Would anyone out there in Raspberry Pi 2 world care for instructions on how to move / partition to a USB or perhaps a ready to go image for buring to your SD card for firmware and another for your hard drive? Please let me know and will create whatever has interest. May even do both if peope want to get more hands on
Will G
Yes, interested. I’ve also spent the last few days working on Ubuntu MATE 15.10 for the Raspberry Pi 2, it is shaping up very nicely 
Which process Wimpy… I can write up procedures for downloading img file and extracting it and creating two img files from there so people know they can trust the procedure and that i didnt tamper with it. Not sure if you ever used /dev/loop to mount a img file so you can use gparted to edit it or not. I find that procedure easier so i can have cat read partitions , pipe though pv to monitor and then take stdin and write it with dd to a file… I can also do that myself then tar.gz the results back to you… Can do both just let me know which one or both you want. Also shall I wait til 15.10 is released or would you like the HDD image to be processed for it as well. Btw, is there a 15.10 img ready for download?
Anything ready for testing yet? Sounds promising 
Doing the final testing now.
If you yourself are creating an image for use on a hdd with the Pi, Ill be waiting for you to create it instead of starting my own fan project. Id rather use yours than create one myself and post instructions that may not work for everyone
Hello, Monery. Yes, I would be interested in installing Ubuntu Mate on an USB stick on a Raspberry Pi 2.
I am not a Linux profi. I messed around a bit with Raspberry, and I am a bit disappointed. Perhaps Ubuntu Mate adds a bit more functionality or more tools, not sure. And perhaps it would run faster from an USB stick than from that microSD card.
I would install it on an USB stick and play with it around for sure.
Thanks.
depending on your microSD card, your performance will vary… I was running mine on the 8GB card that was supplied from the kit i ordered, can’t remember who I got it from, but I thought the performance was really bad… When I replaced that card with a 32GB card Class 10 card from Sandisk, I really noticed the performance go up with Ubuntu MATE. I did some overclocking and timing adjustment and I really got it running FAST, well fast for a quad core ARM device anyways… Also you can NEVER remove the microSD card completely. There is no BIOS. First thing the Pi 2 does is looks for a FAT16 partition on the SD card to get things rolling. After that, all you need to do is move the OS to another block device such as a hard drive or a USB flash drive. There are some files your need to edit manually. Once that is done the microSD card will be for that Pi and that Pi only… it MAY work in others, but your need your USB drive or hard drive or whatever with you as well.
Totally unrelated infomation from this thread is that the default timings used for CPU speed, GPU, and memory seem to be there for rock solid stability and not performance.
IMPORTANT NOTICE!!!
no all Pi 2’s are created equil!!! I am not sure what overclocking works best for you, if you want to overclock, or if my values will make your Pi 2 unstable or not. Always assume that if you overclock, even if the dealer says its ok, and we will support it, that overclocking will kill it and it will die begging you why did you make me go faster than I was designed to do. If you would like those values, I will provide if you so desire
Monery
Is it possible to do a dist-upgrade on an existing Ubuntu MATE for Raspberry PI 2 15.04 or must we download a new image and proceed from start?
With kind greetings,
Marti van Lin, Maastricht (Netherlands)
Now just so there is no confusion I am not part of the Ubuntu MATE team with that said…
I have done “sudo do-release-upgrade -d” myself on my Pi 2 and obtained a beta copy. I had mixed results but I believe it was a bug in the upgrade process, not a feature. I ended messing up the OS a few times because of it. From the release notes that Ive read I see no reason why we will not be able to do it once 15.10 is released. If the team will be offering us a tool to use different kernels and the FAT16 boot partition is not going to be big enough to store all the apps, we may have to use gparted to do some resizing. Other than that I dont forsee a problem as of yet
Monery
Doing a release upgrade of Ubuntu MATE for the Pi 2 is absolutely not supported and will not completely correctly. Aside from that, you’d need large microSDHC card and it would take ages to complete.
Backup your data, flash a new card and then restore your data.
Ah well that sucks. Will this be the case going from 15.04 to 15.10, or will the Ubunto MATE team ever support the procedure. If clean installation will only ever be supported are there plans for a simple tool that can backup home folders and make a list of additional packages that were installed to ease the growing pain?
You are right about one thing. About 4.5 hours to upgrade OS on my 32Gb microDS. Hdd is less than 90 minutes
This is only the case for the Pi 2 image, release upgrading Ubuntu MATE 15.04 onwards (for i386, amd64, and PowerPC) is supported and works.
It is due to the unconventional nature of the Raspberry Pi kernel.
Well in that case Ill be looking forward to the first LTS or Rasp Pi 3 whichever comes first. In the meantime Ill be learning how the build-image.sh works and see how it works and see if I can do my hdd/flash hybrid with it. Love the Pi 2… Hate the slow I/O on the storage. Is anyone planning rewritting it in the meantime or is it safe to base my work on it for at least 6 months?
For anyone following this thread, I apologize for disseapearing. Life has a way of getting in the way of things, and life sure did get in the way.
I’ve recently got into playing with my Rasp Pi2 again today only to find that it was locked up… Not even sure why. After rebooting, I went into emergency mode. Long story short, had to remove the hdd and run e2fsck on it only to find out that there were errors all over the file system. It is an old drive, usb powered, and the Pi 2 it was plugged into was overclocked. I have sense decided to move back to the microSD only for storage model as I try to determine what is causing the problem of corruped file systems on the / partition. Since I have time to play with it, I will make sure that the Pi 2 itself is healthy before trying to do some additional experiements…
For the Pi 2 dev team here on Ubuntu MATE…
When I first started this idea, short of using dd to move data from the 2nd partition to the first on the external drive I am using, only reference that I was able to find was inside the cmdline.txt file that says
dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=tty1 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline rootwait quiet splash
I changed it to dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=tty1 root=/dev/sda1 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline rootwait quiet splash. Is there any other settings that I mave have missed to make this work right? Shall I change any settings on that line that maybe I don’t understand?
Let me know and I will make another attempt in a week or so because, microSD for any serious I/O to block storage really stinks with flash memory
Monery
There’s a little “HOW-TO: Moving a FS to USB/HDD drive” tutorial on how to move a file system to an external USB or HDD storage device. Also the article “Using an External Drive as a Raspberry Pi Root Filesystem” can be of interest.
Maybe this can be elaborated further for UbuntuMATE for the RPi 2 B device.
I did try the 2nd link you provided for adafruit on moving root fs to a hdd and it worked like a charm. I didn’t have to change a thing and it worked great! That is until my old hdd I was using failed, then I used a big bulky 3.5 inch til the enclosure stopped working. I am 99.9% certain that plugging into a Pi or using Ubuntu-MATE had NOTHING to do with the failure, just bad luck and old equipment. Until I get some more time on my hands and some additional hardware, I consider the experience a success and a well designed system is in place for people that wish to attempt this. If your looking for an inexpensive and fast way to get more speed out of your Pi2 and you like Ubuntu MATE like I do, this was only a partial success. Granted it is fast, but from the amount of money your going to spend on making your Pi2 faster for general computing usage, my opinion is to spend a bit more money and get yourself a low end PC based on AMD64 arch.
With that said, I consider the project closed and I will not be spending any more time on it.
I do want to thank everyone involved in assisting me on this endeavour. If you have any questions about this yourself, Id be happy to pass along any experience I have obtained. Feel free to ask any questions you wish, I will monitor this thread until it is closed
hey, i have a 5tb external hard drive i tried pulgging it in my raspi 2 it just kept blinking and my mouse and keyboard ketp stopping to, is it cuz there it not enough power or something?
ok i looked at this article here https://learn.adafruit.com/external-drive-as-raspberry-pi-root?view=all
“he Raspberry Pi doesn’t have enough power to run most external hard drives or SSDs, so unless you have a drive with its own power supply, you’ll probably need a powered USB hub.”
ok well ordering a usb hub now
Yes, please get an active USB hub with a separate power supply, and connect the power hungry HDDs to the hub. The USB sockets of the RPi device do not provide enough juice by default to operate even one HDD.