Armbian | How To use with Rock Pi 4

What is Armbian ?

Armbian is a base operating system platform for single board computers that other projects can trust to build upon.

• Lightweight Debian or Ubuntu based distribution specialized for ARM developing boards.
• Each system is compiled, assembled and optimized by Armbian Build Tools
• It has powerful build and software development tools to make custom builds
• A vibrant community.

Common features

• Debian or Ubuntu based. Compiled from scratch,
• Install images are reduced to actual data size and resized at first boot,
• Root password is 1234. You are forced to change this password and create a normal user at first login,
• Ethernet adapter with DHCP and SSH server ready on default port (22)
• Wireless adapter with DHCP ready if present but disabled. You can use armbian-config to connect to your router or create AP
• NAND, SATA, eMMC and USB install script is included (nand-sata-install)
• Upgrades are done via standard apt-get upgrade method
• Login script shows: board name with large text, distribution base, kernel version, system load, up time, memory usage, IP address, CPU temp, drive temp, ambient temp from Temper if exits, SD card usage, battery conditions and number of updates to install.

Performance tweaks

• /var/log is mounted as compressed device (zram, lzo), log2ram service saves logs to disk daily and on shutdown
• half of memory is alocatted/extended for/with compressed swap
• /tmp is mounted as tmpfs (optional compressed)
• browser profile memory caching
• optimized IO scheduler. (check /etc/init.d/armhwinfo)
• journal data writeback enabled. (/etc/fstab)
• commit=600 to flush data to the disk every 10 minutes (/etc/fstab)
• optimized CPU frequency scaling with interactive governor (/etc/init.d/cpufrequtils)
  • 480-1010Mhz @Allwinner A10/A20
  • 480-1260Mhz @Allwinner H3
  • 392-996Mhz @Freescale imx
  • 600-2000Mhz @Exynos & S905
• eth0 interrupts are using dedicated core (Allwinner based boards)

Supported boards

Check download page for recently supported list.

How To use Armbian with Rock Pi 4

Check download page for recently released OS images.

Preparation Make sure you have a good & reliable SD card and a proper power supply. Archives can be uncompressed with 7-Zip on Windows, Keka on OS X and 7z on Linux (apt-get install p7zip-full). RAW images can be written with Etcher (all OS). Boot Insert the SD card into the slot, connect a cable to your network if possible or a display and power your board. (First) boot (with DHCP) takes up to 35 seconds with a class 10 SD Card. Login Log in as: root  Password: 1234. Then you are prompted to change this password (US-Keyboard setting). When done, you are asked to create a normal user-account for your everyday tasks.

Recommended: Setup Docker on Rock Pi 4

Visit this : ROCK Pi 4 : Overview | Installation

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