Armbian is a Linux distribution based on Debian and Ubuntu for ARM development boards.
It was recently announced release of new version of Armbian 23.11 codenamed "Topi", a version in which it is highlighted that the levels of Armbian's support policy have been modified, support for new devices, releases a new login manager, among other things.
For those who don't know about Armbian, they should know that this is a distribution that excels at offering a compact system environment for multiple computers single plate ARM-based
Main new features of Armbian 23.11 “Topi”
One of the most important changes that is presented with this release of Armbian 23.11 "Topi" is in the support policy levels, which have been modified to reflect greater reliability and support for boards of directors. This change It translates into three levels of support, which are:
- Standard Support: where boards of directors will receive complete and consistent support.
- Preparation support: It is designed for boards that are in support validation.
- Community maintained: The support of the plates depends on the community in general for its maintenance.
In particular, Armbian 23.11 adds the following boards to the standard support category: Khadas VIM1S, Khadas VIM4, Texas Instruments TDA4VM and Xiaomi Pad 5 Pro.
Other notable changes are in the kernel and desktop, since in this release it is presented support for Linux kernel 6.6 LTS, Updated kernel configurations for compatibility with Waydroid and Redroid and bluetooth support for VIM1S/VIM4 boards.
For the Armbian 23.11 “Topi” desktop part unify display managers in all desktop environments, in addition to implementing a new login manager default from LightDM to SDDM for KDE Plasma and GDM for GNOME.
In addition to this, Armbian 23.11 also has several bug fixes to improve support for Banana Pi CM4, experimental support for UEFI/EDK2.
On the other hand, Armbian 23.11 presents daily image builds based on Ubuntu 23.10 (Mantic Minotaur) and Debian Testing (Trixie).
Of the other changes that stand out:
- Fixed issues in display managers.
- Automated testing has been expanded to check the quality of builds.
- Fixed hardware acceleration issues with Mali G-31 and fixed HDMI output issues on rk3328
- Resolved network configuration challenges on Debian variants and firmware updates for Orangepi R1+ LTS
- Improved system stability and user experience by fixing specific kernel and device related bugs.
- Added support for new boards
Finally if you are interested in knowing a little more about it about this new release, you can check the details In the following link.
Download Armbian
For those who are interested in being able to download the new version of this distribution for their device, they can do it directly from the page from where we can find a list of all the ARM-based computers on which the distribution runs.
Regarding the tool you can use to record the image of the system, you can make use of Etcher which is a multiplatform tool or directly in Linux from the terminal with the help of the DD command or one that you consider pertinent. The download link is this.
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 images, packages, and distribution editions of the ZSWAP system used for the exchange.
SSH login offers an option to use two-factor authentication, plus the box64 emulator is included, which allows you to run programs created for processors based on the x86 architecture.
It is worth mentioning that ZFS can be used as a file system. Ready-made packages are offered to run custom environments based on KDE, GNOME, Budgie, Cinnamon, i3-wm, Mate, Xfce and Xmonad.