NanoPi NEO older os releases?

[souad]

hello guys,
sorry i had to tag orangepione, only because i could not find nanopi neo in allwinner h3 category.
anw, my question is where can i find the older releases of the armbian os, i visited archive but i could not find the image i downloaded like one year earlier which is armbian v25.11 linux kernel 6.12.51 sunxi, there used to be a legacy option in the page related to nanopi neo where i could find all the older releases but looks like it is gone.

[Werner]

moved to unsupported

 

try https://fi.mirror.armbian.de/oldarchive/

if what you are looking for is not there, it's gone.

[souad]

yes i already browsed this link earlier and did not find it. thank you very much.

can u explain to me why would an image be gone and not listed in the old archives? do u recommend i use the new image? and would this new image be patched and updated? how would i know if a specific image would be updated or not?
i dont see LTS anywhere i guess.
thank you for your patience.

 

[eselarm]

Nanopi-NEO is community maintained only, so it basically means that you need to maintain it yourself as you are writing some messages here you can consider yourself part of the community. So quite some DIY, but I have 5 Nanopi-NEO's 3 running 24/7 and all fine Armbian Trixie (with a bit of my own preferences and tweaks), but the core things (u-boot and sunxi kernel) work as expected and reliable and nice low-power. 1 runs a bit more experimental kernel 7.0.12-edge-sunxi, but already up for 23 days as USB-camera server.

Another managing electric fence:

root@nanopineo:~# uname -a
Linux nanopineo 6.18.35-current-sunxi #1 SMP Tue Jun  9 10:28:53 UTC 2026 armv7l GNU/Linux

So you can take the image listed on: https://armbian.com/boards/nanopineo

and then do regular apt update && apt full-upgrade and every 2 year a dist-upgrade, (see Debian docs how that is done), I have done that since summer 2021 or so.

 

There is indeed no LTS image, you yourself need to do the 'Long Term Support' with the help of everyone else who also wants to keep this nice and tiny SBC running for as many years as possible.

 

Edited August 14 by eselarm

[souad]

thank you @eselarm for clearing that up, so regular apt update and upgrade would make it good to go.
as for maintaining it myself, is there like a guideline u can tell me about to start with?

thanks in advance 

[eselarm]

2 hours ago, souad said:

as for maintaining it myself, is there like a guideline u can tell me about to start with?

Most important is to realize that it is Debian Linux, so in general at debian.org or various linux info sites should be your guideline. It takes time but step by step you get to know more and will be able to solve potential issues on your own. As you can see from Armbian docs:

https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_FAQ/#can-i-upgrade-to-a-new-armbian-release

it also suggest to look at generic Linux info sources and help on the longer term. So I would say https://wiki.debian.org/ But many other sources of info about Linux, maybe YouTube is more of interest for you.

 

But it depends what you want with the Nanopi-NEO. Various people keep the base release for years (so Trixie (13) currently). Debian will keep packages from older releases, but not forever. So Trixie is now 'stable', will then turn to 'oldstable' mid 2027 and then to oldoldstable mid 2029. After that you won't see updates, so by then you might want to have learned yourself how to upgrade from 13->14->15 etc.

 

Most important is that you make sure you learn yourself how to backup and restore your running installation. Then you don't need to download a new image in case for example your SD-card gets broken. There are several SD-card backup programs, throughout the years I made something myself in some scripts, but it is similar to 'btrbk', which is standard available in Debian. It allows to back-up whole computers while they keep running, so in case of my NanoPi-NEO's, I can keep the SD-card inserted as well.

But of course a basic method is to take out SD-card, make a backup image of it or maybe copy the whole SD-card to a spare SD-card. But others sure have better tips as I don't use that method.

Edited August 15 by eselarm