Setting up Banana Pi - a guide
To use your Banana Pi, you first need to set up an operating system and connect to the Pi.
Banana Pi: Install the operating system
You need at least one SD card with 4 GB.
- First download the Win32 Disk Manager and install it.
- There are different operating systems that you can use. You can find a selection here.
- Since the images are compressed with a Linux variant, you need 7-Zip to unzip the image.
- Now unzip the image. You will receive a .tar file, which you can also decompress.
- After opening the Win32 disk imager, select your image. Make sure that your SD card is really selected as "Device".
- Now you can insert the SD card into your Banana Pi and start it.
Banana Pi: First setup
Connect your Banana Pi to your network using a LAN cable so that you can configure it. In the following, Raspbian is used as the operating system.
- First you need to find out the IP address of your Banana Pi. Since it logs on to DHCP as "Lemaker" by default, just open the CMD prompt and use the "ping lemaker" command.
- You can now access your Pi via Putty. To do this, open Putty and type in the IP address of your Pi under "Host Name (or IP address)".
- You can log in in a window that opens. Use "bananapi" as your user name and password.
- With "sudo raspi-config" you open the Raspbian options manager. Now you can change your password, change the language or adjust the host name in the advanced options.
- You should definitely expand the file system. This means that larger cards (over 4 GB) are also recognized and used as these.
- Restart your Banana Pi, you can further customize it.
If you choose Raspbian as the operating system, you can use your Banana Pi in the same way as a Rasperry Pi. You can connect it to the WiFi or set up your Pi as an FTP server.