I joined the forum today. Coming to look for help with MATE on PI 4. Complete noob. Well not completely... I was using the ODROID XU4 computer for about 2 years with Armbian OS. I couldn't get Ubuntu to work well on it. So I settled for Armbian which did the job as a server, but as a desktop I couldn't get it to be a great experience. Then the USB3 ports on the XU4 died, and after some research I found that this was a common problem with the XU4 and I wasn't thrilled with the idea of getting a replacement. Well it seems like the moon and the stars were perfectly aligned for me to find that the PI 4 computer is available, with equal/better processing power to XU4 when it's overclocked, and Ubuntu is available for it. And there is a whole community of PI users helping each other. I am immediately sold.
Now I got everything up and running. But I ran into some minor issues, only the kind of issues that a newbie would have.
I was trying to follow this guy on youtube doing a temperature test and I found out that my Ubuntu MATE image for PI 4 doesn't come with some raspberry pi tools such as rpi-eeprom-update (for firmware updates) and vcgencmd (for hardware sensor access). The official raspberry pi OS "Raspbian" has those tools but I don't want to use Raspbian. Can I add raspi tools to Ubuntu?
I tried putting this line in /etc/apt/sources.list:
N: Skipping acquire of configured file 'main/binary-arm64/Packages' as repository 'http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian buster InRelease' doesn't support architecture 'arm64'
Because, obviously I did the wrong thing which was to copy the line from someone elses' settings that I found online. And try as hard as I could, the answer to whether I could download rpi tools to Ubuntu was not resolved through google search. Is there is a kind or wise soul out there to point me in the right direction, I would be most grateful. If it can't be done, then I will want to find some equivalent tools. Specifically I want to be able to record / plot the temperature sensors.
There does not appear to be an authoritative answer on availability of rpi-eeprom-update for Ubuntu 20.04.
Please take note of James Chambers's comment from his GitHub:
Ahh yes the new bootloader firmware utility.
This utility is only available on Raspbian at the moment. I think mostly nobody dares to risk bricking everyone's Pis because if you look at the source code at GitHub - raspberrypi/rpi-eeprom: Installation scripts and binaries for the Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry Pi 5 bootloader EEPROMs it makes extensive use of the /opt/vc tools (some of which are not open source). The 64 bit build of these tools is known to be partially incomplete and poorly tested. I build the absolute latest vc tools in this image but I wouldn't trust them to perform this update correctly.
Right now no distro has dared to include this utility and I definitely wouldn't be the first because I would never put all of your Pis at risk like that. If something goes wrong when using this utility you can brick the Pi.
The most important thing to understand is that the rpi-eeprom bootloader updates are permanent. Reformatting your SD card won't affect them as they are actually flashed onto a special EEPROM chip inside the Pi. This means that if you have a spare SD card or just install Raspbian and then install the bootloader updates you can install anything you want after that.
I actually keep a spare SD card with Raspbian on it just to safely flash these updates.
Thank you for the info. The comments from James explain a lot. Also it helps to illustrate the challenges that a dev will face when porting to pi 4. I'm truly appreciative that it has come this far.