Support for 64-bit ARM systems was implemented

Mar 8, 2017 01:04 GMT  ·  By

The Q4OS development team is pleased to inform Softpedia today about the general availability of a brand-new edition of their Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution for PINE64 boards.

Q4OS is a lightweight distro built around the old-school Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE), an open-source initiative that tries to keep the spirit of the KDE 3.5 desktop environment alive across all GNU/Linux distributions, and while it's been engineered to run on 32-bit and 64-bit PCs, there are also Raspberry Pi builds available.

However, this news comes as a surprise for us, because we did not expect to see Q4OS run on the PINE64 64-bit ARM single-board computer (SBC), but now it does and dedicated images are available for download from the official Q4OS PINE64 Wiki entry if you want to try this Debian-based OS on your PINE64 development board.

Based on Debian GNU/Linux 8 "Jessie"

It looks like the PINE64 port is based on the Debian GNU/Linux 8 "Jessie" operating system, which means that it's derived from the stable Q4OS 1.8 series of the distribution. It includes a Liux kernel that has been optimized for PINE64 single-board computers.

"Anyone is welcome to download the image and create a bootable SD card, please read Pine64 setup guide," said the devs. "Q4OS on PINE64 hardware runs stably and swiftly, due to its lightness and typical low hardware requirements. The full set of Debian stable and Trinity repositories is included and available for software installation."

If you've always dreamed of running KDE 3.5 on your PINE64 board, now you can if you download this special edition of Q4OS Linux. In related news, the Q4OS team announced earlier this month the release of the third maintenance update to the Q4OS 1.8 "Orion" stable series of the operating system, which you can download from our website.