LeMaker Guitar Quick Start

Illustration for LeMaker Guitar Quick Start documentation

What You Will Need

Before powering on your LeMaker Guitar for the first time, gather the following items:

  • Power supply – A quality 5 V / 2 A micro-USB adapter. Under-powered supplies can cause random reboots and filesystem corruption, so avoid charging cables without a dedicated wall adapter.
  • MicroSD card – Class 10 or UHS-I rated, minimum 8 GB capacity. A 16 GB or 32 GB card provides comfortable room for packages and logs.
  • Ethernet cable – For the initial network connection. Wi-Fi can be configured later if your image includes a supported USB dongle driver.
  • HDMI cable and display (optional) – Needed only if you intend to use a graphical desktop or need console access without SSH.
  • A computer – Running Windows, macOS, or Linux to flash the microSD card image.

Step 1 – Download an Image

Visit the LeMaker downloads page at lemaker.org and select the Guitar section. Several Linux distributions are available, including Debian, Ubuntu, and Android. Choose the image that best fits your project. Each download is provided as a compressed archive containing a raw disk image.

Step 2 – Verify the Checksum

After downloading, compare the SHA-256 checksum of the file against the value published on the downloads page. On Linux or macOS run sha256sum filename.img.gz; on Windows use certutil -hashfile filename.img.gz SHA256. If the checksums do not match, re-download the file before proceeding.

Step 3 – Flash the MicroSD Card

The recommended flashing tool is balenaEtcher, which works on all major operating systems and handles decompression automatically. Open Etcher, select the downloaded image file, choose your microSD card as the target, and click Flash. The process typically takes two to five minutes depending on card speed. Advanced users may prefer dd on Linux: sudo dd if=guitar.img of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress.

Step 4 – Insert the Card and Power On

Slide the freshly flashed microSD card into the Guitar’s card slot with the contacts facing downward. Connect an Ethernet cable to the RJ-45 port and, optionally, plug in an HDMI display. Finally, connect the micro-USB power cable. The board’s green power LED should illuminate immediately, and the blue activity LED will begin blinking as the kernel boots.

Step 5 – Find the Board’s IP Address

If you do not have an HDMI display attached, you need to discover the Guitar’s IP address on your local network. Check your router’s DHCP lease table for a new entry, or run an nmap ping scan from another machine: nmap -sn 192.168.1.0/24. The Guitar will typically identify itself with a hostname such as guitar or lemaker.

Step 6 – Log In via SSH

Open a terminal and connect with SSH: ssh root@192.168.1.x. Default credentials vary by image—common combinations include root / lemaker, linaro / linaro, or ubuntu / ubuntu. Consult the release notes bundled with your download for the exact username and password.

Step 7 – Secure and Update the System

Immediately after your first login, change the default password with passwd. Then bring the package index up to date and install any available security patches:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y

Consider creating a non-root user account and disabling root SSH login for improved security.

Post-Boot Checks

Verify that all four Cortex-A9 cores are online with lscpu and confirm available storage with df -h. Check the kernel version using uname -a. If the root partition does not span the full microSD card, expand it with resize2fs or the distribution’s built-in first-boot expansion script. For further configuration, see the LeMaker Guitar wiki page and the LeMaker product pages.

Author: LeMaker Documentation Team
Last updated: 2026-02-10