Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS on a Raspberry Pi

So, with the newest version of Ubuntu now available for the Raspberry, I wanted to jump in and see what they had to offer my Raspberry experience! Also, I need to have some Ubuntu in the network to see if I can configure Saltstack to handle an Ubuntu node for something that I’ve been exploring for work. So, looking through the rack I found a couple of PI4’s that weren’t doing anything and decided to image their SD cards with the new OS.

Create an SD card to boot

First, off to Ubuntu land to grab the new image. The downloads are available at ubuntu.com Choose your Raspberry model and bit size.

What a nicely laid out page! I’m grabbing the 64-bit version because I’ve got more than 2GB of RAM. If you’ve only got 2GB, the 32-bit version will run just fine. Here’s what the experts are saying:

The Raspberry Pi 2 only supports 32 bits, so that’s an easy choice. However the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 are 64 bit boards. According to the Raspberry Pi foundation, there are limited benefits to using the 64 bit version for the Pi 3 due to the fact that it only supports 1GB of memory; however, with the Pi 4, the 64 bit version should be faster.

https://ubuntu.com/download/raspberry-pi

Once the download was complete, I just clicked on the ubuntu-20.04.1-preinstalled-server-arm64+raspi.img.xz file in the downloads directory and the Raspberry Pi Imager opened! I forgot that I installed that! Cool. I’ll use that.

It populated the Operating System field on the left on its own. I’ll put an old SD card in my USB reader. (I’ve been loving this one. Some other readers don’t jibe with my computer and the USB auto-thing doesn’t always work. This one is a treat.) When I click on SD Card, it presents me with a list of available SD cards, so I pick the only one.

After that, I get an ominous warning that I’m going to overwrite EVERYTHING on my SD card. That’s fine. I keep a little box of SD cards that I use in my Raspberries here on my desk, so I know I’m not overwriting anything other than an old Raspberry drive. It dutifully copies the contents of the image file to the SD cards and then verifies its work. Once it’s done, I’m putting in a second card and repeating the process, because I’m moving two Raspberries over to Ubuntu.

Problems! Nothing is ever easy

hmmm… I’ve going to have to run Flash Drive Tester on that one! It can read test or do destructive r/w pattern testing. I’ve really come to rely on it and it’s FREE. SD cards DO fail! Especially in Raspberries! I keep lots on hand and try to be good about rotating them and testing them often. SD cards are cheap. I buy them on Amazon and get them the next day with my Prime account! OK! That looks better:

Boot Up

Once I’ve got my SD cards written and successfully verified, I can unplug my PI4s and replace the SD cards with the freshly minted Ubuntu cards and power up!

I like to “tail -f /var/log/messages” on my dhcp server when I boot up “new” Raspberries to ensure that they get their IP address assigned and registered in dns. Here we can see that is happening:

Oct 8 12:32:07 rock dhcpd: DHCPDISCOVER from dc:a6:32:95:f5:4e via enp0s31f6
Oct 8 12:32:07 rock dhcpd: DHCPOFFER on 192.168.1.52 to dc:a6:32:95:f5:4e via enp0s31f6
Oct 8 12:32:07 rock dhcpd: DHCPREQUEST for 192.168.1.52 (192.168.1.6) from dc:a6:32:95:f5:4e via enp0s31f6
Oct 8 12:32:07 rock dhcpd: DHCPACK on 192.168.1.52 to dc:a6:32:95:f5:4e via enp0s31f6
Oct 8 12:32:07 rock dhcpd: Added new forward map from ubuntu.local. to 192.168.1.52
Oct 8 12:32:07 rock dhcpd: Added reverse map from 52.1.168.192.in-addr.arpa. to ubuntu.local.
Oct 8 12:34:15 rock dhcpd: DHCPDISCOVER from dc:a6:32:3a:02:6c via enp0s31f6
Oct 8 12:34:15 rock dhcpd: DHCPOFFER on 192.168.1.54 to dc:a6:32:3a:02:6c via enp0s31f6
Oct 8 12:34:15 rock dhcpd: DHCPREQUEST for 192.168.1.54 (192.168.1.6) from dc:a6:32:3a:02:6c via enp0s31f6
Oct 8 12:34:15 rock dhcpd: DHCPACK on 192.168.1.54 to dc:a6:32:3a:02:6c via enp0s31f6

First Contact

Cool! They’re on the network! Let’s ssh in and see what we’ve got with our new Ubuntu 20.04 Raspberries!

Looks like we have a winner! The initial name and password is “ubuntu”. Type that and then get ready to repeat that and then type in a new password. Ubuntu FORCES you to change your password and then hangs up on you! So do as you’re told and then ssh right back into the same IP address and log in with your new password.

I’ll put up another post with what I’m finding in my brand new UBUNTU flavored Raspberry PI!