After few weeks of delay PINE 64 arrived. Here are first impressions and tips on how you can start exploring the device.

The first place which is worth visiting is PINE 64 Wiki. It’s not too extensive so far but you can find the basic information about hardware and setup guides, there. I tried couple of images from Pine A64 Software Release but since I have the 2GB RAM version I’m out of luck for most of them.

Thanks to Open Build Service there are two frequently updated openSUSE Tumbleweed images available.

If you prefer Debian I would suggest to try Debian Jessie Images from lenny.raposo. It’s quite easy to install them. First you download longsleep’s BSP linux image and copy it onto the Micro SD card.

root@host:~# xzcat simpleimage-pine64-latest.img.xz > /dev/sdX

After that delete the second partition, create it again on the same place, extend it to the end of the Micro SD card and create ext4 filesystem. After that just extract one of the root filesystems available on the forum.

root@debianpine64:~# cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor	: AArch64 Processor rev 4 (aarch64)
processor	: 0
processor	: 1
processor	: 2
processor	: 3
Features	: fp asimd aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32
CPU implementer	: 0x41
CPU architecture: AArch64
CPU variant	: 0x0
CPU part	: 0xd03
CPU revision	: 4

Hardware	: sun50iw1p1

root@debianpine64:~# uname -a
Linux debianpine64 3.10.65-4-pine64-longsleep #16 SMP PREEMPT Sun Apr 3 10:56:40 CEST 2016 aarch64 GNU/Linux

root@debianpine64:~# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1988        108       1880          8          6         34
-/+ buffers/cache:         68       1920
Swap:            0          0          0