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The Armbian project announced today that their Debian/Ubuntu-based ARM distribution is now available for Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computers with support for the Cinnamon, GNOME, Xfce, KDE Plasma, and i3 environments.
This is a true Christmas gift for Raspberry Pi fans as they can now install a fully optimized GNU/Linux distribution on the Raspberry Pi 5 computer, based either on the Debian GNU/Linux 12 “Bookworm” or Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) operating system series.
The Debian build is available with the GNOME, Xfce, and Cinnamon desktop environments pre-installed. On the other hand, the Ubuntu-based images are available with the KDE Plasma, GNOME, Xfce, and Cinnamon desktop environments, as well as with the i3 tiling window manager.
Minimal and CLI (command line) editions are provided as well for both Debian Bookwork and Ubuntu Jammy flavors without a graphical environment. These are targeted at those who create a custom Armbian system for their Raspberry Pi 5 devices with a different graphical environment, or without one.
When running Armbian for the first time, you will be asked to input a root (system administrator) password, choose a shell (Bash or ZSH), create a default username, connect to a Wi-Fi network (if available), as well as to set the system language and timezone. All this is done in a text-mode environment.
The Raspberry Pi 5 builds are based on the latest Armbian Linux 23.11 release, which arrived last month on November 29th, 2023, with support for the Linux 6.6 LTS kernel series, support for new devices, adaptive login managers for all supported graphical environments, and other changes.
Without further ado, if you want to install Armbian Linux on your Raspberry Pi 5 computer, you can download the prebuilt images right now from the official website. All the prebuilt images are powered by the long-term supported Linux 6.1 LTS kernel series, more specifically by Linux kernel 6.1.68.
Update: Apart from the KDE Plasma image based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, all the other prebuilt images won’t boot to desktop. The Armbian team is investigating the issues and I will update the story again when I receive word from them.
Update 2: Armbian fixed all the desktop images after my report. I’ve updated the article with a screenshot of the Debian-based image featuring the Xfce desktop.
Last updated 4 months ago
