Banana Pi is a real thing

Now that I've almost caught up with life after an extended stint on the West Coast, it's time to play.

Like Gunnar, I acquired a Banana Pi courtesy of LeMaker.

My GuruPlug (courtesy me) and my Excito B3 (courtesy the lovely people at Tor) are giving me a bit of trouble in different ways, so my intent is to decommission and give away the GuruPlug and Excito B3, leaving my DreamPlug and the Banana Pi to provide the services currently performed by the GuruPlug, Excito B3, and DreamPlug.

The Banana Pi is presently running Bananian on a 32G SDHC (Class 10) card. This is close to wheezy, and appears to have a mostly-sane default configuration, but I am not going to trust some random software downloaded off the Internet on my home network, so I need to be able to run Debian on it instead.

My preliminary belief is that the two main obstacles are Linux and U-Boot. Bananian 14.09 comes with Linux 3.4.90+ #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Sep 12 18:13:45 CEST 2014 armv7l GNU/Linux, whatever that is, and U-Boot SPL 2014.04-10694-g2ae8b32 (Sep 03 2014 - 20:53:14). I don't yet know what the status of mainline/Debian support is.

Someone gave me a wooden cigar box to use as a case, which is not working out quite as hoped. I also found that my hack to power a 3.5" SATA drive does not work, so I'll either need to hammer on that some more or resolve to use a 2.5" drive instead.

memory:

Mem:        993700      36632     957068          0       2248      11136
-/+ buffers/cache:      23248     970452
Swap:       524284       1336     522948

cpu:

Processor       : ARMv7 Processor rev 4 (v7l)
processor       : 0
BogoMIPS        : 1192.96

processor       : 1
BogoMIPS        : 1197.05

Features        : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt 
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant     : 0x0
CPU part        : 0xc07
CPU revision    : 4

Hardware        : sun7i
Revision        : 0000
Serial          : 03c32de75055484880485278165166c9