this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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How hard is the initial setup for this board? Is it a simple flash an sdcard and power it, or does it require manual kernel crosscompiling of some specific unmaintained github fork? I know Debian is working on offcial riscv support but I haven't looked at how far its come along in a bit.
I think he said in an earlier video that the Lichee 4A comes with Debian pre-installed.
I own its predecessor, the Lichee RV. It recommends flashing one of their images to a flash card for that one, but I ended up compiling my own bootloader, kernel, etc just because I wanted to, for fun.
Pre-installed to the emmc I assume? That's nice for the out of the box experience, but knowing the nature of SBCs I'd like to be able to at least get a copy of the image so I can burn a new boot device when something goes a little sideways.
Since you've worked with them before, are these the correct images? https://wiki.sipeed.com/hardware/en/lichee/th1520/lpi4a/3_images.html I did a little bit of digging from the link in the description of the video, if so then I'd gladly get a couple of these to play with. Dual Ethernet, and even PoE is awesome at this price point.
You can use dd on another machine to make a bitwise copy of the card before you first use it.
Yeah, the one's off sipeed's site should work. I've never used it though, I basically built my own, tiny LFS image for it. Also, keep in mind that if you get a Lichee RV, it will be significantly less powerful than the Lichee 4A. It's based on the single-core Allwinner D1 CPU and only has 512MB of memory. It's a fun little board though!
Edit: Just wanted to clarify: I have no experience with the 4A, only the RV model. I wish I did though. It looks pretty cool!