Armbian 26.8: rewritten installer and bootable UEFI images

A new version of Armbian 26.8 is out — a distribution based on Debian and Ubuntu and aimed at single-board computers with ARM and RISC-V architectures. The project supports more than 300 different boards, and this latest release brings several notable changes at once.

A new installer

The headline addition is a completely rewritten installer. The developers say it is better tested, can flash the bootloader on its own, and has received a number of other improvements. In addition, UEFI images are now distributed as bootable live ISOs. This makes it easier to work with IPMI virtual drives and cloud environments — that is, with the kinds of scenarios where there is no physical access to the board.

Kernel and drivers

By default, Armbian 26.8 uses the Linux 7.1 kernel. For anyone who needs something fresher, the recently released stable Linux 7.2 kernel is available on the edge branches for certain hardware platforms. The release also improves support for wireless drivers.

New boards

The list of newly supported devices turned out to be impressive. Among the newcomers are the Anbernic RG DS and RG Vita Pro, the Radxa Cubie A7Z and Dragon Q6A/Q8B, the Seeed reComputer RK3576 and RK3588 DevKit kits, the TI BeagleBadge and TMDS64EVM, the Orange Pi 4 Pro and Zero 3W, the Sovol Zero and SV08, the Walnut Pi Box and 1B, the EmbedFire LubanCat 5IO, the LuckFox Nova, the SpacemiT K3 Pico-ITX, the Milk-V DuoS, the Avnet MaaXBoard 8ULP, the NanoPi NEO3 Plus, the KICKPI K3B, the Graperain G3568 v2, the EASY EAI Nano, the Mellow Fly C5, the CIX P1, the Xiaomi Pad 6S Pro tablet, and the Tanix TX6S.

You can download the images and read the full details on the Armbian.com website.

Source: Phoronix