So about a month ago i ordered an Orange Pi development board. At the time it was $12 + shipping from mainland China. And i just got it a few days ago. I have been buying up used Raspberry Pi's for the past year hoping to build a cluster at some point, and i have several boards in use for various projects and media centers at home.
The Orange Pi had a low price. 1024 MB RAM and a Allwinner Quad Core 1.6GHz CPU. For $12 that is a steal. The fact that it sports a Allwinner CPU, this device will at best deliver partial hardware accelerated video playback using the CedarX multimedia library, and i have no idea if it is supported or not. For my use i couldn't care less about video playback. I had been eyeing the RPi2 for the specifications to use for a few more demanding tasks that needed the boost in specification.
The documentation for the boards is really bad, and the instructions to get a board up and running is actually so bad the if you follow them, you will not end up with a board running anything.
I was planning to use the Debian image for the board, but when i spotted an Arch Linux image just above the Debian one, i was sold. I love the efficiency of Arch and the AUR, and as a long time Arch user, i was aboard. After running $ dd to write the image to my SD card, i was left with a prebuild Arch install and a BOOT directory containing kernels and resolution scripts that i had to further narrow down to fit the device i got.
After that, i spend about an hour setting up the yaourt package manager, that was a bit more tricky to do on the ARM7 platform than it is on my x86 devices.
First of all. When adding the yaourt repository to /etc/pacman.conf i usually add this:
[archlinuxfr]
SigLevel = Never
Server = http://repo.archlinux.fr/$arch
However. For the arm platform i added:[archlinuxfr]
SigLevel = Never
Server = http://repo.archlinux.fr/arm
After that i manually downloaded and build both the yaourt package and the package-query package it has among it's dependencies.
package-query and then yaourt:
$ wget https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/snapshot/package-query.tar.gz $ tar xfz package-query.tar.gz $ cd package-query && makepkg $ sudo pacman -U package-query*.pkg.tar.xz
$ wget https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/snapshot/yaourt.tar.gz $ tar xzf yaourt.tar.gz $ cd yaourt && makepkg
And Finally:
$ sudo pacman -U yaourt*.pkg.tar.xz
