Hi, I have just switched from rpi to banana pi M5, bored with failures on micro sd. I need some help: Managed to install Android on eMMC but for Ubuntu and Debian buster I am having problems : Both burned on micro SD card but when boot up M5, nothing is displayed on the screen. I can only access to M5 through SSH but with a very limited numbers of commands. Logged with SU. I used etcher to burn the cards. Is it normal to have a reduce set of commands recognized by these 2 OS ? Why there is nothing on the screen ? I may doing something wrong with these 2 Linux sd cards. Any advice can you give to have something on the screen and a full set of linux commands ? Thanks you for reading and your help.
The support of Sinovoip is really bad, they think that all their customers are developers and don’t give straight answers. If you want to use their distros of linux you must to know some things that they don’t say in their “support web site”.
- The Debian distro is a reduced server version, that’s why you must attach a keyboard to BPI-M5 and access trough console commands. The defaul user is root an password is bannanapi.
- When you are logged as root user, edit nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config and change “PermitRootLogin without-password” line to “PermitRootLogin yes”. Save an reboot
- Now you can loggin with root access from SSH. If you want use pi user, you need intall sudo service “apt-get install sudo”, edit “nano /etc/hosts” and add to end of file 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost 127.0.1.1 bananapi Save and reboot
Hi Jorge , thanks for your help.
I installed sudo as you advise, ok
Since the beginning my ssh login was ok but the main issue is still: no display at all on connected monitor / keyboard.
I am looking for a config file somewhere, not found yet.
My hdmi connection is ok since under Android all is fine.
ubuntu distro found on bpi site does not work at all.
Next step is to move debian buster from sd to eMMC.
Any working linux distro you could recommend ?
Learning banana pi the hard way 
In my opinion, the better way is boot with Armbian. The Ubuntu distro from Sinovoip for BPI-M5 works well too but depends what are you looking for with the SBC. If you want I can show you how to boot with Armbian because Sinovoip don’t give straight answers. By the way, I think the Android distro for BPI-M5 is the worst that I ever see.
If you want to force a specific resolution for the monitor, just edit boot.ini in the boot partition of BPI distros and change the line value from true to false:
setenv display_autodetect “false”
and select your specific resolution in the line:
setenv hdmimode “1080p60hz”
Hi, I was using a DVI monitor with a HDMI adapter, after editing the file it worked.
Next step is to make StartX working.
Have to dig again
Are you using debian distro for BPI-M5?
Using: Debian GNU/Linux 10 (buster) from “2021-01-21-debian-10-buster-bpi-m5-aarch64-sd-emmc.img”
You should try Armbian instead!
I am open to any advice, suggestion. Any good tuto you would recommend ? Thanks