Armbian broken sometime in the last few months

[michel_luc]

I had Armbian running from a MicroSD card for a while and it worked pretty well. I did an "apt dist-upgrade" the other day and now it won't boot into a graphical desktop. And it doesn't come up on the network because I can't ping it.

I installed the latest Armbian onto another MicroSD and it doesn't work either.

So their image for the Pinebook became broken probably in the last few months.

I tried an earlier image from 2023 and did an "apt dist-upgrade" on it and it broke too.

Sucks. That is a nice OS.

That does suck. The original Pinebook will never be a speed demon but runs Ubuntu surprisingly well.  I think there are two problems. The first is that not a lot of work is going in to the Pinebook on Armbian. The second problem is that I don't think Armbian supports dist-upgrade.

I  can think of two things you can do. You could download a recent build that boots and keep it updated, using "apt upgrade" instead of dist-upgrade. Both bookworm and Jammy are supported releases for a while.

The other thing is that you can use the Armbian build framework and build a more recent release yourself. It's not super hard, although you'll have to google a bit and possibly install some software to get it to run if you've never done it before. I just did it myself today, and if you build it with the legacy 6.1 kernel you can have Ubuntu Noble on your Pinebook.