About Plebian

Introduction

Plebian stands for "PINE Live Debian", and was born out of a perceived need for an as-vanilla-as-possible Debian image for the PINE64 Quartz64 line of single board computers and compute modules.

The images are based on Debian Bookworm's kernel package, meaning you'll get timely security updates directly from Debian even years in the future.

The "Live" part of the name refers to there not being an installer. All you have to do to install the image onto your board is to flash it. Your data on it will be persistent.

We're not a project claiming to support every SBC under the sun, instead we're laser-focused on PINE64's offerings and know the boards in-and-out.

Who We Are

The lead developer behind Plebian is Nicolas Frattaroli, who has been active in bringing drivers and device trees for the Quartz64 devices to mainline Linux.

Aside from receiving occasional donations, we're completely independent, allowing us to honestly and plainly point out hardware problems when they do exist.

Why Choose Plebian

Plebian sets the bar for Quartz64 OS images. We actively work on our own u-boot tree for the boards and contribute to the mainline Linux kernel. We don't just repackage other people's work, we do the work. Our image generation is automated and publicly documented; we're not a hand-crafted one-off image hosted on some forum.

Acknowledgements

We'd like to thank PINE64 for supporting the project with hardware donations.

Additionally, we'd like to thank Oratek for supporting the project with a hardware donation of a TOFU board.

We'd also like to extend our thanks to the generous GitHub Sponsors supporters of Plebian's developers.

Last but not least, we would like to thank Peter Geis for his amazing work on the board bring-up for these boards in mainline Linux.