Installing Ubuntu on Raspberry Pi

20 Dec 2021 12:17 raspberry-pi ubuntu

My Raspberry Pi 4 cluster is currently 32-bit. It’s got a 32-bit kernel with a 32-bit userland. But I need to run 64-bit software on it. I looked into upgrading it in place, but that’s infeasible. So I need to reinstall it.

This time I’m going to use Ubuntu 21.10 rather than Raspbian / Raspi OS.

Since there’s nothing of value on my cluster, I simply re-flashed the USB storage of each node with Ubuntu Server by following the instructions on the Ubuntu website.

I installed the nodes one at a time, because I’m using ssh, and it would be easy to mix the nodes up.

So, for each one:

  1. Insert the USB stick and turn the node on.
  2. Wait for a few minutes while the installer does its thing.
  3. Log in and reset the password.
  4. Change the hostname; reboot.
  5. Copy my SSH public key.

Log in; reset password

The installer uses the name ubuntu, so log into the node:

ssh ubuntu@192.168.28.155   # password is 'ubuntu'

It immediately prompts to change the password, so do that.

I generated a random password by using the following:

env LC_CTYPE=C tr -dc 'a-zA-Z0-9' < /dev/urandom | head -c 16 ; echo

I used the same password for each node. I’m going to use SSH with public keys, so I’ll never need to enter it again.

Change hostname; reboot

echo 'rpi405' | sudo tee /etc/hostname
sudo shutdown -r now

Copy my SSH public key

ssh-copy-id ubuntu@rpi405

…and repeat

Then repeat, for each of the other nodes, one at a time.

Upgrade them all

Finally, update all of them (tmux synchronize-panes is your friend here):

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
sudo shutdown -r now    # new kernel; reboot

64-bit?

Yes:

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ uname -a
Linux ubuntu 5.13.0-1008-raspi #9-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT Wed Sep 29 08:27:44 UTC 2021 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ dpkg --print-architecture
arm64

Install some basics

sudo apt-get install \
    --no-install-recommends \
    vim-nox silversearcher-ag jq gron
sudo update-alternatives --set editor /usr/bin/vim.nox

mkdir "$HOME/bin"
echo 'export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin' >> ~/.bashrc

Next: reinstall k3s.