The Armbian community has just released the Armbian Imager 2.0 GUI program to easily flash pre-built Armbian-built Ubuntu or Debian images for over 338 boards from 64 SBC vendors. The new version features a slick user interface rewritten from scratch and implements custom user profiles in the settings with username and password, SSH key, Wi-Fi network credentials and country code, timezone, locale, and shell. That means the board is ready to use after flashing. In some ways it’s similar to the Raspberry Pi Imager 2.0, except it covers a much broader ecosystem of single board computers.
To be honest, I had no idea Armbian had an imager so far. The last time I used an Armbian image, I downloaded it directly from their website and used USB Imager or another tool to flash it to a microSD card slot. So it’s a good opportunity to check out the Armbian Imager 2.0 program by downloading and installing it on my laptop.
It’s available for Linux x64/arm64 (Raspberry Pi), Windows x64/arm64, macOS x64 and Arm (Apple M1-M4). I installed it on a laptop running Ubuntu 24.04. Some UI features include dark theme selection and eighteen languages automatically selected from your locale.
The first step is to select the board’s manufacturer, and the platinum vendors, who sponsor the Armbian project, come first. I went with Radxa.
We’re now shown a list of boards from the manufacturer, again listed by level of support with four levels: Platinum, Standard, Community, WIP. I selected the Rock 5B Plus SBC.
In the next step, we can select the operating system, again with a list of images that can be filtered by “Stable”, “Rolling Release”, “Apps”, and “Minimal”. The “Apps” filter will show specific images such as Kali Linux, Home Assistant, OpenMediaVault, etc. I went with the Armbian 26.2.6 GNOME image above.
Up next is storage device selection with the system device hidden by device. My 16GB microSD card was properly detected, and after selecting it, I was presented with a summary, and click on Erase & Flash to start the process.
The utility will download and uncompress the OS image, then write it to the microSD card and verify it.
Sadly, it failed due to a problem with that specific microSD card:
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09:31:40 ● flash::linux::writer: Image size: 6140461056 bytes (5.72 GB) 09:31:40 ● flash::linux::writer: Unmounting device partitions... 09:31:46 ● flash::linux::writer: Writing image... 09:35:54 ● flash::linux::writer: Write error at byte 301989888: No space left on device (os error 28) 09:35:54 ● operations: Flash failed: Failed to write at byte 301989888: No space left on device (os error 28) 09:35:54 ● board_queries: Device(s) removed: ["/dev/sda"] 09:35:54 ● operations: Cleaning up failed download |
The uncompressed image size is 5.72 GB, and we’re told there’s no space left on a ~16GB microSD card, so there’s clearly an issue, which the kernel log confirms:
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[387400.206648] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#0 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK driverbyte=DRIVER_OK cmd_age=0s [387400.206657] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#0 Sense Key : Not Ready [current] [387400.206661] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#0 Add. Sense: Medium not present [387400.206663] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] tag#0 CDB: Write(10) 2a 00 00 08 1e 00 00 00 f0 00 [387400.206665] I/O error, dev sda, sector 531968 op 0x1:(WRITE) flags 0x4800 phys_seg 30 prio class 2 [387400.206675] Buffer I/O error on dev sda, logical block 66496, lost async page write [387400.206682] Buffer I/O error on dev sda, logical block 66497, lost async page write [387400.206685] Buffer I/O error on dev sda, logical block 66498, lost async page write [387400.206687] Buffer I/O error on dev sda, logical block 66499, lost async page write [387400.206689] Buffer I/O error on dev sda, logical block 66500, lost async page write |
While the program detected the issue in the console, the UI didn’t show any error message, and instead, I got a mostly blank window.
I tried again with an 8GB microSD card, and I got the same result as above in the user interface, but it failed silently in the terminal.
I have enough experience to know that when it’s not the storage device itself that fails, it might be the card reader instead. Since I don’t have a working card reader with me, I installed the Windows version of Armbian Imager 2.0 on the Khadas Mind 2 mini PC and tried again using the card reader in the Mind Graphics 2 dock. I could confirm the 16GB microSD card was indeed dead, but I managed to flash Armbian 26.2 successfully on the 8GB card.
What we haven’t checked out so far is the custom profile option, so let’s do that now by going to the Settings, Profiles section.
Clicking on “+ New profile” will show Network options for Ethernet and Wi-Fi…
… as well as localization, root account, first user options…
… as well as Advanced options, and a preview of the config file stored in /root/.not_logged_in_yet. Clicking Reveal will show the passwords. If you set passwords, you may not want to share the resulting image with third parties since passwords are stored in plain text in the file. I suppose it’s deleted after the first login, but it’s usually possible to mount such an OS image as a loop device to access all files.
We can now click save and create as many profiles as we want. The profile can be selected on the “Confirm Selection” window right before starting the flashing process.
The Armbian Imager program is open-source, and you’ll find the source code on GitHub.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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