I've not yet tried installing debian with the installer per se yet, but I did finally manage to get it to start. It turns out the installer dosen't output to the HDMI port but you need to use the serial port on the banana pi. And there's 3 pins on the machine to connect to - it needs a serial to USB converter (a PL2303 cable, not a 9 pin serial port!) to work. Note that the USB OTG port dosen't work for this. Here's what I did;
- Grab a spare SD card
- Put it into a linux machine and find out what device name it gets (become root and then dmesg; on my machine it was /dev/sdc)
- Wipe the card with
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dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=1M count=4
- Download two files
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wget https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/armhf/daily/netboot/SD-card-images/firmware.BananaPi.img.gz
wget https://d-i.debian.org/daily-images/armhf/daily/netboot/SD-card-images/partition.img.gz
- Write the two files;
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zcat firmware.BananaPi.img.gz partition.img.gz > /dev/sdc
- Wait, type sync and remove the card and then put into banana pi.
- Connect up the PL2303 cable to the banana pi. On my PL2303 cable -- the black wire is ground, white is recieve (RX) and red=send (TX). I think this needs to be switched round when connecting to the banana pi - looking at the J12 connector use the last 3 pins (not the 4 pin connector below J12). Getting the RX and TX pins round the wrong way or misconnecting the ground will result in nothing happening(!).
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J12 . . . [BLACK][WHITE][RED]
1 . . . .
- Become root on a linux box and run
I did that and I now can see the debian installer using the screen program. BTW, I would upload a picture but I just got an error from the forum, "Sorry, the board attachment quota has been reached."
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Update:*After* the debian installer had completed (over the serial port) and after the banana pi restarted the banana pi did output a command line to HDMI.
ljones