from the waiting-for-release-3.14159265... dept.
Raspberry Pi 64-bit Armbian Gets New Release:
Armbian, a community-run Linux distro that supports over 100 Arm- and X86-based SBCs, has announced a new version, 22.02, and there's an optimized image ready to be installed on your Raspberry Pi.
Armbian takes a 'mainline first' approach to Linux, attempting to unify the experience across many different boards, each of them optimized for at a kernel or userspace level to maintain performance. Images are based on either Debian or Ubuntu, and use mostly vanilla upstream package repos, as most of the work has gone into kernel optimization.
The new release is the first to support UEFI on both Arm and X86 using GRUB, so it can boot on Intel Macs, and along with the hundreds of bug fixes you'd expect from a new version, there's a new Extensions build framework that allows users to extend the build system independently from the core code base, with over 20 hooks available.
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Raspberry Pi OS "Bullseye" is getting some changes to improve its robustness. Gone is the default user 'pi' with the default password of 'raspberry'. On first-boot, a setup wizard walks through setting a normal user with a regular password, though there are still options for headless installation. Among other improvements, it is now also possible to do the setup with a bluetooth mouse/keyboard exclusively. The old way required at least a wired mouse, if not also a wired keyboard, to connect first.
There are also mechanisms to preconfigure an image without using Imager. To set up a user on first boot and bypass the wizard completely, create a file called userconf or userconf.txt in the boot partition of the SD card; this is the part of the SD card which can be seen when it is mounted in a Windows or MacOS computer. This file should contain a single line of text, consisting of username:encrypted- password – so your desired username, followed immediately by a colon, followed immediately by an encrypted representation of the password you want to use.
Since it is a full general-purpose computer, other distros and even other operating systems are available for the Raspberry Pi. Slackware, LInux Mint, and Devuan are all among the distros which run well. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD also support at least some Raspberry Pi models. However, the official guides and tutorials all point to Raspberry Pi OS, which is a Debian derivative.
Previously:
(2022)
Long Interview with Eben Upton About Long Term Plans for RPi (journal entry)
(2022) Can't Get Hold of a Shiny New Raspberry Pi? Blame the Bots
(2022) Raspberry Pi 64-bit Armbian Gets New Release
(2021) Raspberry Pi Launches .com Website, Eyes Retail Expansion in Africa
(2021) The Ongoing Raspberry Pi Fiasco
(Score: 3, Interesting) by coolgopher on Friday March 04 2022, @07:51AM (2 children)
Nooooo! Give me proper U-boot for crying out loud, not that toy called GRUB2.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2022, @08:16AM
Hell no.
None of that embedded device tree garbage.
The beauty of x86 is I can plug in a USB hard drive with a generic Linux image and it will boot ANY machine.
A pity so few vendors support ARM's SBBR standard.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2022, @03:25PM
It's not advised to run submarines on Raspberry Pi's