Debian 0.3 Image
I received a working Debian Image with my Nezha, which is great but its only provenance was that it came with the board and was built on 1st June, just before the boards were shipped. On 10th June Wu Caesar, the main man, provided an "official" release Debian 0.3 which was built on 3rd June.
I struggled to burn it to an SD card as it wasn't in a standard image format. The Telegram forum was vital to resolve this. The readme.txt said that you need a utility "PhoenixSuit" used by Allwinner to burn the image. However, try as I might, I couldn't get PhoenixSuit 3.1.0 to work. A Telegram post on 1st July provided a link to RVboards downloads; the RVboards SBC is identical to the Nezha. The download site contained PhoenixCard 4.2.5 which is a much newer version of the image burning software. I successfully burned Debian 0.3 images to both 64GB and 16GB SDcards. After using PhoenixCard you can't reformat SD cards using Windows but it may be possible to fix with the PhoenixCard "restore" option.
The image has networking configured and boots into an LXDE GUI on the HDMI port. Although slower than other Linux SBCs it was great to see it is a proper product. GCC is ready for use so we are off to a great start. In the following minor setup tasks I was most pleased that configuration activities were totally normal.
Debian 0.3 configuration
I want to run the system headless, so I set up a static address. Systemd networking is used so there was a slightly different procedure, setting up a file /etc/systemd/network/lan0.network containing the static address details. Once the static address is in place I can use SSH access and copy over an ssh-id file for autologin.
At first I wasn't sure if / how the console is configured as we dont have a boot config.txt file. The board comes with a USBTTL cable and I found details for connections in the advert for the rvboard on AliExpress! Once the serial cable is connected and started at 19200 baud we see the console startup which has much useful detail in it.
I could now change the run level using systemctl from graphical.target to multi-user.target. Startup and shutdown are now significantly faster.
Debian 0.5 image
On 2nd July Pierce Andjelkovic kindly provided a Debian 0.5 image on Telegram. Again I had a tortuous trial and error experience installing it. The instructions are in Chinese but Google translate does a great job in decoding the chinese character sequences.
The image is copied to an SD card using dd then adjusted using gdisk to delete the 6th and last partition. I struggled to get gdisk to delete the partition on my 16GB disk and eventually found I could do it using my Nezha board, running Debian 0.3. I also found that simply burning the image to a 32GB SD card is a lot easier, it doesn't need the partition to be deleted.
The same configuration tasks were completed for static IP (although I needed to edit the traditional /etc/network/interfaces) and runlevel.
Debian 0.5 software
I wanted to use a samba client to access shares on other systems but cifs is apparently not included so I could not mount devices on other systems. However I could install samba and configure local shares so that other systems can copy files on/off.
Having GCC native compilation available is wonderful so I quickly tested the hello world C program. More importantly and exciting is that I can do native compilation of risc-v assembly programs. Not knowing what risc-v instructions are or how to program isn't a problem. With Google as my friend I was able to successfully compile and run a risc-v hello world program, amazing 😁
To learn assembly I purchased a book RISC-V Assembly Language by Anthony Dos Reis which was mentioned on Telegram forum. It appears to provive a nice simple introduction so I am looking forward to it.
