2. Abel: Pine64+ SBC

Named after Niels Henrik Abel, whose memorial is (pining!) by a Norwegian fjord (hence a wee joke about "pining for the fjords").

Documented at wiki.pine64.org, this is a wee single board computer with quad-core ARM Cortex-A53, 2GB of RAM, and not much storage.

Acquired via a Kickstarter project, and OSed with Debian via root filesystem material from Pine64 Forum discussion on Debian installation alongside bootloader from umiddelb/z2d Pine64 installation , based on instructions gleaned from the latter. I was surprised at how easy/quick the installation was; it amounted to...

• Download bootloader, getting simpleimage-pine64-latest.img

• Download Debian root filesystem, getting debian-lxde.tar.gz

• Install bootloader onto a microSD card, dd if=simpleimage-pine64-latest.img of=/dev/nodeofthesdcard bs=1M

• Use fdisk to resize the second partition to fill the remainder of the card

• Make a filesystem on the second partition. mkfs.ext4 -O ^has_journal /dev/nodeofthesdcard2

  This will become the root filesystem.

• Mount the root filesystem. mount /dev/nodeofthesdcard2 /mnt

• Make a boot directory as mountpoint for the bootloader. mkdir /mnt/boot

• Mount the boot partition. mount /dev/nodeofthesdcard1 /mnt/boot

• Extract root filesystem onto the card. tar --numeric-owner -C /mnt -xfz /tmp/debian-lxde.tar.gz

• It might be interesting to drop a fresh kernel in place at this point; I did not do so.

• Unmount cleanly. unmount /mnt/boot; unmount /mnt; sync; sync

I shifted the SD Card from laptop to the Pine64 unit, and it booted up happily.

• It started up with whatever xdm variant is in LXDE.

• I asked the ethernet port to switch on - ifup eth0; this picked up addressing from DHCP on my network.

• I modified /etc/resolv.conf to point to my fave DNS server; probably I should have DHCP handle that.

• Needed to restart NTP to get it to fix up time; it thought the time was years ago, as the real time clock had no value, and no battery to make it hold values across reboots.

  I should look into getting a battery for the real time clock. There's a socket to plug that in.