Here is how you can get openSUSE running on Banana Pi M2.

* Download the image

* Extract the archive to get openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Bpi-M2-Xfce.img

* Dump openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Bpi-M2-Xfce.img on to a SD card
(dd if=/path/to/openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Bpi-M2-Xfce.img of=/dev/sdX bs=4M; sync #replace /dev/sdX with your actual SD card device)

*  In case you have a bigger SD card, use yast2 disk(partitioner) to “expand” the second partition. You can use yast’s package manager to install more software. The default password for root is linux, you may want to change that first thing after booting.

I am unable to get sound on this hardware, probably their kernel is missing sound related modules, if you figure out how to get sound working drop me a line so I can include it in next release.Everything else(wifi, hdmi out, USB ports etc) works well enough.

There is BerryTerminal project which makes it possible to use Raspberry Pi as LTSP Thin Client, on the server you can run any distribution that can run LTSP server, it can be running CPU with x86/x86_64/whatever architecture as LTSP provides a way to run X session from the server via SSH tunnel. Biggest benefit of running LTSP is centralized user and data management, and clients can be of modest specification as all clients’ sessions are run on the server. This is a drawback as well, as the server needs to be powerful enough to handle many sessions. This is where LTSP Fat Client help, it allows running of users’ session on the client that are powerful enough, while users and data are stored on the central server allowing modest server to serve many more clients than it would otherwise. Raspberry Pi is not that capable to run full featured Linux desktop, Banana Pi with it’s dual core CPU and 1 GB RAM is just good enough to work as a Thin Client as well as a Fat Client. perfect for home, small office or school lab.

Piece of history, first ever Banana Pi LTSP terminal running openSUSE KIWI-LTSP

There is openSUSE 13.1 available for Banana Pi, it comes with XFCE desktop and many useful software pre-installed. Because I do not know how to create images for this hardware, that image is used as a base for Banana Terminal. Here are the steps to turn your Banana Pi into LTSP client.

* Download openSUSE-Bananapi-LTSP.tar.xz

* Extract the archive to get openSUSE-Bananapi-LTSP.img from it.

* Dump the openSUSE-Bananapi-LTSP.img on to a SD card, see step 5 here.

* Change settings according to your network configuration

In the second partition of SD card etc/lts.conf edit the SERVER variable to point to LTSP server in your network.

* Plug the SD card in your Banana Pi and boot it up, make sure the network is connected and LTSP server is set up properly. You have to create users on the server to use for login on client.

*  In case you have a bigger SD card, use yast2 disk(partitioner) on the client to expand the second partition. You can use yast’s package manager to install more software. The default password for root is bananapi, you may want to change that first thing after booting.

If you would like to run LTSP client on ARM7 hardware supported by openSUSE I would be happy to accept hardware donation to get it working

Have a lot of fun…

wget http://www.zq1.de/efika.img.xz # 83MB
xz -cd efika.img.xz | dd of=/dev/sdX bs=1M

with sdX being the device name of your SD-card (e.g. “mmcblk0” on the smarttop itself) with at least 1GB (actually 1024000000 bytes) of free space.

When inserted at boot, it should just boot up within 23 seconds and let you login as root with password “linux” on SSH, serial and with a USB-keyboard on HDMI. I spent some effort on putting as few packages as possible into it. Still, you have zypper to install packages and nano to edit files.

There is still a known hangup when you try to reboot. Workaround is: init 2 ; sleep 12 ; killall rsyslogd ; umount /boot/ ; mount -o remount,ro / ; reboot

As it still uses the original linux-2.6.31 kernel, it has another bug that also happens with pre-installed Ubuntu: sometimes (in ~40% of cases), boot stopps early, before graphics is initialized, when the last line on serial is “console handover: boot [ttymxc0] -> real [tty1]”. Try turning it off and on again.

This should allow you to have a whole lot of fun…

This week I finally got my genesi efika MX box. By default it has on old Ubuntu version installed on its internal IDE-attached 8GB SSD. It features 512 MB RAM and a 800 MHz ARMv7 CPU.

Using a HDMI-cable and an HDMI-DVI-Adaptor I got it connected to a monitor, plugged in a USB keyboard+mouse and it pretty much worked out of the box with WLAN,Ethernet,X11 (except for a bug that causes it to force you to change PW on every console login). How boring.

Having read about recent progress with openSUSE on ARM I wanted the excitement of running it on this box.

Michal’s image and script (now in alpha) was very helpful to get me started within 15 minutes.

If you have any (e.g. x86) openSUSE system running, there is another easy way to create a working ARM chroot-environment:

zypper ar http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:/Tools:/Unstable/openSUSE_12.1/openSUSE:Tools:Unstable.repo
zypper install qemu osc
osc co openSUSE:Factory:ARM bash
cd openSUSE:Factory:ARM/bash
edit bash.spec # add lines with your packages like BuildRequires: zypper,vim
osc build –no-verify –clean standard armv7l

If it worked well, /var/tmp/build-root/ should contain a chroot environment. E.g. you can run

file /var/tmp/build-root/bin/bash
/var/tmp/build-root/bin/bash: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.16, BuildID[sha1]=0xed9ca12f44c8591560d780cf807b6b6cf8ca8873, stripped

I partitioned my SD-card into two partitions. The first one for /boot with ext2 (needs only 150MB) and the second one for / to contain the rootfs. Be sure to have barrier=0 in your fstab for all ext[34] partitions so that writing to SD will not be as slow. The default U-Boot configuration first checks on the first partition of an SD-card for boot.scr which is a uImage-formatted version of a U-boot script. I copied all of Ubuntu’s /boot and /lib/modules/, slightly adapted their boot.script file to have root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 and uImage/uInitrd-2.6.31.14.26-efikamx as kernel/initrd, dropped “quiet splash” and added “console=ttymxc0,115200” to see more of the boot and ran a line from another helpful site:

mkimage -A arm -O linux -T script -C none -a 0 -e 0 -n “my boot script” -d boot.script boot.scr
echo mxc0:S12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -L 115200 ttymxc0 vt102 >> /etc/inittab # for serial console

However, this failed to boot. Using the serial debug console, I could see U-boot trying to load the boot.scr but it was thinking it was zero bytes for some strange reason. Re-creating my /boot partition as a raw copy of /dev/sda1 with my adaptions ontop finally gave me an SD-card that just boots openSUSE Factory on ARM with framebuffer console on HDMI/DVI.

Find more ARM-related info on our openSUSE ARM Portal