The release of the Linux distribution Armbian 24.5 has been published, providing a compact system environment for various single-board computers with processors based on ARM, RISC-V, and x86 architectures, including various models of Raspberry Pi, Odroid, Orange Pi, Banana Pi, Helios64, pine64, Nanopi, and Cubieboard based on 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 distributions, an SDK is provided. ZSWAP is used for swap. When accessing via SSH, there is an option for two-factor authentication. It includes the box64 emulator, allowing the execution of programs compiled for x86 architecture processors. Ready-to-use packages are offered for launching user environments based on KDE, GNOME, Budgie, Cinnamon, i3wm, Mate, Xfce, and Xmonad.
Release Features:
- The framework for creating repeatable Armbian builds based on Debian and Ubuntu has been updated. In Ubuntu-based builds, packages from Canonical, including snapd, are removed, and kernel versions 6.6 or 6.8, OpenZFS 2.2.4, deb packages with Chromium, VS Code, Thunderbird, Firefox, box86 and box64 emulators for Aarch64 systems are provided. Support for builds based on Ubuntu 24.04 has been added.
- Support has been added for Orange Pi 5 Pro, Radxa Zero 3, FriendlyElec CM3588 NAS, Radxa ROCK 5 ITX, Avaota-A1 (Allwinner T527), Sakura pi (Rockchip rk3308b), SK-AM68, qemu-uefi-x86 (for virtualized environments), Phytium Pi (4Gb), Cool PI CM5 EVB (RK3588) boards.
- Improved support for Khadas single-board computers, Radxa ROCK Pi S, Odroid C1, Rock 4C+, TQMa8MP (i.MX 8M Plus).
- Ubuntu 22.04-based builds have added KDE packages from the KDE Neon repository.
- For several boards (rockchip, rockchip64), the Linux kernel has been updated to version 6.8.
- The Linux kernel 6.1 has been provided for Banana Pi M7, Radxa Rock 5c, and Orange Pi 5 Pro boards.
- The command-line toolkit has added commands rewrite-uboot-patches, kernel-dtb (build only DTB (Device Tree)), inventory-boards (output list of boards in CSV format).
- Support for NVMe-over-TCP has been included for rk35xx, rk3588, rockchip64, uefi, and wsl.
- The armbian-firstlogin interface has been redesigned.
- A PPA repository with Chromium for aarch64 has been added.
- The command 'rsync --one-file-system' has been implemented in the armbian-install installer.
- DRBD has been enabled in kernel settings for Marvell Armada 370, 380, and XP SoCs.
- In the SDDM display manager, autologin is enabled, and a custom theme has been applied.
- Video capture via HDMI is enabled using the FFmpeg package.
Source: opennet.ru
