See PART 1 for the RV2.. The RV I didn’t do a lot with – as I was having such a fun time with the local AI on the RV2 – and my friend Antonio asked me if he could have the RV. This is his story….
Everything below is from Antonio:
I installed the latest Debian server edition, downloading from the link on the bottom of the product page here. I wasn’t interested in the desktop edition at all as the speed results on the more powerful RV2 were already not that great, and the plan in this case is to use this little board as a NAS to share movies to my firestick…
I decompressed the 7z file and flashed using Balena Etcher directly onto an NVME drive (a 2TB Lexar model) using an external usbc box. The manual you’ll find in the previous link shows a different path: flashing on a microsd, booting from that, then downloading the image from the booted up system from microsd, decompress and flash onto the nvme using “dd“, a linux tool which copies sector by sector, similar to what Balena Etcher does.
So, i just booted from the already flashed NVME driver directly, plugging in just an HDMI cable to see if this worked or not, power, and Ethernet cable…
Once the system booted, it expanded to cover the fully 2TB disk space and reported the ip address.
I then removed the HDMI cable and left only usbc and Ethernet, went to my pc, and logged in via ssh on that ip, user root, password orangepi
Then the mess began – but first – a screenshot… this is going to get a bit wordy…
root@orangepirv:~# apt update Hit:1 https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian-ports/20221225T084846Z unstable InRelease Err:1 https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian-ports/20221225T084846Z unstable InRelease The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY E852514F5DF312F6 Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Reading state information... Done All packages are up to date. W: An error occurred during the signature verification. The repository is not updated and the previous index files will be used. GPG error: https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian-ports/20221225T084846Z unstable InRelease: The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY E852514F5DF312F6 W: Failed to fetch https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian-ports/20221225T084846Z/dists/unstable/InRelease The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY E852514F5DF312F6 W: Some index files failed to download. They have been ignored, or old ones used instead.
You should know that riscv64 cpu arch is not yet officially supported by Debian, so you need to use some “snapshot archives”, like the one you see above, reporting errors because the signing gpg key used to “verify packages are legit” is missing… after various testing and trials, I found it was not just missing, but even expired (from 2022…)
Updated snapshots archives are all listed here, but not all of them contain riscv64 arch binaries, so it was a trial and error process again: https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian-ports/
All valid debian signing keys are here: https://ftp-master.debian.org/keys.html
I tried lots of them, while trying the various snapshots, starting from the most recent and going back… this is what to do, for each of them… LOTS of “doesn’t support architecture ‘riscv64′” etc…
apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys E852514F5DF312F6 apt install --reinstall debian-archive-keyring apt install --reinstall debian-ports-archive-keyring apt update
What finally worked was this one (note the snapshot folder, 2 years old), by disabling the gpg signature check, as I’d already wasted enough time…
echo 'Acquire::AllowInsecureRepositories "true";' | sudo tee /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/98allow-unsigned echo 'APT::Get::AllowUnauthenticated "true";' | sudo tee /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/98allow-unsigned-unauth sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list > /dev/null <<'EOF' deb [trusted=yes] https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian-ports/20230724T141507Z unstable main EOF sudo rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* sudo apt update
Note: it still complained about expired gpg key, but now – who cares…
W: GPG error: https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian-ports/20230724T141507Z unstable InRelease: The following signatures were invalid: EXPKEYSIG B523E5F3FC4E5F2C Debian Ports Archive Automatic Signing Key (2023)EXPKEYSIG 8D69674688B6CB36 Debian Ports Archive Automatic Signing Key (2024)
This confirmed every time it asked to update or keep some config files, and rebooted… while rebooting, I noted the RV was VERY hot, both sides… I’ll need to add a heatsink both on the cpu and the ssd, and at least a fan on top of the cpu one… the cpu reached 83c while apt was running, down to 63c after reboot and a bit of settlement… you can open a separated ssh session with this command to keep track of temperatures: “orangepimonitor -m” (for scrolling output, -M for single line results)
orangepi-config had no samba in the 3rd party software menu, so i went straight linux:
apt install -y samba mkdir -p /opt/share chmod 777 /opt/share
then added this block to the end of /etc/samba/smb.conf to have that share folder just created exported as \opirv by samba:
[opirv] comment = Shared Medias path = /opt/share browseable = yes read only = no guest ok = yes
and checked this was set up in the global block (I had to add the 2nd line, while the 1st was already OK)
[global] map to guest = Bad User guest account = nobody
I finally restarted samba: systemctl restart samba
I went from pc to \\opirvIP and got a block from Windows 11…
solved by Pressing Win + R, then typing: gpedit.msc
Navigate to:
Computer Configuration
→ Administrative Templates
→ Network
→ Lanman Workstation
Double click on: “Enable insecure guest logons”
Set it to “enabled”, and apply.
To apply the setting without reboot, run from an administrative cmd:
gpupdate /force
Now going to \\opirvIP was OK, i saw my “opirv” folder, tried to copy a large file in it, I achieved 65MB/s… not bad..
For me, this is enough for this board, I need a suitable box and proper heat management… pointing a usb fan directly to it brought the temperature to 53°
Oh, as the update process installed and enabled iperf3 server too, i tested that: full gigabit, so samba wastes 1/3 of the bandwidth…
I stripped away the lcd flat cable connector between the hdmi socket and the audio one, so as to have more room for the larger heatsink I could fit in there… the goal being to avoid any active cooling solution, no fan, no noise… so i covered with kapton tape the parts that could have caused a short circuit (just in case), included the 40 pin Pi connector, and added 3 layers of heat pads to raise the cpu and near memory chip height above the taller components near the cpu, and put a decent copper heatsink above all of these…
Below, I added 3 layers of thicker heat pads between the pcb and the nvme to avoid it bending, added 1 heat pad above the nvme and a large aluminium heatsink above the ssd…
Finally, I secured 1st this large ssd heatsink with 2 zip ties, then the copper cpu one with another thicker tie, trimmed them, and job done…
Easy on to the eyes? Hell no. Works? Hell yes. Earlier, the cpu started at 65c and raised almost to 80c while copying files… and without noisy fans, now it starts at 40c, and stabilizes at 50c under the light load this sbc will be used: sharing movies and TV series via samba to a couple of Android boxes and Firesticks, so no more need to move around usb dongles. The speed is between 60 and 65Mb/s, enough for the job IMHO.
So – that’s Antonio’s Orange Pi RV experience – if you have any questions – please get in touch with him via the comments.
