• Device has different wireless chips so wlan0 (WIFI connection) might not work out of the box.

Legacy kernel images (all boards) (default branch)

• HDMI output (if exists) supports only limited number of predefined resolutions
• TV Out doesn’t work as expected (only PAL/NTSC resolution, overscanning, no h3disp support, notes for OPi Zero)
• 1-Wire protocol, reading out DHT11/DHT22 sensors or S/PDIF requires setting the minimum CPU frequency to 480MHz or higher
• Hardware accelerated video decoding supports only limited number of video formats
• ‘Out of memory’ (OOM) issues are possible due to a kernel bug

Mainline kernel images (all boards) (next/dev branches)

• No Mali drivers
• No hardware accelerated video decoding
• schedutil CPU governor may cause clicks and pops on audio output – change(d) to ondemand to work around this issue

Board: Orange Pi Zero

• Onboard wireless module (XR819) has poor software support so wireless connection issues are expected
• Onboard wireless module (XR819) is not supported on mainline releases

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).

Boot

Insert SD card into a slot and power the board. (First) boot (with DHCP) takes up to 35 seconds with a class 10 SD Card and cheapest board.

Login

Login as root on HDMI / serial console or via SSH and use password 1234. You will be prompted to change this password at first login. Next you will be asked to create a normal user account that is sudo enabled (beware of default QWERTY keyboard settings at this stage).