Armbian has been released!

#1

Armbian 22.05

Highlights:

  • Thousands of hours have been invested to stabilize supported board images

  • Hundreds of Linux kernel and user space related bug fixes completed by the Armbian team

  • Added support for new boards

  • Established new Maintainers

What’s New:

Our first priority is to support and enhance the Community. To that goal, Armbian releases updates and bug fixes from our Contributors on a regular basis. We are excited to add support for the following new boards:

  • DevTerm A06

  • Orange Pi R1+ LTS

  • Radxa Rock 3A

  • Radxa Zero

And to announce new Maintainers and movement to supported status the following boards:

  • ESPRESSObin

  • Radxa Rock Pi 4

A complete list of bug fixes and updates are linked below.

Community Call to Action:

As an Armbian Community member or user you know that we support many different single board computers, with each release requiring a significant investment of time, effort and money. While most Linux distributions can create a single build and then release their distribution, we must test our releases against many different hardware platforms which is much more time consuming and makes providing consistent stable images more challenging. We are able to develop new and updated releases due to the significant contribution of time from our Maintainers, developers and limited donations.

At present our funding and Community time contributions allows us to complete one medium sized project per year related to our tools such as the Build Framework or our configuration tool along with bug fixes, support for new boards, etc. Clearly this level of support, while appreciated, does not allow us to complete many of the outstanding issues or improvements needed or requested by the Community. Accordingly, we believe we are at an inflection point, where in order to move forward and address the Community’s needs, Armbian needs to transition to a new business model. One where growth will require us to acquire additional funding before we can address many of the larger issues.

How can you help?

Time: For those who want to contribute time, please consider becoming a board Maintainer of one of the many boards that Armbian supports.

Money: For those who can help monetarily, please consider making a donation.

Credits:

This release represents the hard work of exceptional individuals who have contributed their time and expertise. Many thanks to (in alphabetical order):

150balbes, adeepn, AmadeusGhost, amazingfate, belegdol, catalinii, chbgdn, DJAlPee, EvilOlaf, heisath, hzyitc, iav, igorpecovnik, julianwhitehm, lanefu, littlecxm, Myron-S, ManoftheSea, neheb, NicoD, paolosabatino, peter279k, piter75, psztoch, RadxaYuntian, RichNeese, rpardini, schwar3kat, The-going, Tonymac32, theblackhole, TRS-80, umiddelb, yang

To see the full release changelog, please visit: Release Changelog

The full release can be read: here

–

Hello All,

As Radxa boards make up a good amount of supported Armbian boards, our media team wanted to get an update out to the Radxa Community. If this is the wrong place for this announcement someone on the moderation team please reach out and we can find a better place for it. Otherwise, we will continue to update you here in this thread as new releases are put out.

Have a great day!

1 Like
#2

Hi there,

I’m glad that you are improving the software. I love the hardware, but it lacks good software support…

Today I flashed the three packages just released a week ago, but with no luck, so you need to improve the software still more if you want to have a nice user base:

-Image for radxa-zero-debian-buster-xfce4-arm64-20220602-0403-mbr.img.xz: No Wifi service in the panel, after verifying with “mncli dev wifi” that all SSIDs were scanned correctly, I tried to connect manually using "nmcli dev wifi connect… " but I’ve got this error:

Error: Connection activation failed: (5) IP configuration could not be reserved (no available address, timeout, etc.).

I tried to run “mncli monitor” but there is no output and I had to cancel the process.

About the other two images that I tested:
- Armbian_22.08.0-trunk_Radxa-zero_bullseye_current_5.10.119_minimal.img.xz: **No desktop.**  Useless.
- Armbian_22.08.0-trunk_Radxa-zero_focal_current_5.10.119_xfce_desktop.img.xz : **Worked but can't start GPARTED after installing it.  Useless.**
#3

Dear Radxa Community,

We are excited to announce that our new release is approaching quickly, with an estimated release date of May 25th . Our team is working actively on the final touches, focusing on stability and fine-tuning advanced features such as 3D and video acceleration. We’re utilizing the best available methods, as there are multiple options to consider.

We are adjusting our build targets to include stable, rolling and application-specific builds.

  • Stable Releases : For those who prefer a more reliable and tested environment.
  • Rolling Releases : For the latest updates and experimental features.
  • Applications : Optimized builds for specific applications.

We will continue to support Jammy (old stable Ubuntu) while gradually introducing Noble as the latter has numerous bugs from upstream user space applications.

Official Partnership with Radxa:

We are thrilled to announce a new official partnership with Radxa. This collaboration will enhance support for their newly released RK3588 boards, bringing more robust and reliable options to our users.

Community Engagement and Giveaways:

One of our current giveaways is nearing its end, but don’t worry – a new one is here! Stay tuned for more exciting opportunities.

Focus Areas:

As we approach the release date, we ask for your help, especially in the areas of desktop acceleration and desktop environments. While we have covered base OS system features well, your contributions and feedback are invaluable.

Community Poll Results:

We recently conducted a poll to understand our community’s involvement in open-source projects. Here are the results:

  • I’m an active contributor : 28.6%
  • Contributed occasionally : 31.7%
  • Not yet, but I’d like to : 28.6%
  • No, why? : 11.1%

These results are based on 63 votes and show a vibrant and engaged community, with a significant number of active and occasional contributors. For those who haven’t contributed yet but would like to, we encourage you to get involved. Your participation can make a significant difference!

Thank you for your continued support and contributions. Together, we can make Armbian even better!

Best regards,

The Armbian Team

#4

Just a quick question:
Is the Armbian presence at fosstodon the official mastodon account?

I’m asking because the account isn’t verified at this moment.

#5

It is, but we were not aware of this functionality. Thank you for hint!

image
image.png338×562 68.8 KB

1 Like
#6

Ah. Great. Releasing the worst software I’ve ever seen that’s maintained by an even worse community of narcissists. Yes I am bitter because you shouldn’t tell people you offer something and then degrade them if they mention problems or lack of features.

You people create an illusion of reliability and dependability and then just trash people who dare to complain about anything. The whole Armbian initiative should be dropped completely.

At least that’s how it’s been so far in my opinion.
To be fair - not everyone at Armbian is like that, but the forums are hell.

(sarcasm) Gosh, gotta love community endeavors…
Ban me for saying all that if you want, but keep this message visible.
Maybe someone somewhere will reflect on their attitude.

1 Like
#7

When you say “you people”, do you mean just the one person (who won’t be named), or multiple people you’ve encountered for support?

#8

Armbian 24.5.1 Havier

We’re excited to announce a new Armbian release: Armbian 24.5.1 Havier! This release focuses on stability and UX improvement, with an emphasis on stable builds and the hardwares we support the most. The changelog of this release is just massive!

Key highlights

Reproducible Armbian OS and Armbian build framework are tightly connected. Framework can build custom Debian or custom Ubuntu. Armbian Ubuntu is made from LTS or latest packages and is cleaned from all Canonical packaging including snapd. By default, we provide the latest critical packages also in the LTS package base. Armbian Jammy and Noble comes with highly optimized, specially built for each hardware platform, on top of mainline kernel 6.6.y or from SoC vendors, ZFS 2.2.4 and always the latest deb packaged Chromium, packed as .deb, comes with 3D and video acceleration where possible, VS Code, Thunderbird, Firefox, preinstalled Linux Userspace x86 and x86_64 Emulator on aarch64 hardware and several others. Armbian provides cleaned, improved, but stays close to the standard Debian and Ubuntu experience. To keep 100% compatibility, we tend to keep things that work well as they are. We stick to a minimalistic approach – less is more.

Excellent Hardware Support

Armbian excels in providing exceptional hardware support for single board computers. Our team maintains a large and diverse selection of hardware. We specialize in Rockchip flagship SoC RK3588, and Allwinner devices, we look forward to adding more Qualcomm devices. Our highly productive developer community integrates everything into the fast and user-friendly Armbian build framework (SDK).

Rolling builds

We are aware that many of you would like to run the latest code. For this reason, we provide daily rollercoaster aka rolling builds with Debian Testing / Trixie or Ubuntu Oracular, also with desktops which are under heavy development, such as KDE Plasma. We delayed releasing those in our stable channel as they are too immature.

Unofficial Images

In addition to platinum or standard support, where we usually have at least one person behind, Armbian provides many unofficial images for boards that are not fully tested and supported at https://github.com/armbian/community. Most of those images work just fine, but are untested.

If none of the ready-made images suits you, build your custom version of Armbian image. Perhaps you want to start your own Linux distribution? By using Armbian, this becomes very easy! We provide complete tooling.

Home Assistant and Other Tools

Do you want to speed up installation of your Home Assistant to almost any device that is out there? We provide ready to run images for many, but you can build your own in no time with the help of the build system and its extension framework. Which is in use to automatically build Home Assistant, OpenHab and Armbian Security (Trixie with Kali Linux tools). This provides a clean security oriented experience.

Recommendations for Production use

For production environments, we recommend:

  • hardware that has platinum or standard support label. For devices with these labels, we have people who are maintaining the code and we offer professional support.
  • using stabilized point releases around Armbian Linux 6.6.y and user space Jammy and Armbian Bookworm.
  • becoming Armbian Silver or Gold support partner to get access to professional services and help us pay common software support bills.

How Armbian cover the bill?

1% of software development, that comes without fun factor, is covered by the community donations. Any loss we are trying to mitigate with the help of partners. Sadly, a large part of the R&D bill still remains unpaid. We are mitigating this by dropping support on areas where loss is the biggest. If we do not receive enough volunteer help or funds from professional support, support degradation will become noticeable 6-12 months after we stop maintaining certain sections.

If you would like that we continue investing our precious time on the same level, perhaps on different levels, you need to step up and help.

Remarkable Contributors

We extend our heartfelt appreciation to the individuals who have contributed immensely to the growth and success of Armbian.

The Armbian superstars of this release

Support Staff: Didier, Lanefu, Adam, Werner, Aaron and many others have dedicated their expertise and time to provide support and guidance.

We also extend our gratitude to our esteemed partners. Your contributions and support are invaluable in shaping the Armbian community and its success.

Thank you for your continuous support to the Armbian community!

The Armbian team

1 Like