The Armbian 22.11 Linux distribution has been released, providing a compact system environment for various ARM-based single board computers, including various models of Raspberry Pi, Odroid, Orange Pi, Banana Pi, Helios64, pine64, Nanopi and Cubieboard based on Allwinner, Amlogic, Actionsemi processors , Freescale / NXP, Marvell Armada, Rockchip, Radxa and Samsung Exynos.
The Debian and Ubuntu package bases are used to form the builds, but the environment is completely rebuilt using its own build system with the inclusion of optimizations to reduce the size, increase performance and apply additional protection mechanisms. For example, the /var/log partition is mounted using zram and stored in RAM in compressed form, flushed to the drive once a day or at shutdown. The /tmp partition is mounted using tmpfs.
The project supports more than 30 Linux kernel builds for various ARM and ARM64 platforms. An SDK is provided to make it easy to create your own system images, packages, and distribution editions. ZSWAP is used for swap. SSH login provides an option to use two-factor authentication. The box64 emulator is included, allowing you to run programs built for processors based on the x86 architecture. ZFS is used as the file system. Ready-made packages are offered for running custom environments based on KDE, GNOME, Budgie, Cinnamon, i3-wm, Mate, Xfce and Xmonad.
Features of the release:
- Added support for Bananapi M5, Odroid M1 and Rockpi 4C plus boards.
- Improved support for Rockpi S boards.
- The packages are in sync with the Debian 11 repositories. Upgrading the Linux kernel to fresh branches by default is on hold as part of stability work.
- The formation of weekly updated assemblies supported by the community has begun.
- Added ultra-compact builds optimized for deploying standalone programs.
- Added build support for systems based on RISC-V architecture with UEFI.
Additionally, we can note the development of a specialized distribution kit Orange Pi OS (Arch) for Orange Pi boards, based on the Arch Linux package base. GNOME, KDE and Xfce are offered as user environments. Includes typical desktop applications including KODI, LibreOffice, Inkscape, Thunderbird, VLC, VS Code and Neochat. The distribution will come with a graphical installer and an initial setup program that allows you to set up settings such as time zone, language, keyboard layout and Wi-Fi on the first run, as well as add accounts.
The new distribution will complement the previously offered Orange Pi builds of Orange Pi OS (Droid) based on Android and Orange Pi OS (OH) based on OpenHarmony, as well as officially generated images based on Ubuntu, Debian and Manjaro.
Source: opennet.ru