Last year we concluded to shrink supported board count https://www.armbian.com/newsflash/armbian-needs-your-help/ and stop providing images for not supported hw https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Board-Support-Rules/ . Main idea of this is to make a clean line what is supported and what not. Also an attempt to lower stress from support.

But. Images that are in the system and those which are not (yet) are usually produced:

• by developers individually

• by 3rd party projects: https://github.com/ophub/amlogic-s9xxx-armbian

• 3rd party Linux distros (manjaro, dietpi, debian, … ) usually just “supports” everything

For those working, half or not working images, people are still asking us on our forums for support so we didn’t actually fix much. I didn’t expect and we also shouldn’t drive users away because of this. Just solve this better …

This means it makes little sense to not provide images at all so it might be sane to come out with some automated solution that can be used - primarily by us & our community.

Working POC exists on:

https://github.com/armbian/community

Is a dedicated repository which is holding up to 3 releases of targets that are not end of life (EOL) or supported. For EOL we don’t provide images as they usually don’t build or are just obsolete, while for supported we provide stable downloads from our fast download infrastructure with torrents.

This repository contains Actions scripts that builds images from (beta.armbian.com) nightly repository on every 6 hours. Since we easily hit API rate limits, we have to (automatically) repeat builds to complete one version many times until all images are successfully uploaded. Releases are only uploaded to GitHub and IMO it should stay this way, unless this is a problem for Chinese users? - it is possible to (ready but not enabled) upload to our infrastructure or just somewhere else then GitHub.

Each targets gets 2 x CLI and 2 x XFCE desktop images in latest Debian and Ubuntu flavour. If BUILD_DESKTOP=”no” is set in the board config, then desktop images are not generated.

Download link:

https://github.com/armbian/community/releases/latest