The release of the Linux distribution Armbian 22.11 has been published, providing a compact system environment for various single-board computers based on ARM processors, including different 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 different Linux kernel build variants for various ARM and ARM64 platforms. To facilitate the creation of custom system images, packages, and editions of the distribution, an SDK is provided. ZSWAP is used for swap. When logging in via SSH, there is an option to use two-factor authentication. The package includes the box64 emulator, allowing the execution of programs compiled for x86 architecture processors. ZFS is used as the file system. Ready-made packages are offered to run user environments based on KDE, GNOME, Budgie, Cinnamon, i3-wm, Mate, Xfce, and Xmonad.
Release Features:
- Support has been added for the Bananapi M5, Odroid M1, and Rockpi 4C plus boards.
- Support for the Rockpi S board has been improved.
- Packages have been synchronized with the Debian 11 repositories. The update of the Linux kernel to the latest branches is temporarily suspended as part of the effort to increase stability.
- The creation of weekly updated community-supported builds has begun.
- Ultra-compact builds optimized for deploying individual applications have been added.
- Support for building systems based on the RISC-V architecture with UEFI has been added.
Additionally, it is worth noting the development of a specialized distribution Orange Pi OS (Arch) for Orange Pi boards, based on the Arch Linux package base. The user environments available include GNOME, KDE, and Xfce. It includes typical desktop system applications, including KODI, LibreOffice, Inkscape, Thunderbird, VLC, VS Code, and Neochat. The distribution will come with a graphical installer and a setup program that allows users to configure settings such as time zone, language, keyboard layout, and Wi-Fi, as well as add accounts upon first boot.
The new distribution will complement the previously offered Orange Pi OS (Droid) builds based on Android, Orange Pi OS (OH) based on OpenHarmony, as well as officially generated images based on Ubuntu, Debian, and Manjaro.
Source: opennet.ru
