Web server on OrangePi Zero running Armbian
Part I
The hardware
So I have a new side project. To build a web server to run WordPress on it. What’s the excitement on that you may ask. Well I wanted to build a server with the lowest consumption possible, tiny footprint (both physical and from OS point of view). I started searching for a small developer board. I already own a RaspberryPI but I wanted something else. There are numerous of boards out there. Do not get me wrong RaspberryPI is the pioneer and they opened the road but I wanted something else and why not cheaper. I stumbled upon OrangePi. A lot of boards there. I chose OrangePi Zero board. A tiny little thing that is an open-source single-board computer. It can run Android 4.4, Ubuntu, Debian. It uses the AllWinner H2 SoC, and has 512MB DDR3 SDRAM. It is only 48 mm × 46mm. It is impressive that this little thing has more power and more memory than my first web server in the ’90s ( a Pentium MMX 166 if I remember correctly, with 256 MB RAM). The company provides a very good support through their website. There are a lot of resources there and a good community. So I got the board from AliExpress for around 8$. Not bad at all. The OrangePi Zero so far ticks most of my boxes. Cheap, small, low power consumption and open source. Functionalities can be added by extension board. I bought the NAS extension board which adds an mSATA and a SATA connection among other things. The goal is to boot and run the system from an mSATA disk. Next stop what to run on it.
The OS
OrangePI offers a lot of distributions to choose from and download.Each of them are customised to the board. This includes Android, Ubuntu, Debian, Raspbian and others. I tried couple of them but since I heard of Armbian project I wanted to try it. Armbian is “Lightweight Debian Jessie or Ubuntu Xenial based Linux distribution”. The project supports a lot of boards not only OrangePI obviously. There are detailed instructions to burn the image on an SD. It is pretty straight forward. It took maybe thirty minutes to install to SD, boot up and config my OrangePI. Its name is portokali which means orange in Greek. You can check some statistics here.
Part II
Fine Tune
Coming soon