Armbian is a Linux distribution based on Debian and Ubuntu for ARM development boards.
It was recently announced release of the new version of Armbian 23.08, codenamed “Colobus”, version in which a large number of package updates were introduced in general for the different board images, as well as support improvements and support for new devices.
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, including various models of Raspberry Pi, Odroid, Orange Pi, Banana Pi, Helios64, pine64, Nanopi, among others.
The bases of the system are divided into two, Debian and Ubuntu Its base packages are used to form the builds, but the environment is completely rebuilt using its own build system with the inclusion of optimizations to reduce size, increase performance, and apply additional protection mechanisms.
Main novelties of Armbian 23.08 «Colobus»
In this new version of Armbian 23.08 that is presented, one of the most important changes that we can highlight is the adding the armbian-gaming extension, this is an excellent tool that allows both Armbian, Ubuntu and Debian ARM versions the be able to install game applications.
Another of the novelties that are presented in Armbian 23.08 «Colobus», are the hardware support enhancements and additions for the system, and it is that now It has support for Crust (Allwinner), Orange Pi Plus and Radxa CM5, as well as for the Lenovo X13S.
In addition to this and talking about support improvements, but software, we can find that it was added support for booting into Khadas VIM3/VIM3L boards, this was achieved thanks to the u-boot version 23.07-rc4, it was added support for new memory chips used in Banana Pi M5 boardsAlso highlighted is SPI boot support for Rock5A boards and support for compiling in a Debian 13 "Trixie" environment.
On the other hand, it also highlights the adding two other extensions in the system, one of them is grub-with-dtb along with which improvements were implemented in the system grub. The other added extension is bluetooth-hciattach to Orange Pi 5 builds.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- The kernel on Banana Pi CM4 has been updated to version 6.1.
- Added support for 4G modems with PCI interface.
- Official scripts were provided to update the distribution.
- The NanoPi Duo2 board now supports the power button and Ethernet.
- Added driver for wireless cards based on the MT7921U chip
- gnome-calculator has been returned to the base distribution.
- Improved support for various boards, such as Raspberry Pi, Banana Pi, Rockpi4c+, among others.
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.
The SSH login offers an option to use two-factor authentication, plus the box64 emulator is included, which allows you to run programs built 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.