2015-10-04

Latest Toy: The Orange Pi PC

You may have heard about the latest Raspberry Pi 2 clone: The Orange Pi PC, a device that sells for only $15 yet comes with a quad-core Allwinner H3 and 1 GB RAM. (But don't be fooled - while "open source" is mentioned everywhere on that website, the actual open source situation is still pretty bad).


After my Raspberry Pi started acting up and run very unstable a year ago, this looked like a nice replacement. Thus I decided to order the "Orange Pi PC set 3" including a plastic case and power cable from AliExpress, and will try to get Gentoo running on that device. The manufacturer's Gentoo forum section is all crickets, so I expect to encounter at least some problems.

If you want to see this thing in action, or at least watch me struggling to get Gentoo running, come next weekend (10+11 October 2015) to the Prague Linux Days and visit the Gentoo booth.

5 comments:

CaptainBlood said...

Hi Christopher, hopping you'll keep us up to date with your findings & issues ...
However it is also planned to order one here as well.

I've given up figuring out how to build an equivalent gentoo qemu VM for this platform as I never felt googled information to be enough reliable to risk loosing days in try and fails sessions. This VM was supposed to be a milestone toward the real thing ...

Good luck to you.

Anonymous said...

How did it work out for you in the end? If you got this running, can't wait to hear how :D

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

Gentoo runs on the device. I still need to document how to build u-boot and the kernel. For now, I made a guide in the wiki for using precompiled u-boot and kernel from existing Linux images:

https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Orange_Pi_PC/Quick_Start

CaptainBlood said...

Thks 4 keeping us updated ;-)