08-29-2016, 11:41 AM
Pine64 now also officially added: http://www.armbian.com/download/
Armbian is not another Linux distro but a nice build system (and a collection of knowledge of course) supporting 2 Debian releases and 2 Ubuntu releases on +40 different SBC. Currently we provide only headless images with Debian Jessie and Ubuntu Xenial with both legacy kernel and 4.7 (for developers only) so in case you want to give Debian Wheezy or Trusty a go or build a desktop image you would've to use our build system instead (for developers only).
So if you're not keen on headless server usage or use already longsleep's original Ubuntu image then there's not much to gain from trying out or switching to Armbian. Please keep in mind that these are preview/beta images and read carefully through all links on our Pine64 download page before using any of our images (we wrote our documentation for a reason).
Please be also aware that we might further improve server/headless usage by turning Pine64/Pine64+ into a true headless device. It's already known from other Allwinner SoCs we support that by disabling GPU and HDMI two nice improvements happen automagically:
Armbian is not another Linux distro but a nice build system (and a collection of knowledge of course) supporting 2 Debian releases and 2 Ubuntu releases on +40 different SBC. Currently we provide only headless images with Debian Jessie and Ubuntu Xenial with both legacy kernel and 4.7 (for developers only) so in case you want to give Debian Wheezy or Trusty a go or build a desktop image you would've to use our build system instead (for developers only).
So if you're not keen on headless server usage or use already longsleep's original Ubuntu image then there's not much to gain from trying out or switching to Armbian. Please keep in mind that these are preview/beta images and read carefully through all links on our Pine64 download page before using any of our images (we wrote our documentation for a reason).
Please be also aware that we might further improve server/headless usage by turning Pine64/Pine64+ into a true headless device. It's already known from other Allwinner SoCs we support that by disabling GPU and HDMI two nice improvements happen automagically:
- Consumption and internal SoC temperature decrease a little bit which helps with throttling under full load
- Memory bandwidth increases which helps with a few workloads (have a look at last two rows of cpuminer scores in post #16 here, disabling this stuff helps applications that depend on higher memory bandwidth : )