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A20 OLinuXino Lime2

Olimex's A20 OLinuXino Lime2 is a fully Open Source Hardware (OSHW) single board computer. This means that the designer is actively helping people using the platform for their own designs, and supports them in adding hardware functionality and production advice. This is a part of freedom that is often overlooked, but very much aligned with the FreedomBox goals. It uses the Allwinner A20 Dual Core ARM processor.

Important: Read general advice about hardware before building a FreedomBox with this single board computer.

Similar Hardware

The following similar hardware will also work well with FreedomBox.

• Olimex's A20 OLinuXino Lime2 4GB. This hardware merely has extra 4GB NAND storage that is not used by FreedomBox.

Download

FreedomBox SD card images are available for this device. Follow the instructions on the download page to create a FreedomBox SD card and boot the device. These SD card images are meant for use with the on-board SD card slot and won't work when used with a separate SD card reader connected via USB.

An alternative to downloading these images is to install Debian on the device and then install FreedomBox on it.

Availability

• Price: 45 EUR (A20 OLinuXino Lime2)
• Price: 55 EUR (A20 OLinuXino Lime2 4GB)

• Olimex Store

Hardware

• Open Source Hardware (OSHW): Yes

• CPU: Allwinner A20, ARM Cortex-A7 @ 1GHz dual-core
• RAM: 1 GiB DDR3
• Storage: 4 GB NAND flash built-in (only on 4GB model), 1x microSD slot
• Architecture: armhf
• Ethernet: 10/100/1000, RJ45

• WiFi: None, use a USB WiFi device

• SATA: 1x port

Non-Free Status

• Non-free blobs required: No

• WiFi: Not available

• Boot Firmware: BROM (GPLV2+)

Known Issues

• Revision G2 (written on the board): The current stable Debian11/bullseye image (from 2021-08-27) will not start an Ethernet connection! This means you can not continue with the installation process at first. This can be fixed by following this description after you copied the image to your SD card. Or you Download and use the Pioneer Edition image to fix the issue. It contains a slightly modified u-boot.

• Revision G2 hardware has also poor performance when transmitting Ethernet data in Gigabit mode for older FreedomBox releases. The procedure above or for rev. C fixes this.

• Revision C hardware has poor performance when receiving Ethernet data in Gigabit mode. To workaround the problem, you can switch to 100 Mbps mode instead of Gigabit mode. Login to your FreedomBox as root (or plugin the SD card into another computer) and create the file /etc/NetworkManager/dispatcher.d/20-fix-ethernet-problem with the following contents:

  set -e  # Exit with code on error
  
  IFACE="$1"
  ACTION="$2"
  
  if [[ "$IFACE" != "eth0" ]]; then
      exit 0
  fi
  
  case ${ACTION} in
      up)
          logger "Setting up $IFACE in 100Mbps mode"
          mii-tool eth0 -A 100BaseTx-FD
          ;;
      *)
          ;;
  esac

• Revision K hardware is not working properly.

CategoryFreedomBox