Which image for original Banana Pi (M1?)

Hi all.

I have an old Banana Pi which was the original version (probably “M1”) which I use for reading my central heating and solar station, doing some home automation stuff, nagios etc. This one has a very slow SD card which is limiting speed quite a bit.

I use Banana Pi because it has an actually usable serial port, not like Raspberry pi which does not really have one besides the one used for serial console.

Now I cannot find an image that works. Raspbian does not work and the only bananian Image I found is really old. I do not remember which version I used for the current installation but the repos are raspbian jessie so I think I used bananian to install and upgraded to raspbian later.

writing an bananian image to sd card and copying files from the old installation does not work either. Can somebody point me in the right direction on how to install a new (current) OS or clone the old OS? The new card I have is unfortunately smaller than the old one so dd’ing does not work.

Is there a working image with reasonable current OS that works with the BPi-M1?

You should check out Armbian: https://www.armbian.com/bananapi It is really good, well maintained, with new kernels and current Ubuntu / Debian software.

About the old system, you could shrink the file system and partition before you create a DD image. This way it will fit on the smaller SD card.