Differences Between Armbian and Debian

[Igor]

3 hours ago, endecotp said:

how the default installation differs from a regular Debian installation

It doesn't differ (much). Major difference is that when you start with a Debian / Ubuntu you start with a DI (Debian Installer) and install Debian to some drive. That process is identical on all x86 Ubuntu based Linuxes. Only background / colours, configurations, perhaps an application / GRUB versions is changed ... We only provide "LIVE" image because of different hardware design / scenarios. Its more suitable this way.

Once you login into Armbian, all tutorials and install cases will work the same way as they work on particular Debian / Ubuntu version https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials with rare exceptions when application does not come with arm/arm64 binaries (in such case you need to build app from sources). Armbian is clean Debian (or Ubuntu).

The problem you have with Samba can be explained with common cheap/broken USB to SATA implementation and the fact that USB based NAS solutions are ... crap/problematical. But also Samba is not the best. I only use NFS and which works as expected.

 

 

[endecotp]

On 1/22/2020 at 9:35 PM, Igor said:

It doesn't differ (much)

 

This is my first installation of Buster; my other Debian systems are still running Stretch for various reasons. I've noticed a couple of post-installation differences with Armbian Buster; I don't know whether these are Stretch vs. Buster differences or Debian vs. Armbian differences:

 

1. /var/log seems to be a ramdisk, so it's not persistent.

2. command-not-found seems to be installed by default.

 

Regarding installation itself, I wonder if it would be possible for you to re-use more of the Debian Installer stuff?  I'm thinking of things like initial user creation, timezones and language, and (for systems like mine with an SSD) partitioning.

 

Anyway, thanks for all the work - it has worked very well so far.

[endecotp]

4 hours ago, Igor said:

We cover this functionality with armbian-config (which btw. nobody helps me maintaining).

 

I was really just "wondering out loud" about whether you could solve the problem of having Armbian-specific tools that need maintenance by instead re-using the existing, and maintained, functionality in Debian Installer.

In the past I've used Martin Michlmayr's installer for the QNAP-TS119, which works more like this.  I think one of the installation methods for the NSLU2 was also based on a modified Debian Installer.

Anyway just a thought.

 

 

5 hours ago, Igor said:

Debian is very rough system and we improve it here and there.

 

I've been finding a few more of these differences.  For example, find /etc -name '*armbian*'.  It would be useful to have a list, maybe a diff of the filesystems trees with an unmodified Debian or something.  I'm pretty familiar with how vanilla Debian works and I worry that the superficial similarity is misleading.

 

This is just some honest feedback from an old Debian and ARM user but new Armbian user.  I appreciate that resources are limited; I know how that feels.  Thanks again for all the hard work.

[TRS-80]

31 minutes ago, endecotp said:

I've been finding a few more of these differences.  For example, find /etc -name '*armbian*'.  It would be useful to have a list, maybe a diff of the filesystems trees with an unmodified Debian or something.  I'm pretty familiar with how vanilla Debian works and I worry that the superficial similarity is misleading.

 

If you ever get around to compiling such notes, please do consider sharing them somewhere. Maybe a new post. I know I would find that interesting, perhaps others also.

[endecotp]

19 hours ago, TRS-80 said:

If you ever get around to compiling such notes, please do consider sharing them somewhere.

 

The lists of packages seem to be here: https://github.com/armbian/build/blob/master/lib/configuration.sh

I don't know how those compare to what Debian Installer would install by default.

 

Armbian-specific things in /etc, etc., seem to be here: https://github.com/armbian/build/tree/master/packages/bsp/common

[kgblack]

Here's a package comparison I did today of fresh installs (yesterday) of Armbian and Debian. Unfortunately, I forgot to do an update/upgrade of Armbian before listing the packages, so Armbian may appear to be slightly out of date compared to Debian, but the comparison took me too long to repeat it just for that update.

 

comparison in pdf

comparison in csv

 

Here are the 28 Armbian packages I updated after the comparison:

 

armbian-config armbian-firmware armbian-zsh avahi-autoipd base-files curl
  debian-archive-keyring groff-base iputils-arping iputils-ping libbsd0
  libcurl3-gnutls libcurl4 libnss-myhostname libpam-systemd
  libpython3.7-minimal libpython3.7-stdlib libssl-dev libssl1.1 libsystemd0
  libudev1 linux-libc-dev openssl python3.7 python3.7-minimal systemd
  systemd-sysv udev