I received today my first Banana Pi boards. The quality looks decent. That means that it is not anything that would pass any QC in Finland. Some of the components and connectors were not straightly aligned and there were quite a lot cold solder joints in the board but it should work.
I ordered also enclosures so installed one of them and then for software. I choosed Raspbian as os to give an first try, so went downloading that. From www.lemaker.org and under Resources / Downloads choosed Raspbian_For_BananaPi_v3.1 dated 12:th Aug 2014.
Setting up SD Card
As I’m on mac, then once downloaded
md5 Raspbian_For_BananaPi_v3.1.tgz MD5 (Raspbian_For_BananaPi_v3.1.tgz) = 22a0b5c23de914f273423b3caa4292f tar -xvf Raspbian_For_BananaPi_v3.1.tgz
to verify the the md5sum matches the same as on web page and to unpack the image. After that I did following to install it on new empty sd card.
diskutil list ... /dev/disk1 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: FDisk_partition_scheme *3.9 GB disk1 1: DOS_FAT_32 NO NAME 3.9 GB disk1s1 diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1 sudo dd bs=65536 if=Raspbian_For_BananaPi_v3_1.img of=/dev/disk1
Notice that dd command takes quite a long time to execute. For me it took 45 minutes (maybe my sd card is really slow). After that I ejected the SD card safely and plugged all the cables to banana pi and booted it with the SD.
Later I did the same for 8GB SD from different wendor with
sudo dd bs=4194304 if=Raspbian_For_BananaPi_v3_1.img of=/dev/disk1
and that took only 38 minutes so it probably is depending on the card speed.
First Nothing happened, kind off. Red powerled was lit, and green was flashing but nothing on screen. Then after some surfing found out that it could be hdmi thing and after changing hdmi cable (which though worked on raspberry pi) to another, I got screen. After some initial playing around.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install iceweasel #this is firefox sudo apt-get install iceweasel browser-plugin-gnash #this is flash sudo bpi-config Expand filesystem Internationalization options locale fi_FI.UTF-8 default fi_FI.UTF-8 timezone EU/Helsinki keyboard Generic 105 PC - Other - Finnish - Finnish - Default - no compose - no Advanced Options Hostname banan1 ssh enable Finnish - Reboot Yes
After that when it boots back you should have decent Banana Pi testing environment at your hands.
Final thoughts of Banana Pi first impressions
Quality decent, some unexpected issues with HDMI cable compability, but relatively smooth process to get started.