Dear All, What do you know about Armbian? What do you think?
Is there any overlap between the Debain ARM people on this list and the Armbian developers? I recently bought an ODROID-HC1 to use as a basic NAS. It's an interesting board with an Exynos Coretex-A15 SoC and Ethernet and SATA connectors, and a nice mechanical design for a single- disk NAS. Typically for ODROID it has manufacturer support for only Ubuntu and Android, so I looked for good ways to install Debian. There is a DebianOn wiki page but it's very convoluted. For the first time I decided to try Armbian. Very briefly, Armbian's main strength seems to be that they have configurations and/or patches for U-Boot, the kernel, and related stuff for a good selection of ARM boards which are kept up to date and seem to work pretty reliably. They have a build system and infrastructure that seems to rebuild these as often as needed. There is also a reasonably responsive user/developer forum. Installation involves downloading an SD card (or similar) image which boots directly into a functioning system (with only a few first-boot steps like initial user/password setting and possibly resizing the filesystem to fill the device). This reminds me more of how the Debian cloud images work than Debian Installer. On devices like the ODROID-HC1 where you are very likely to have a large disk as well as the boot device, there is a script to move everything over. Once installed, the system is almost but not quite regular Debian. For example, there are obvious things like a verbose motd that reports the CPU temperature and more subtle differences like /var/log being on a RAM disk. I have been gradually trying to make the system more "vanilla" but it's not always clear if there will be side effects from e.g. removing or disabling these Armbian things. Debian on ARM does suffer a bit, IMHO, from a lack of "official" installation support on many of the popular boards. So we end up with things like Raspian. Unlike Raspian, Armbian has NOT rebuilt the package archive; it uses official Debain ARM packages. Anyway, this all makes me wonder if there could or should be closer collaboration here. For example, should Debian ARM be actively steering people towards Armbian as a way to get Debian onto their ARM boards? Could, perhaps, we have some way to launch regular Debian Installer and get a regular Debian system, after bootstrapping using Armbian? Any thoughts or experiences to share? Regards, Phil.
