I've been unable to locate the answer otherwise in the forums or with Google. I apologize in advance if this has been answered elsewhere.

I've just received my OPi Zero and loaded 'Armbian_5.24_Orangepizero_Debian_jessie_3.4.113' onto the SD card. I was expecting to operate headless and connect via Ethernet initially. WiFi comes later.

The OPi seems to start up okay (blinnking LED). My router DHCP screen shows assigning an IP address to 'orangepizero', so linux is getting that far.

I get no response when I try to access the OPi using SSH, so I'm stuck at this point. The Ethernet LED's are lit, but that doesn't really mean anything.

I'm using a 5V/2A power supply that works well with Raspberry Pi's (RPi 3.0) and I've tried multiple SD cards. The results are the same.

Any thoughts on how to turn on SSH, pick a more appropriate distro, or otherwise access the OPi?

How are others making this work?

tia,
Bruce Raymond

My OPi Zero also doesn't get an IP address from my router,Accurate to say that sometime it get IP ,sometime it down,maybe the lan is broken.

[SOLVED]

I dunno what happened. I generated a response and hit Post and the post disappeared.

Short version: The problem was my stupidity - I used a cheap SD card and just assumed it was okay because it worked with a Raspberry Pi. Once I substituted a higher-quality SD card everything worked okay.

shooreg, thanks again for your help - much appreciated.

Hi shooreg. Thanks for the info. I've tried the debug serial port and don't seem to be getting anything out of it during boot up. I've monitored both RXD and TXD with my scope just in case I got them mixed up and I'm not seeing any activity.

I've tried using Armbian 5.24 for OrangePiZero, and Lubuntu 1404 for dolphin-p2. The Armbian load goes out and gets an IP address. I can ping the Zero, but not connect to it with SSH. The Lubuntu load doesn't get an IP address from the DHCP server (my router).

I've used Lubuntu running on my PC (through VirtualBox) and used it to look at system.log and dmesg.log. I didn't find any SSH activity (I'm sorta out of my element here). I'm seeing some file corruption, so I'm rethinking the power supply. Still digging, but I think I've got a path.

Thanks for your help. I'll keep you posted.

Maybe sshd is not enabled in systemd (not installed??)in your distro.
-you can get a console of a running OPI over a debug UART (need usb-ttl dongle)
-you can mount your sd card to other linux machine with sdcard reader and modify config files manualy