The recomended OS is Armbian, at its last release.

The releases available for the OrangePi PC are here www.armbian.com/orange-pi-pc/.

The image can be flashed on the SD using Balena Etcher, available on the site www.balena.io/etcher/.

Once flashed the SD card, power on the system (connected to a monitor and a keyboard). At first boot the system will request you to set the root password and to set a new user to use the OS.

Another choice can be Debian server, available from the OrangePi productor site www.orangepi.org/.

Search for the OrangePi PC section and found the right image www.orangepi.org/downloadresources/.

Once downloaded the image unzip it and flash the *.img file with some tool, for example Win32DiskImager on Windows.

The user needed to login is root and the password is orangepi.

After the first login change the default password and create a new user.

Any Os that is Ubuntu or Debian based is suitable.

First thing to do, on any OS, is to update everything that is upgradable with the commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

The created user need some permission in order to run OctoPrint.

sudo usermod -a -G tty USER
sudo usermod -a -G dialout USER
sudo adduser USER sudo

You need to install the last Python release, so it is needed to download the source and compile it.

1. Install all the dependencies needed.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install build-essential zlib1g-dev libncurses5-dev libgdbm-dev libnss3-dev libssl-dev libreadline-dev libffi-dev curl libbz2-dev

2. Download the sources from the official site (ftp mirror). Look for the last version and download the *.tar.xz package. Then extract it.

curl -O https://www.python.org/ftp/python/X.Y.Z/Python-X.Y.Z.tar.xz
tar -xf Python-X.Y.Z.tar.xz

3. Compile the sources.

cd Python-X.Y.Z
./configure --enable-optimizations
make -j $(nproc)

This will take a lot of time, something like 45 minutes.

4. Install the python binaries.

If you DON'T have python installed on your system you can use:

sudo make install

Instead, if you want to not overwrite your previous Python install, you can use:

sudo make altinstall

5. Now you can verify the installed version.

python3 --version

You need to install the last OctoPrint release. It is possible to install from pip manager. These steps are taken from the official OctoPrint community.

1. Install all the dependencies needed.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install python3-pip python3-dev python3-setuptools python3-venv git libyaml-dev build-essential
sudo apt install git libyaml-dev build-essential

2. Create the environment needed to install OctoPrint. Create a directory and a Python virtualenv.

cd ~
mkdir OctoPrint && cd OctoPrint
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

3. Upgrade pip manager.

pip install pip --upgrade

4. Install OctoPrint (--no-cache-dir is needed to ensure the downloading of the last OctoPrint version).

pip install --no-cache-dir octoprint

5. It is a good thing now to reboot your system.

sudo shutdown -r now

6. Test that everything is working.

OctoPrint/venv/bin/octoprint serve

And try to connect to http://<pi's IP>:5000. You should be greeted with the OctoPrint UI.

Setup the automatic startup (save OctoPrint as a system service).

1. Download the service script

wget https://github.com/OctoPrint/OctoPrint/raw/master/scripts/octoprint.service

2. Modify the script based on your environment

nano octoprint.service

and modify the User part with your USER and the ExecStart part with /home/USER/OctoPrint/venv/bin/octoprint

3. Move the script to its installation folder

sudo mv octoprint.service /etc/systemd/system/octoprint.service

4. Try if everything is correctly set up

sudo systemctl start octoprint.service

5. If everything works you can enable OctoPrint to start at boot

sudo systemctl enable octoprint.service