Yes, Armbian seems to be the best images to use for Radxa cards. Armbian has also an easy to use build utility where I can make a new OS image in 20 minutes running on the Radxa 5B. I can easy choose between different kernels, distro bases and desktop environments, including CLI. This was an eye-opener 
I also tried the (outdated) rbuild from Radxa, but it would not run without lots of errors and I was not able to build any images. Radxa should pay Armbian to make OS images for Radxa harware.
Another option that seems more modern and flexible is to use u-boot (uefi bios) and then boot an arm64 OS image. One website that does his for the Radxa boards is https://sd-card-images.johang.se/
I just did a 5B+ build - this morning 30th Jan 2025, using the Radxa rsdk tool. It took about 30mins to run/build.
The build is cli only, bookworm. It’s just under 4GB in size vs over 7.3GB for the kde version.
Screen shots to show the build, size, install and running system. Happy to post the base Debian/cli image if it helps. I don’t know how/where to upload a 4GB .img file. If you have a dropbox link to send me I’m happy to drop you a copy.
I also ran a build for the 5B. But can’t test since I have a couple of 5B+'s but no 5B. Anyway, I have a 5B build if you want to try it.
—build testing----
I put the build on an sdcard, using balena, booted the 5b+ with no hdmi cable. Then logged in with putty. Found the IP address by looking at my dhcp server connections page. Logged in with the std “radxa/radxa” username/password.
I ran rsetup to make sure that all of the latest bookworm updates had been pulled in the build, I set wifi locale and timezone. I enabled wifi.
Then I installed Openmediavault - using the install script found here:
I installed a bunch of plugins. Mounted a couple of drives, set some shares, added some users. Copied a couple of TB of data. Configured docker/compose and built emby server.
Ran emby server and got all of the media I had copied to be scanned. All seems to work well. I didn’t experience any glitches - unlike in the past. I can see that the dev team have updated/improved the rsdk build environment to allow for all of the gui stuff to be omitted, which helps. The build environment does still kick an error at the end wrt a backup build - this is a bug that I reported some months back. It looks like rsdk creates a couple of builds, the main one is good, but the backup throws an error - hence my testing to make sure all is good.
The main problem with building images (for Radxa 5B) is getting graphics driver included. I have built many images, but they all have software rendering for graphics. Only a few, like Joshua Riek’s Ubuntu image, has the Panfrost graphics driver included. Is there an easy way to include this when building images, or add this after install?
If you compress the image file that is 4GB you get it down to 1.5GB about? I have to think about how to get this sent. Is it possible to send large files via Google mail? Use torrent. Do you have Google drive?
If I install Gnome, do you know if I get graphics drivers?
I can open a Dropbox account, I guess it’s still free?
You can use Joshua’s or amazinfate’s ubuntu ppas to get the mesa version hacked to support Mali-G610 (with kernel 6.1). But if you want only GPU acceleration and not video acceleration then just install armbian with mainline kernel 6.13 and it should work better.
Thanks for the info.
Let me know if I get this correct, there are 4 different modes of graphics: software rendering of everything, hardware gpu rendering of the desktop and software rendering of video decoding, software rendering of the desktop with hardware decoding of video, and hardware gpu support of both the desktop and video decoding?
The hacked version of Mesa is both desktop and video hardware gpu rendering?
If I use the main line kernel and get a server image, do I get the graphics driver for the desktop if I install Gnome ontop? Or do I have to get an image with Gnome preinstalled to get the graphics driver?
I downloaded the prebuilt server image of Armbian and installed Gnome, and I think I only got software rendering of Gnome (wayland, didn’t try x)
Let’s take this step by step:
So, there is no real driver you’d need to install, it either is in your kernel and your mesa or not.
Also, you don’t need to guess whether you have software or hardware rendering, just look it up in Gnome settings (About section)
Easy to make a build, boot up and test out if you have the functionality. If the needed drivers are not there, then I’m sure Radxa dev can give you a command to add them to the build you just installed.
Thank you so much for the explanation! Hardware support is so much more complicated than in Windows
OK, so the desktop and gui like gnome uses the gpu driver. Here the mainline kernel is often the best choice even if it does not include vpu drivers (not the most important thing for me).
The vendor kernel often has the vpu driver, but not the gpu (mesa) driver? That is why I get software rendering of gnome in many images?
Also, in the Joshua Riek Gnome image there are two graphics “cards”, one software and one mesa. Does this have something to do with the npu that is seen as a graphics card?
Yes, you’re right. Since I often pick the vendor kernel, I guess I don’t get the gpu driver? I’ll try the current and beta kernels to see if I get gpu 3d acceleration support. Vulkan is for gaming, or video encoding/decoding?
More questions
The official OS images released by Radxa uses old kernels like 5.10 or 6.1 Is this because they are vendor kernels and not mainline kernels? Do they use driver blobs and not mainline drivers?
Why do they not use mainline kernels? What is the Rockchip SDK used for? Radxa cannot make new OS images because of missing SDK, they say? Can the mainline kernel only be used when every single driver is included?
No, gnome depends on OpenGL. The video processing unit only handles video (like H264, H265, AV1).
The vendor kernel always has the kernel GPU driver but you also need a userspace driver for the GPU to work (so, mesa or blobs).
Vulkan is mainly for gaming/3D, they are trying to build some video acceleration to it but it’s experimental, less efficient than native VPU and can be ignored for now.
The second “graphics card” on Joshua’s distros is the NPU
Userspace driver… 
Is this like firmware and driver?
I did build a new copy of Armbian with the newset 6.13 kernel and got the Panfrost driver in gnome, but life is not easy, I had no HDMI audio… 
Not really. But please don’t overthink this… You just need to have the proper kernel and mesa.
Yes, apparently the HDMI audio should be fixed soon (kernel side).
Thanks, lots of goodies
Must admit I’ve not read the complete thread.
How about looking here?
ROCK 4C+ with Ubuntu 24.04 and ROS 2 Jazzy Jalisco
I suppose the relevant part:
In this case Rpi5b
Armbian_community_25.2.0-trunk.439_Rpi5b_bookworm_current_6.6.74_minimal.img.xz
I’m still a bit of a Linux noob, but I have my 5B+ running with DietPi, and things seem to be going well. Not sure if it is missing features you might need, but it’s pretty user-friendly for a CLI and it seems to support the Rock 5B+ pretty perfectly…
