OrangePi/Installing

Mac

Get The Image

Your first task is to figure out which version of the Orange Pi you have, since there are about a dozen different versions.

Unfortunately, the operating system images that are linked to on the Orange Pi website (http://www.orangepi.org/downloadresources/) were either broken, missing, in Chinese, or on file-sharing sites that want to install software on your computer.

Alternatively you can download sketchy binaries from forums like this: http://www.orangepi.org/orangepibbsen/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=342

Orange Pi inventors obviously DNGAF about how you get your images.

Extract the Image

Extract the .xz file using Keka (on Mac)

I'm going to walk through the procedure using ubuntu-wily from here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B1hyW7T0dqn6fndnZTRhRm5BaW4zVDVyTGlGMWJES3Z1eXVDQzI5R1lnV21oRHFsWnVwSEU

Prepare SD Card

Plug in an SD card and run diskutil list to see the sd card:

/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk0
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS CRONUS                  999.3 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3

/dev/disk1 (internal, physical):
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *15.9 GB    disk1
   1:             Windows_FAT_32 NO NAME                 64.0 MB    disk1s1
   2:                      Linux                         7.3 GB     disk1s2

Unmount it:

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1

Write Image to SD Card

For the last step, you use dd (disk formatter utility) to write that image to your SD card:

$ time dd bs=1m if=orangepi-plus-debian-server-card-v0.9.img of=/dev/disk1
925+0 records in
925+0 records out
969932800 bytes transferred in 440.491904 secs (2201931 bytes/sec)

real	7m21.021s
user	0m0.008s
sys	0m17.441s

The above command took 7 minutes on my system.