Please advice distro for opi zero

waylander · Published in 2018-7-17 01:55:23

Hello all,

i'm holding now opi zero and wondering what to use to get spi tft and wifi working

tried recomended distros for zero as well as dietpi and armbian, but some of them fail to enable spi at all (even when i enable it in configs), some fail to create fbtft_device, all of them not wanna connect to wifi.

can someone advice me a distro where i can easily (i'm not very fluent at reworking the whole distro) setup spi tft and wifi?

waylander · Published in 2018-7-18 00:07:05

wow! igorpec, thanks for detailed answer! i need to recheck your links!

igorpec · Published in 2018-7-17 22:26:20

Edited by igorpec at 2018-7-17 15:45

SPI 100% works on Armbian (since early days) - proof: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/ ... spi-lcd-touchscreen

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1483270805309190

Armbian is the only real Linux distribution with know-how and support for Orangepi Zero. Enabling SPI display is not exactly "plug and play" but also not hard. Elsewhere don't go much below BASH.
https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Allwinner_overlays/
https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Armbian-Config/

Wifi on Zero is crap and you don't need to jump many distros, which can only have the same or worse driver, to understand that. Background:
https://forum.armbian.com/search/?q=xradio
https://forum.armbian.com/search/?&q=xr819

waylander · Published in 2018-7-17 21:37:58

8bitbacon replied at 2018-7-17 06:13
If you are using an orange pi zero h2 this is a good screen for it because just uses the yellow rca ...

so you mean that setting up spi tft is a pain on opi?

unfortunately i've already bought a 3.5 tft.

did not understood the thing about your boot image, why is it disconnecting from ethernet? but sounds very cool that it is able to connect to wifi. was it hard to make wifi work on custom distro?

rollmeister · Published in 2018-7-21 00:42:10

Orange Pi One Plus or Orange Pi Lite2 is much better and probably 3 times faster. Small board too.

Armbian is the only choice for Orange Pi Zero, but Diet Pi is also sort of ok and uses less ram.

Werner · Published in 2018-7-21 19:44:44

Dietpi dropped their support for all OrangePi devices quite a while ago....

knoxwille · Published in 2018-8-15 18:36:44

Hello all, I have a website apache2, php7 powered. I'm using my s912 android tv-box which installed armbian, apache2, php7. it is working good but sometimes freezing and I cannot find why it happening. I'm suspecting, my tvbox is not fully supporting by armbian. That's why I've bought an OPI zero 512 board for move my server in it. I need light and effective system. I don't need desktop such as xfce etc. I don't need run kodi. wifi is also not needed. Which distro is best for it ?
Thank you for your suggestions.

igorpec · Published in 2018-8-21 01:56:43

Which distro is best for it ?

TV boxes are not officially supported by Armbian but Opi Zero is.

The best hardware for this job would be a slightly bigger board like Orange Pi PC+, which runs cooler, faster and more stable. It also has eMMC on board. With the same chip.

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