Banana Pi Pro Notes

At some point I bought a Banana Pi Pro. On October the 28th I showed up at AUG Torino and successfully booted a Banana with the precious help of Enkel.

This is a a step-by-step follow-up of this page from lemaker forum, with some minor n00b edits. I'm assuming you are running a Linux installations. I hope somebody is able to go throught the steps and create a easy-to-use step-by-step for iOS and Windows.

Prepare your MicroSD card for the Banana Pro

Hook up the SD in the PC.

• In a terminal, run the sudo fdisk -l command to check the MicroSD card node.

fdisk -l

This is what I have back from the terminal

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System

/dev/sdb1 8192 15646719 7819264 b W95 FAT32

• Run the sudo umount /dev/sdxx to unmount all the partitions of the MicroSD card. In my case:

sudo umount /dev/sdb1

• Run the sudo fdisk /dev/sdx command. Use the o command to delete all partition of MicroSD card and use the n command to add one new partition. Use the w command to save change. I typed:

sudo fdisk /dev/sdb

then typed o I have this in return Building a new DOS disklabel with disk identifier 0x0e37b43d. Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous content won't be recoverable.

Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by w(rite)

I'll go for an 'n'

Command (m for help): n Partition type: p primary (0 primary, 0 extended, 4 free) e extended Select (default p): Using default response p

then confrim twice with a double enter. Finalize the writing with 'w'

• go to the folder you've donwnloaded the images from the Banana Pi Pro site, in my case ~/BananaProImages in my home directory.

NOTE: I've previously unzipped the images from *.zip or *.tgz files using my desktop environment!

cd ./BananaProImages

• Run the sudo dd bs=4M if=[path]/[imagename] of=/dev/sdx command to write image file to Microsd card. Wait patiently to successfully complete writing. Please note that block size set to 4M will work most of the time, if not, please try 1M, although 1M will take considerably longer. You can use watch -n5 'sudo kill -USR1 $(pgrep ^dd)' in another terminal to have the progress printed out while you are waiting (it's going to take some time....

(terminal 1) sudo dd bs=4M if=/home/davide/BananaProImages/Lubuntu_For_BananaPro_v1412.img of=/dev/sdb

(terminal 2) watch -n5 'sudo kill -USR1 $(pgrep ^dd)'