Hey everyone, I’m looking to replace my router with a NanoPi R6S but want to do everything myself from Alpine Linux.
I’ve been doing a lot of research and it seems that the chipset and hardware are supported as of Linux 6.3, but looking at Alpine’s ARM documentation makes installation sound a bit more advanced than I’m used to (specifically, the partition layout and U-Boot are confusing to me).
Has anyone gone this route?
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Why not OpenWRT?
I’m simply interested in running Alpine Linux on it.
I looked at the nanopi r4s and the r6s when I replaced my router. I did consider doing it all myself but in the end settled on the r4s running opwenwrt, I think it took all of 5mins from download to working system. The benefit been the openwrt image has uboot included so only one image need writing, also web interface out of the box
Don’t think of it as an installation, it’s writing image files to disk. I prefer using gparted or disks when working with partitions. Then use dd for the actual writing as I can quite easily see I’ve got the right partition from gparted/disks. Got that wrong a couple of times 😅
I’m familiar with writing images, but I’d be crafting it myself since there’s no official one from Alpine Linux for the specific SoC.
No onboard eMMC? Are you able to run this from a read-only SD? That’s kinda intriguing, I figure eMMC could be one of the weakest links on an SBC.
The r4s doesn’t have eMMC where as the r6s does. I just left the SD card as rw, I’m not too concerned about failure, I’m hoping for some wear leveling built in, if not SD cards are cheap. I should probably clone the disk and have a cold spare SD card.
Storage wise I’m using 17. 63MiB of 29.38GiB, I think I may have bought a too big SD card Ram usage is around 88MiB of 3.87GiB I have got a couple of more things to set up like wireguard but as it stands I’m glad I went the openwrt route over a full server install
Yeah OpenWRT is incredibly slim. I remember doing a double-take looking at their install page because the memory requirements are so low. I’m used to seeing numbers in GB and they’re saying they can provide full functionality in 64 MB.
I suppose what I could do is download a supported image (like OpenWRT) then get the image layout details from that in order to build my own image.
I know I’m going about it the hard way but it’s something I don’t mind learning.
Any special requirement for Alpine, or just “because I want to”?
It’s exactly that, I’m simply interested in running Alpine Linux on it.
