The installer was also tested to work on NanoPC T3. The NanoPC T3 board contains emmc card and the installation may be done also on emmc.
Download installation image from releases page. For Debian it should be debian-installer-nanopi.img file, for Ubuntu - ubuntu-installer-nanopi.img one. Get an empty micro SD card. This may be the target card on which the Debian or Ubuntu will be installed, but this is not required. Write the installation image directly to the SD card. For example, on Linux system it may be done by run the following command as root:
cat debian-installer-nanopi.img >/dev/sdX
Where sdX is the SD card device. Insert the SD card into SD card slot on NanoPi. Plug monitor, keyboard and mouse. Power on the device. Wait until installer boots (this may take some time).
At this time the SD card is unused and may be replaced with the target SD. At least 8 GB card is recommended, but it highly depends on desired desktop environment. For installation without GUI 2 GB is enough.
Follow the installation instructions.
Note that the installer is robust and allows to install Debian or Ubuntu not only on SD card. But for NanoPi there are some limitations concerning /boot directory, namely:
- the /boot directory must be located on SD card; it does not matter whether it is mounted or not mounted as a separate partition, but in all cases it must be located on SD card (on NanoPC T3 it may be also on emmc).
- it cannot be on LVM
- filesystem type may be only ext2/ext3/ext4
These limitations are caused by u-boot restrictions. On the other hand, it is possible to locate root partition on e.g. some USB hard drive.
The installer needs of course Internet connection. It downloads plenty of packets from repository. It is possible to connect using either wifi or ethernet. Both methods are working.
The installer warns at some point about missing support for software RAID devices. The warning may be simply ignored :)
The installer is a minimal adaptation of generic Debian installer. Upstream installer was developed for use on normal PC. Hence it leads the installation in the way suitable for normal PC, which may be not optimal for NanoPi device. Namely:
-
Partition manager demands some swap space. It is a good idea for the NanoPi, but not on SD card. Swap space on SD card is a bad idea in general, because SD card has limited lifetime. Set up swap space on SD card may significantly decrease life time of the SD.
-
The installer proposes installation of various desktop environments, including GNOME and KDE. But the device has limited amount of memory and such heavy environments may not work properly. Lightweight desktop environments like LXDE or Xfce should work fine. But beware also on web browsers like firefox or Google chrome (chromium). They may eat hundreds megabytes of memory.
The installer is not perfect. Sometimes some step may fail. For example, I encountered a problem with software installation step. It failed because the installer pulled software over a hour and the repository has changed in the meantime - some packages were gone. It was enough to repeat the step - the installer has updated their information about repository contents and has finished successfully.
When some installation step fails, please press Ctrl+Alt+F4. This key combination redirects to page with installation logs. They may provide more accurate information about the failure reason. Sometimes a problem may appear because of problems with hardware, for example broken SD card. The installation logs should provide accurate information.
The s5p6818 SOC contains VPU (Video Processing Unit) hardware dedicated for encoding/decoding video files. The SOC contains also an overlay graphics layer (plane) dedicated for render graphics in formats suitable for playing video files (yuv420, yuv422, yuv444). The hardware allows to play video with little CPU utilization.
I have created nano-video program, a simple video player for NanoPi M3 which uses the hardware. Please try.
Below are some details regarding the hardware usage.
The video hardware is available in Linux as video4linux devices:
- VPU encoder as /dev/video14
- VPU decoder as /dev/video15
- Overlay video layer as /dev/video1
Unfortunately most of the video sofware does not give any opportunity to utilize these devices. However GStreamer gives this opportunity. The gstreamer1.0-plugins-good package contains video4linux plugins whose allow to play the video using VPU decoder and overlay video layer. It is needed also h264parse plugin from gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad. When pulseaudio package is installed, also gstreamer1.0-pulseaudio package installation is recommended.
Below are some usage examples of these devices using gst-launch-1.0 utility. A most simple usage, using playbin plugin:
gst-launch-1.0 playbin uri=file://$HOME/Videos/01_Blessed.mp4 video-sink=v4l2sink
The above command may be also launched without GUI started. It has one disadvantage, namely it consumes some CPU because decoded image is copied between VPU and video sink.
A hand-made pipeline for h264 video stream (avc1) with yuv420p image format:
gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location=$HOME/Videos/01_Blessed.mp4 ! qtdemux name=demux demux.video_0 ! h264parse ! v4l2video15dec capture-io-mode=dmabuf-import ! v4l2sink device=/dev/video1 overlay-top=300 overlay-left=600 overlay-width=1280 overlay-height=720 io-mode=dmabuf demux.audio_0 ! queue ! avdec_aac ! pulsesink
The io-mode parameters are causing that decoded video is not copied, so the CPU usage is very little. It is also possible to play video without v4l2video15dec plugin. In this case video is decoded by software. CPU usage is much higher, although still much less than when video is decoded fully by software:
gst-launch-1.0 filesrc location=$HOME/Videos/01_Blessed.mp4 ! qtdemux name=demux demux.video_0 ! queue ! avdec_h264 ! videoconvert ! v4l2sink device=/dev/video1 overlay-top=180 overlay-left=330 overlay-width=1280 overlay-height=720 demux.audio_0 ! queue ! avdec_aac ! pulsesink
The installation image may be built only on target Debian or Ubuntu system, i.e. on arm64 device running Debian for Debain installer, Ubuntu for Ubuntu one. To properly build the image, some base images must be collected in base subdirectory, namely:
-
upstream debian-installer package source. It may be obtained by invoke:
apt-get source debian-installer -
ap6212-firmware package files: deb and udeb
-
bl1 boot image, bl1-nanopi.bin
-
u-boot binary image, u-boot.bin
-
Debian package with kernel - it may be taken from NanoPi kernel release files or built from the kernel sources as bindeb-pkg target.
-
nanopi-bluetooth debian package
The directory contents may look like below:
$ ll debian-installer-nanopi-m3/base
total 7356
-rw-r--r-- 1 rafal rafal 227396 Dec 6 23:16 ap6212-firmware_2_all.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 rafal rafal 226398 Dec 6 23:16 ap6212-firmware-di_2_all.udeb
-rwxr-xr-x 1 rafal rafal 28784 Dec 6 23:16 bl1-nanopi.bin
drwxrwxr-x 5 rafal rafal 4096 Oct 12 21:45 debian-installer-20101020ubuntu523
-rw-r--r-- 1 rafal rafal 6632158 Dec 6 23:16 linux-image-4.14.4+_4.14.4+-1_arm64.deb
-rw-r--r-- 1 rafal rafal 33858 Dec 6 23:16 nanopi-bluetooth_3_arm64.deb
-rwxr-xr-x 1 rafal rafal 361744 Dec 6 23:16 u-boot.bin
It is also necessary to install tools needed to build the installer:
sudo apt-get build-dep debian-installer
Finally, run make in main directory.