The NanoPi Zero 2 is based on the Rockchip RK3528A SoC with Quad-core ARM Cortex-A53, Mali-450 GPU (but missing video interface) and 1 to 2 GB of RAM. It has Gigabit Ethernet on board and can be extended via M2 PCIe2 with wifi. Unfortunately only one USB 2 A interface is available. Read more here Wiki

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I orderd two direct from the FriendlyElect website and receive them after 8 days.

Flashing the image to SD-card

The official images are in friendlyelec wiki (see sources). I choose Debian Bookworm. balenaEther does a good job flashing the image to an SD-card. After flashing the image consumes only 7 GB of the SD-card. With gparted i extend the patition to the maximum size.

Set date and time

! This is only required if public ntp servers are not available !

This is the case in my test setup, because the internet access is blocked completely at this point.

Set timezone:

pi@NanoPi-Zero2:~$ timedatectl list-timezones | grep Amsterdam
Europe/Amsterdam
sudo timedatectl set-timezone Europe/Amsterdam

Set date and time:

pi@NanoPi-Zero2:~$ sudo date --set 20:29:00
Sat Aug 16 20:29:00 CEST 2025

Set APT sources to debian.org

Update source file

Delete everything in ‘/etc/apt/sources.list’ and add the debian.org repo:

deb https://ftp.debian.org/debian/ bookworm contrib main non-free non-free-firmware
# deb-src https://ftp.debian.org/debian/ bookworm contrib main non-free non-free-firmware

deb https://ftp.debian.org/debian/ bookworm-updates contrib main non-free non-free-firmware
# deb-src https://ftp.debian.org/debian/ bookworm-updates contrib main non-free non-free-firmware

deb https://ftp.debian.org/debian/ bookworm-proposed-updates contrib main non-free non-free-firmware
# deb-src https://ftp.debian.org/debian/ bookworm-proposed-updates contrib main non-free non-free-firmware

deb https://ftp.debian.org/debian/ bookworm-backports contrib main non-free non-free-firmware
# deb-src https://ftp.debian.org/debian/ bookworm-backports contrib main non-free non-free-firmware

deb https://security.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security contrib main non-free non-free-firmware
# deb-src https://security.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security contrib main non-free non-free-firmware

Then update APT and upgrade the system

apt update && apt upgrade

Of cause internet is required now!

Testing

The OS comes already with a basic script to measure cpu frequency and temperature. Here on idle:

cpu idle

With Openssls speed function i ran a small test:

openssl speed

During the test cpu frequency and temperature rose up:

cpu stress

Sources

https://wiki.friendlyelec.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_Zero2 https://wiki.debian.org/DateTime