Bootable SD card

Identify the card
First identify the device of the card and export it as $card.  card=/dev/sdX

Cleaning
To be on safe side erase contents of your SD Card first.  dd if=/dev/zero of=${card} bs=1024 seek=544 count=128

Bootloader
 dd if=spl/sunxi-spl.bin of=$card bs=1024 seek=8 dd if=u-boot.img of=$card bs=1024 seek=40

If using u-boot v2013.07 or earlier then the procedure is slightly different

 dd if=spl/sunxi-spl.bin of=$card bs=1024 seek=8 dd if=u-boot.bin of=$card bs=1024 seek=32

Partitioning
 dd if=/dev/zero of=$card bs=1M count=1 sfdisk -R $card cat < mount ${card}1 /mnt/ cp linux-sunxi/arch/arm/boot/uImage /mnt/ cp sunxi-boards/sys_config/a10/script.bin /mnt/ umount /mnt/

Rootfs
Here this depends on what distribution you want to install.

Using rootfs tarball
 mount ${card}2 /mnt/ tar -C /mnt/ -xjpf my-chosen-rootfs.tar.bz2 umount /mnt

The recommended rootfs is ubuntu-alip.

Linaro rootfs
Linaro offers a set of different root filesystems, but all the links are broken there. Linaro folk remove older ubuntu based images, and then cannot even maintain their own wiki. If they themselves cannot even deal with the stupidity of their own policy, why should we secondary users be able to do so? It's almost as if they do not want people to use their rootfs.

In any case, you can get the actual rootfs tarballs here. ALIP is a minimal LXDE based desktop environment which might me useful to most allwinner users.

Ubuntu Precise Userspace
Normally you would install it using a rootfs tarball as described in the previous section, but debootstraping it is also an option.

 mount ${card}2 /mnt/ debootstrap --arch=armhf --variant=buildd --foreign precise /mnt/ cp /usr/bin/qemu-arm-static /mnt/usr/bin/ chroot /mnt /debootstrap/debootstrap --second-stage exit cat < etc/apt/sources.list deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ precise main universe deb-src http://ports.ubuntu.com/ precise main universe deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ precise-security main universe deb-src http://ports.ubuntu.com/ precise-security main universe deb http://ports.ubuntu.com/ precise-updates main universe deb-src http://ports.ubuntu.com/ precise-updates main universe EOT cat <> etc/fstab none	/tmp	tmpfs	defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0 /dev/mmcblk0p1	/boot	vfat defaults 0 0 EOT umount /mnt

External

 * Additional info on sunxi's flavor of U-Boot