The release of the Linux distribution Armbian 23.02 has been published, providing a compact system environment for various single-board computers based on ARM processors, including various models of Raspberry Pi, Odroid, Orange Pi, Banana Pi, Helios64, pine64, Nanopi, and Cubieboard featuring Allwinner, Amlogic, Actionsemi, Freescale/NXP, Marvell Armada, Rockchip, Radxa, and Samsung Exynos processors.
The builds are formed using package bases from Debian and Ubuntu, but the environment is completely reconstructed using its own build system with optimizations for reducing size, increasing performance, and applying additional security mechanisms. For example, the /var/log partition is mounted using zram and stored in RAM in a compressed form with data flushed to the storage once a day or upon shutdown. The /tmp partition is mounted using tmpfs.
The project supports over 30 variants of Linux kernel builds for different ARM and ARM64 platforms. To simplify the creation of custom system images, packages, and distribution editions, an SDK is provided. ZSWAP is used for swapping. When connecting via SSH, an option for two-factor authentication is available. The distribution includes the box64 emulator, allowing the execution of programs built for x86 architecture. ZFS can be used as the file system. Ready-made packages for running user environments based on KDE, GNOME, Budgie, Cinnamon, i3-wm, Mate, Xfce, and Xmonad are offered.
Release Features:
- Support for the Rockchip RK3588 platform has been added, along with official support for Radxa Rock 5 and Orange Pi 5 boards based on this platform.
- Support for Orange Pi R1 Plus, Raspberry Pi 3, JetHub D1/D1+, Rockchip64, Nanopi R2S, Banana Pi M5, and Banana Pi M2PRO boards has been improved.
- Packages have been synchronized with Debian and Ubuntu repositories. Experimental builds based on Debian 12 and Ubuntu 23.04 have been added.
- Linux kernel packages have been updated to version 6.1. The AUFS file system is enabled by default in kernel 6.1.
- The build tooling has been completely redesigned, which will be used to compile the next release. The new tooling features a simplified logging system, the cessation of using external compilers, a revamped caching system, and support for building on all architectures and OS, including official support for WSL2 environments.
- Automated image building has been ensured, supported by the community.
- Support for various game controllers has been added.
- Support for Waydroid, a package for running Android on Linux distributions, has been added.
- The sound setup script has been improved.
- Transition to the 882xbu driver for wireless USB adapters based on RTL8812BU and RTL8822BU chips has been implemented.
- The gnome-disk-utility package has been added to builds with graphical environments.
- The nfs-common package has been added to all builds except the minimal one.
- The wpasupplicant package has been added to builds based on Debian 12.
Source: opennet.ru
