Mini-Tutorial to get a linux Desktop GUI working on Pine64+

[speedro86]

Hey everyone, I decided to make this small mini tutorial for newbs with little if no experience with linux, embedded computers, or raspberry pi, though the more experience you the better.

I am fairly new to linux, and the pine64, I have some experience with rpi mostly with noobs/raspbian, and building a wifibroadcast setup from supplied images. I also have a fair amount of experience with Arduino, and flight controllers for multirotors. I know that most should be able to get this working without problems

I have tried almost every image available in this forum, and the wiki; Android, Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, Armbian, and simple linux CLI, but no matter which i used I could never get any of them to get all my peripherals(i needed) to work together, if HDMI worked(most always did, aswell as keyboard) but ethernet would never work despite configuring to the t each time. Well last night, I am glad to say that I finally got a build that had my internet working through ethernet, and I ultimately was able to install a Desktop GUI that is working very well! So I am going to detail what I did for you all so that you too can get use from your pine64 if you havent been able to.

The image you want to download is the most recent openSUSE from Terra854, which uses a kernal from Lonsleep his linux Kernel updated to 3.10.104-1-pine64-longsleep-103. The link for the dl is http://pine64suse.weebly.com/download.html I used the HDMI image as thats what im using, but download which one suits your needs. Once finished extract the img, then use Etcher or WinDiskImager to burn it to your sdcard, I recommend at least a 16gb Class 10. Once you've got your sdcard ready, put it into your Pine64+(I wouldnt recommend using the 512mb version), plug in what things your going to use like HDMI, Keyboard, Ethernet, USB, etc, now your ready to power up.

Boot happens fairly quickly, and the login is directly after the verbose output from the boot process. The username is: pine64 and Password is: pine64linux, once logged in run 

Code:

sudo ifconfig

Which will spit out your network info, make sure your network is up by running

Code:

sudo ping www.pine64.org

This should give you a response from the website, also there will be a very easy to notice message stating that your network is UP.
Now you need to change to the root directory I ran

Code:

sudo -s

This will ask for the root password which is pine64root, you will know you're in root from the text color change to red indicating you're in the root level. From here run:

Code:

resize_rootfs.sh

This lets you use the full sd card capacity.

Now this is a linux distro, however there are minor differences in commands, and programs that install software compared to ubuntu, or debian. 
The Desktop GUI is called KDE, and the install program is called zypper, which was included in the image, so now you need to  install KDE by running this

Code:

zypper install -t pattern kde kde_plasma

This will take a while, like a couple hours, I let it run over night. Once it has finished, reboot your pine64, and on the next boot, yu will now have a GUI desktop!!!!!! If you run into problems during the first install, as I did try to reboot. If you do not get any type of monitor output, then power off your pine, remove the sdcard, and put it into your card reader on a windows machine, you will be able to fix the disk without removing anything. Now you are ready to try again, this time the install should work fine.
There you go a smooth running Desktop on your Pine64+!!!!!
Any questions, please ask as I will try my best to help.