OrangePi/Installing

Mac

Flash SD Card with Orange Pi Image

The first step is to download an image and the flash the SD card with that image. These instructions will walk you through the steps.

Get The Image

Before you can download an image, you need to figure out which version of the Orange Pi you have, since there are about a dozen different versions.

Unfortunately, the operating system images that are linked to on the Orange Pi website were broken, missing, in Chinese, or on file-sharing sites that want to install software on your computer. Link, but don't use it: http://www.orangepi.org/downloadresources/

Alternatively you can download binaries from random people on forums: http://www.orangepi.org/orangepibbsen/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=342

You can also get an image from Armbian (again, some random person): https://www.armbian.com/orange-pi-zero/

Extract the Image

Extract the .xz file using Keka (on Mac)

I'm going to walk through the procedure using ubuntu-wily from here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B1hyW7T0dqn6fndnZTRhRm5BaW4zVDVyTGlGMWJES3Z1eXVDQzI5R1lnV21oRHFsWnVwSEU

Prepare SD Card

Plug in an SD card and run diskutil list to see the sd card:

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS CRONUS                  999.3 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3

/dev/disk1 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *15.9 GB    disk1
   1:             Windows_FAT_32 NO NAME                 64.0 MB    disk1s1
   2:                      Linux                         7.3 GB     disk1s2

Unmount it:

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1

Write Image to SD Card

For the last step, you use dd (disk formatter utility) to write that image to your SD card:

$ time dd bs=1m if=orangepi-plus-debian-server-card-v0.9.img of=/dev/disk1
925+0 records in
925+0 records out
969932800 bytes transferred in 440.491904 secs (2201931 bytes/sec)

real	7m21.021s
user	0m0.008s
sys	0m17.441s

The above command took 7 minutes on my system.

Modify SD Card Image

Once you've flashed the image, mount it on your computer so you can make a few changes to it prior to booting your Orange Pi.

Following instructions here: http://www.orangepi.org/orangepibbsen/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=342

First copy the uImage (presumably the boot image, "micro image"):

$ cp uImage_OPI-2 uImage

Next, copy one of the example script.bin files, depending on what monitor/resolution you want (how about NONE?):

$ cp script.bin.OPI-2_480p_dvi script.bin