pi64 is an experimental 64-bit OS for the Raspberry Pi 3. It is based on Debian Stretch and backed by a 4.11 Linux kernel.
The latest images are always available in the releases section.
There are 2 versions : lite and desktop. The desktop version is based on LXDE.
Once downloaded, you can follow these instructions for writing the image to your SD card.
During first boot the installation process will continue for a few minutes, then the Raspberry Pi will reboot and you'll be ready to go.
The default user is pi and its password raspberry, it has passwordless root privileges escalation through sudo.
Once logged in, you might want to run sudo pi64-config in order to get assisted with your setup!
On the lite version, SSH is enabled by default.
You can upgrade the Linux Kernel using this command :
sudo pi64-update
This would make sure the latest release from https://github.com/bamarni/pi64-kernel is installed.
Do not use apt-get to install or update a kernel, kernel modules or kernel headers as this is not supported.
You should be able to run 32-bit programs out of the box as long as they're statically linked. You can check this with the file command :
$ file ./my-executable
./my-executable: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, ARM, EABI5 version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, not stripped
If your 32-bit program is shown as dynamically linked instead, you should still be able to run it by enabling multiarch and installing program's required libraries :
sudo dpkg --add-architecture armhf
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libc6:armhf
Here we're only installing the GNU C Library, but your program might need additional libraries.
On the lite version and for convenience, SSH is installed and enabled by default. This allows you to plug your Raspberry Pi to your home router and get started without the need of an extra monitor / keyboard. If you want to remove it, just run :
sudo apt-get autoremove --purge -y ssh avahi-daemon
You can just drop a file called setup on the boot partition. When the installer notices that file at /boot/setup, it will automatically execute it using bash when installation finishes.
This can be useful if you want to distribute your own image based on pi64.