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?

  • @barsquidEnglish
    1•6 months ago

    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.

    • @TheoriginalthonEnglish
      2•6 months ago

      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

      • @barsquidEnglish
        1•6 months ago

        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.