Ready-to-flash Debian 13 (Trixie) + KDE Plasma (Wayland) image for the Orange Pi 4A (Allwinner T527), running our mainline Linux 6.18.38 kernel with accelerated Mali-G57 (Panfrost).
This is a beta. It works well and has been tested on real hardware, but it's early — feedback and bug reports welcome.
What works (confirmed on hardware)
- HDMI KMS display (720p / 1080p, native HPD/hotplug)
- Mali-G57 GPU accelerated via Panfrost (KDE Plasma on Wayland)
- HDMI audio
- Gigabit ethernet + WiFi (AP6256) + Bluetooth
- The 4 rear USB 2.0 ports (HID + storage, hotplug)
- CPU cpufreq/DVFS + GPU devfreq, both with thermal throttling (runs cool: ~47 °C idle, ~60 °C under load, no heatsink)
Notes
- Login:
user/user. SSH is enabled — change the password immediately (passwd). - First boot is longer: it resizes the filesystem and regenerates SSH host keys. Give it a minute; don't pull the power.
- From microSD, a full KDE desktop takes about a minute to come up (SD is slow). eMMC/NVMe will be faster once supported.
- 2 GB board — recommended: swap is off by default, but there's a
sudo ./add-swapfile.shgift script in the home folder. On the 2 GB variant I strongly recommend running it — it creates a 512 MB swap file that makes a real difference under heavy web use (YouTube alone can push 300 MB+ into swap on a 2 GB board). Without it you may hit out-of-memory with a busy browser. The 4 GB board doesn't need it. - 4 GB variant: should work (RAM auto-detected), but I only have the 2 GB — testers welcome.
- No hardware video decode (no VPU driver in mainline yet); software decode works.
- Full details and troubleshooting in the FAQ.
Flashing
Write the .img.xz to a microSD card (8 GB+) with balenaEtcher, or:
xz -dc aurealnix-opi4a-debian13-v0.1.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress
Verify your download against the checksum below before flashing.
Checksum
sha256 aurealnix-opi4a-debian13-v0.1.img.xz
f2a4aaac50e9eab0e1efa684a2e13c2575ad2219c29015c3f9455d43c52c32c8
The kernel patches, defconfig and board DTS are in this repo. This is spare-time reverse-engineering work — if it helped, coffees are welcome at ko-fi.com/aurealnix ☕