asked to create a normal user-account for your everyday tasks.

We provide CLI (command line interface) images first. If the software is stable enough we add the option to upgrade to XFCE desktop. The Build-System relies on  Debian and Ubuntu. The availability of different images may vary, most of the time because of driver restriction. Sometimes we provide only testing images. All images can be built from sources at any time and in rare cases, where you can't find an image which you need, you can build one.

Each supported Armbian image can be made from scratch – from latest kernel and u-boot sources, updated upstream packages and our most recent bug fixes and improvements. Supported build environment for SDK is Ubuntu Bionic 18.04 x64 but you can run it containerised virtually on any X64 based Linux distribution under Docker. You can re-make live bootable image or just a kernel+dtb(hardware configuration) package which you transfer to your image and install with: dpkg -i linux-image-[branch]-family.deb linux-dtb-[branch]-family.deb. In that process you can enforce many customization. To the kernel or user space. Read more.