User:RemDogKap/SandBox/First Setup

The Star64 is a 64 bit, 4 core Single Board Computer.

Prerequisites

• Star64 SBC
• 12V 3A to 5A Power Supply (Any 12V 3A or 5A type M 5.5mm OD/2.1mm ID barrel type DC Jack Power Supply will work)
• One or more types of removeable flash memory
  • SD card of at least ??GB, no greater than 256GB
  • eMMC Module with USB adapter
• Ability to flash a storage device with a disk image. Balena Etcher is recommended, but advanced users can also use dd in a Unix-like OS

Flashing the image

There are currently two working distributions of Linux compatible with the Star64, pinix and Armbian. Both distributions use the same kernel[???].The pinix distribution is built using Yocto which is an open source project used to create Linux distributions for embedded devices. The pinix distribution is currently focusing on support for GPU and VGPU acceleration for desktop environments. Both distributions use the deb package manager. The Armbian distribution is based on Debian/Ubuntu with changes to make it lightweight and compatible with ARM/RISC-V development boards.

While there are other RISC-V compatible distributions, none of these have the required device tree entries for the Star64 meaning that none will work fully on the Star64. This includes images for the StarFive2, a sister board which uses the same processor, due to other hardware differences. It may be possible to get other distributions to run on the Star64 by cross compiling the working kernel into another distribution.

More information about support for features can be accessed here.

pinix Install

Linux

First, if not already installed, install bzip2 and wget.

$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install bzip2 wget

Second, download a compressed disk image (.wic.bz2) from here (source code available here) using wget. There are three types of images, one command line only and two desktop environments.

• star64-image-minimal - A command line only image
• star64-image-weston - A Weston/Wayland "Demo" image.
• star64-image-plasma- A Plasma Based Image.

$ wget  https://pine64.my-ho.st:8443/${Name of Image File}

Where ${Name of Image File} is the name of your chosen image file. Example:

$ wget https://pine64.my-ho.st:8443/star64-image-minimal-star64-1.2.wic.bz2

Next, decompress the file using bzip2.

$ bzip2 -d ${Path to Image File}

Where ${Path to Image File} is the path to your image file. Example:

$ bzip2 -d star64-image-minimal-star64-1.2.wic.bz2

Next, flash the image to the SD card. The open source Balena Etcher with GUI support is recommended but dd will work as well if you are an advanced user.

Windows

First, make sure that you have 7zip installed and if not, install it.

Second, download a compressed disk image (.wic.bz2) from here (source code available here) by clicking on the files. There are three types of images, one command line only and two desktop environments.

• star64-image-minimal - A command line only image
• star64-image-weston - A Weston/Wayland "Demo" image.
• star64-image-plasma- A Plasma Based Image.

Third, right click on the downloaded file and select 7-zip. Next click extract.

Finally, use Balena Etcher to write your disk image to the SD Card.

eMMC Flash

[Not sure if eMMC flash is any different, I (Rem) do not have experience using it]

Using SD Card

[As mbuggle said in Discord #Star64 on 2023-06-05 1:10 AM CDT (Message ID: 1115160713439223859) it seems like it may be possible to use an SD Card to first boot, use the SSD to transfer the disk image to the eMMC, remove the SD Card and boot from eMMC]