Orange Pi installation on SD card
 

I have an Orange Pi H3 (not Pro version) that I want to install Slackware on. While I find Stuart Winters installation instructions clear, there are some things I'm not sure I understand well enough to do the installation I want.
I have a 16GB SD card and would like to do the full install on it. I don't have the usb to serial cable described in the instructions, I do have a monitor that I used with my Raspberry Pi, so I also would like to do the installation without resorting to using ssh to do a headless install. (I have no experience with ssh) I also have a mini keyboard that uses a bluetooth adapter in usb port.
Some of the things I'm not sure of:
1. What size should I make the partitions (and what order and type) on the SD card?
2. Is it possible to make an installation from a thumb (usb) drive? And what files are needed?
3. Will my keyboard work during the install?

Any help and guidance would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Dan

I can prepare an installation miniroot (where all you need to do is one dd action, the only thing I can not check), if the exact version of the board is specified, it is better to link to it

look
https://linux-sunxi.org/Category:H3_Boards

This is the one I have. Orange Pi PC V1.3

Thanks for your response.

Dan

The initial issues you have are that:
1. The method of installing the OS requires that you use the micro SD card slot for the new version of U-Boot.
You should be able to overwrite the factory version on the eMMC, thereby freeing up the micro SD card slot, but I haven't tried. I don't normally recommend overwriting the factory u-boot unless necessary, which is why the boot-from-SD card method is chosen.
2. The u-boot version required does not support HDMI.
3. There is no HDMI support in the Kernel.

All in all, you need a serial cable. They're low priced and are a necessity when working with ARM devices.
The installation method doesn't suggest using SSH (although the documentation in 14.2 might do, but I changed it to use serial instead in -current).

If you were intending on using the OrangePi as a local machine to sit at and have a keyboard/monitor, you're out of luck at present due to the lack of HDMI support. I don't know when it's likely to appear in the Kernel.

@ drmozes Thank you also for your response. Apparently I haven't done enough research. I was under the impression that the version I have does not have/use eMMC. Which was why I wanted to boot from sd and also use partitions on the sd for full install since it has sufficient room. I also thought the latest kernel has HDMI support.

in my build kid I use patches from armbian to support hdmi

last build kernel kernel-sun8i-4.14.4

u-boot version 2018.01-rc1

You can try to boot from the card by writing the image there slack-current-arm-miniroot_05Nov17-4.14.4-orange_pi_plus_2e-build-20171208.img.7z

Ok, cool thanks. I'll have a look at the patches.

Is this image of the official packages or your own?

only official, additional packages are present in the image with xfce

additional packages are configured for a specific board and can be disabled packages-orange_pi_plus_2e.conf

Nope, you were right -- I forgot that not all of the Orange PI's have eMMC.
The latest stable kernels don't have HDMI support for the OrangePI, but I'll have a look at the patch set and see if I can apply them to 4.14 soon.

oh ok.

Is the HDMI support stable with the patch set you're keeping in your stash? Now that 4.14 is LTS, it'll probably be the kernel for Slackware 15's release, so I'm happy to apply a set of patches to it (since I assume that by the time 15 is released, those patches would already be upstream so that I wouldn't need to include them in the post-15 -current branch going forwards).

yes, HDMI is supported I tested on my Orange Pi Plus 2E board

log uart

Making progress here. System installed and booting up. Have output to hdmi monitor, and mini keyboard working. I am occasionally getting init: id "s1" and "s2" respawning to fast errors. Also the eth0 seems not to be working.

in /etc/inittab comment line:
#s1:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -L ttyS0 9600 vt100
#s2:12345:respawn:/sbin/agetty -L ttyS1 9600 vt100

in the board orange pi plus 2e 1000M Realtek RTL8211E
, and in the board orange pi pc 100M

need a log to understand what's wrong

try to load the 8189es module
modprobe -r 8189fs
modprobe 8189es

if everything is in order, change /etc/rc.d/rc.modules.local
/sbin/modprobe 8189fs
on
/sbin/modprobe 8189es

Ok thanks. inittab edited, that seems to have taken care of that error. Which log do I need to try to find?

ifconfig eth0 gives device not found error

after executing the command modprobe 8189es
see dmesg (which can be shown)