Install Armbian OS - hakehardware/comet GitHub Wiki
Introduction
Armbian is a great choice, and it is the OS I pre-install on the COMETs. However, before the COMET I had very little experience installing an OS on an ARM processor. It was a little intimidating, so I decided to build out this guide to help anyone that wants to install Armbian on a CM3588 (or as I call them: COMETs).
One quick note I want to make is that FriendlyElec has a guide on their wiki to install some OSes but this option did not give me a warm and fuzzy feeling that installing Armbian did. About the time their guide asked me to download something from a Google drive I noped out of there real quick.
So after a day of browsing around the FriendlyElec forums, I saw a post regarding Armbian. As you might surmise from the name, it is Debian for ARM. They offer support for A LOT of really cool boards. They have a few tiers of support, and unfortunately the CM3588 is considered “Community Support” which basically means it is not official supported by the Armbian project. So fair warning, proceed with caution, this may or may not work, and may or may not continue to work. But spoiler alert - it worked great for me!
Getting Started
To get started you will need at least a compatible SD card. Check out the “How to prepare an SD card” section on the Armbian site for more details. But, if you get a modern SanDisk micro SD card, which are only a few bucks now, you should be fine. You will also need a micro SD to USB adapter. I personally have two that seem to work well, the links earn me a commission if you buy them, but I use these all the time to transfer videos from drones which also use micro SD cards.
You will want to reset the card using the SD Card Formatter. I would do this EVEN if it is a brand new card. You can download the Formatter directly from the SD Association. Run the application, and it should detect your SD card. If your SD card is not detected (like mine was) try and format it in windows first with the diskpart tool as shown below.
OPTIONAL: Wipe SD Card
If you run into the same thing, open up the terminal in Windows type
diskpart
Then, list out the disks with
list disk
Now find the disk which represents your SD Card, mine is a 16GB card but shows as 14GB in diskpart
Select the disk based on the Disk number in the left most column
select disk 5
WARNING: This next step will erase the data, make sure you are erasing the right disk. The data will be GONE.
Now clean the disk
clean
Then create a primary partition to get the disk to show up in Windows explorer
create partition primary
You should now be able to select the disk with the SD Card Formatter
I leave all the settings as default, and click “Format”. It should not take long.
Download Armbian
With the SD card ready, get the latest Armbian images by navigating to the CM3588 NAS Kit page.
At the time of this guide, there are three options available: Desktop, Minimal/IOT, and Dedicated Applications (OpenMediaVault). If you want a GUI then go for the Desktop. I will be using this headless, so the minimal/IOT image is what I downloaded.
Write OS to SD Card
Now that you have the image downloaded, you need to write it to the SD card. To write the image, you need to download the USBImager tool. This is a really simple tool
In the first input, you will want to select the image you just downloaded. Then select the SD card, then click “Write”
This step can take a bit of time as the SD cards typically do not have outstanding write speed. For me, it took about 1.5 minutes.
Grab a cup of coffee and once it has finished remove the SD card and pop it into the CM3588.
Booting to the SD Card
Turn on the CM3588 and it should automatically boot to the SD card. Since I used the CLI version, I was able to just SSH into Armbian and use the default user/pass which is root:1234. You will be prompted to reset this thankfully. If you chose the desktop version, you will likely be greeted with something similar. You will be guided through the initial setup, which goes something like this:
Once the setup is done, you need to update your packages with:
apt update && apt upgrade
Once this is finished you can install Armbian on to the eMMC, which will erase everything on it, and write the OS to it so you can boot directly to Armbian via the eMMC. To do this via the CLI, run the following command
armbian-install
Then select the option
2. Boot from eMMC - system on eMMC
The system will be installed and you will be given the option to Power Off the system, choose that option and remove the SD card once everything is installed.
Booting from eMMC
Booting from eMMC
Now power the system back on and it should boot from the eMMC and you can log in using the username and password you created during the setup. At this point you should be good to go!
If you can, make sure you support the Armbian project, this is a really great option for the CM3588 if you do not plan to run the default OpenMediaVault.