v0.2 — Analog audio (headphone jack) + CLI/headless image

Ready-to-flash Debian 13 (Trixie) images for the Orange Pi 4A (Allwinner T527), running our mainline Linux 6.18.38 kernel.

Two images to choose from

• Desktop — aurealnix-opi4a-debian13-v0.2.img.xz (~926 MB): KDE Plasma on Wayland, accelerated Mali-G57 (Panfrost). The full experience.
• CLI / headless — aurealnix-opi4a-debian13-cli-v0.2.img.xz (~146 MB): no desktop, ~740 MB installed, boots in seconds. Server/headless use, or a light base to build on. SSH + NetworkManager (nmtui), and — unique to this board — working analog audio (the 3.5 mm jack) via PipeWire, running headless. Local HDMI text console works too. NTP is on by default (the board has no RTC battery).

Both share the same kernel and hardware support below.

New in v0.2 — analog audio 🎧

• The 3.5 mm headphone jack now works, with jack detection / hotplug. The Allwinner A523 analog codec has no mainline driver, so this ships a custom one (sun55i-a523-codec) ported faithfully from the vendor BSP and validated on real hardware. (Line-out and mic capture are wired in the driver but not bench-tested yet — the board has no onboard speaker/mic.)
• Audio output follows what's connected — plug headphones into the jack and sound moves to them; unplug and it returns to HDMI. If both are present the jack wins. Bluetooth headsets are respected (the auto-switch only reacts to the wired jack). Handled by a small user service, aureal-audio-autoswitch; you can override in the tray or disable it with systemctl --user disable --now aureal-audio-autoswitch.

See the CHANGELOG for the full history.

What works (confirmed on hardware)

• HDMI KMS display (720p / 1080p, native HPD/hotplug)
• Mali-G57 GPU accelerated via Panfrost (KDE Plasma on Wayland)
• Analog audio (3.5 mm headphone jack + jack detect) and 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.sh gift 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. 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-v0.2.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-v0.2.img.xz
63b0019423d2a320aaa5fe58df97db68823b353a30510ffa863fec475904e0ba

sha256  aurealnix-opi4a-debian13-cli-v0.2.img.xz
235fa10ffb2105a72a5a0c05d1eb4ea28bf586f8200dd4fcf830064929b84204

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 ☕