Ubuntu 26.04 LTS · Resolute Raccoon

Ubuntu 26.04 on the
Orange Pi 5 Pro

Prebuilt images and the Armbian-based build recipe for the Rockchip RK3588S — mainline kernel, working Mali-G610 GPU, RK3588 NPU support, and a KDE Plasma desktop image that boots straight into a setup wizard.

Download latest release View on GitHub
MIT licensed · Built with Armbian · Open issues welcome

Get the image

As of May 2026, no off-the-shelf 26.04 image exists for this board. Two prebuilt variants ship with each release on GitHub Releases.

Desktop

~770 MB
  • KDE Plasma + SDDM
  • HW video decode (Rockchip VA-API)
  • RK3588 NPU stack baked in
  • Brave browser preinstalled
  • Auto-launching setup wizard
Download desktop image

Minimal

~300 MB
  • CLI only — headless / server
  • RK3588 NPU stack included
  • orangepi-setup TTY wizard
  • No GUI overhead
  • Optional Plasma post-install
Download minimal image

Flash with balenaEtcher on any OS, or xz -dc *.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4M status=progress on Linux/macOS. Each release ships a matching .sha file — verify before flashing.

What's in it

Six things that should "just work" on this board and didn't, until now.

Mainline kernel

Defaults to BRANCH=current — Linux ~6.18 from Armbian's CI. No Rockchip BSP unless you specifically need it.

Real GPU acceleration

panthor + Mesa panvk on Mali-G610 MC4. Working OpenGL ES 3.1, Vulkan 1.4. No more llvmpipe fallback.

RK3588 NPU

w568w/rknpu DKMS module + librknnrt 2.3.2 + custom DT overlay that replaces the mainline rocket nodes with vendor-style rknpu.

HW video decode

Builds librockchip-mpp + woodyst/rockchip-vaapi from source. Firefox / Brave / mpv pick it up via VA-API automatically.

Setup wizard

Plasma kdialog wizard auto-launches once on first login: NVMe migration, SPI bootloader install, HDMI overscan workaround. Re-runnable.

NVMe boot

Built-in flow puts u-boot in SPI flash and rootfs on NVMe — pure NVMe boot, no SD card after. Or keep SD as bootloader if you prefer reversible.

Why this exists

As of May 2026 there is no off-the-shelf Ubuntu 26.04 image for the Orange Pi 5 Pro:

  • Joshua Riek's ubuntu-rockchip — archived 29 April 2026.
  • Armbian's downloads for this board only ship Debian Trixie.
  • Orange Pi's official downloads top out at 24.04.

Building 26.04 directly hits a rust-coreutils / rustix chroot panic on Rockchip RK3588 vendor BSP kernels — Armbian's first chroot operation (linking the keyring) dies before any of the build can start. The stock OPi 22.04 kernel ships without CONFIG_BINFMT_MISC at all, so you can't even shim qemu around it.

This repo solves it with a 24.04 stepping-stone build, plus a small idempotent patch (apply-uutils-shim.sh) that swaps uutils for a qemu-routed shim during chroot operations and restores it before image creation. The final 26.04 image ships clean uutils — no qemu emulation at runtime.

Build it yourself

Three scripts, three steps. Run on the booted board.

  1. Build the 24.04 stepping-stone image on the stock OPi vendor 22.04 system: ./01-build-noble.sh  (~3-5 h cold, ~3 min cached)
  2. Flash 24.04 to microSD, boot from it.
  3. Build 26.04 from the booted 24.04 system: ./02-build-resolute.sh for minimal, --desktop for the Plasma image.  (~8-15 min minimal, ~30-45 min desktop)
Read the full guide on GitHub →