Does anyone know the status of Ubuntu MATE for Raspberry Pi 3 B & B+? I thought it was supposed to be released when 18.04.1 comes out for desktop?
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They're still being worked on, but there has been a slight delay. They were originally intended to come out around the time of 18.04.1.
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From the blog:
“We’re planning on releasing Ubuntu MATE images for the Raspberry Pi after that 18.10 release is out, in October 2018. It takes usually takes about a month to get the Raspberry Pi images built and tested, but we’ve encountered some challenges with the 18.04 based images which has delayed their release. Hopefully we’ll have something in time for Christmas 2018 :-)”
I guess raspberry pi images don’t generate the headlines anymore. Step forward the GPD Pocket images…
No. But there is only one dev working on that project. From what i know the work on the pi version started after the 18.04 release but there was some big problems. The GPD version it’s much easier to make then the pi version.
P.S use the search function of the forum and don’t spamm all the time the same question thanks.
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Short notes:
- I have modified installation image of 16.04 LTS for my 3 B+.
2..Then I have simply done do-release-upgrade on it. Currently it looks as follows:
I am still very interested in refreshing the images for the Raspberry Pi.
I’ve had a lot going on with my family over the last 6 months or so and a few things had to give, one of which has been working on the Pi images, by comparison, the GPD Pocket images took just a few hours to make.
Starting 29th October I will have the capacity to work on refreshing the images for the Raspberry Pi 2/3/3+ and I welcome the involvement from any community members who are interested in collaborating 
Planning for the new Pi images starts today and something I will flesh out next week.
I want to introduce a change of direction with regard to how the Pi images of Ubuntu MATE are produced. My thoughts are aligned with what @stillwinter has suggested, and I’d like to make a “real” Ubuntu using the Ubuntu provided kernels rather than the hybrid I’ve created in the past.
I’d also like to dodge the massive effort of side-porting a heap of Python modules and applications in a PPA, that is a massive time sink. My feeling is that piwheels/ can solve the Python module requirements and I’m already working with the Raspberry Pi Foundation on creating Snaps of their prefered applications. So a future Ubuntu MATE for the Pi would effectively be a vanilla Ubuntu MATE with minimal modifications to tune it for the Pi. VLC will not feature in the Pi image, preferring instead tomxplayer from @Meticulus.
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I don't know C (got a good Python base, though), but I'd be happy to test images and file bug reports, and I imagine there would be others willing to do so also.
I’ll write a more detailed reply, but for the time being here are the scripts I used to create xubuntu for the pi https://1drv.ms/u/s!AvHY_kl4hMB4gQM56ORE2aveZ_CQ . Armhf and arm64 work pretty much the same apart from dtb files are in a Broadcom folder on arm64. Feel free to use the preseed files I used in xubuntu. With them you have everything to create a U-mate installer. The scripts I included in the zip to create an image from an OEM install are a bit hackish, probably best to ignore them.
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The snaps experience on Raspbian leaves a bit to be desired at the moment. Snaps for Ubuntu MATE should improve things across the stream in Raspbian. Outside of testing on live hardware, commitments at work will hold me back on contributing much.
I have no interest in Ubuntu mate so I won’t become directly involved in producing installers/images for the distro. I’m not even that interested in the raspberry pi. However, it is cheap, low powered and is a capable desktop machine and those combination of things interest me.
I’ve already raised quite a number of bugs to try and improve things in Ubuntu. Most of the preseeding in the xubuntu installer is to overcome out-dated packages, or missing bits like WiFi firmware. Unless you can get WiFi/Bluetooth firmware into the Ubuntu archives, then some sort of ppa is always going to be needed to make things work out of the box.
Currently the way Ubuntu boots the pi in the server images makes no sense at all. I’ve re-used the flash-kernel package, but it is not ideal. You can’t swap a card from the pi2 to a pi3, and the overlays directory is not updated on a kernel update. Debian’s raspi3-firmware package is an even more crazy way of doing it.
The best long term approach is to adopt grub2 like opensuse. This can be done now in generic arm64. All that is missing from grub-installer is a way to tell it that the media is removable. I’ve thought about writing a patch for that, but since practically every bug I’ve submitted has been ignored, it seemed like a waste of time!
Recently I’ve been messing about with v4l2 which I think I have working. There are some patches to enable this in chromium in Linux that I plan to try. This would possibly be a candidate for a snap?
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need this release very badly
ie. it’s fine if there is an official release of mate, raspberry pi model 3 b+
there is absolubtely no way I am going to get into a “you too can install mate on raspberry pi3b+” (lengthy instructions). I want an image, I want the official mate for the b+, from ubuntu. I want it installing, asking for the network id (as the 16.04)
been using it (model b, 16.04) … really need it for the new one.
sorry posted question elsewhere before I saw this thread. Xmas eh? 1 dev on it? 
This seems like a logical approach. I've installed Mate desktop on raspbian lite multiple times and it runs quite well considering the hardware limitations of the Pi 3 Model B. Firefox and Chromium both consume to many system resources to be practical. OMX Player works exceptionally well and consumes an amazingly low amount of system resources. Therefore, tomxplayer should work equally well. Assuming raspi-config will still be included.
If there are any release candidates made available for testing I have a spare Pi 3 Model B available to use for that purpose.
These are the preseed files I used https://1drv.ms/u/s!AvHY_kl4hMB4gQjZxFejoCdyAOZu
For the armhf xubuntu-core image I first built a normal installer. For some reason xubuntu-core doesn’t like bits of ubiquity which is why I turned it into an image. I did an oem install to an sd card and then used the scripts to copy it to a smaller blank disk image. Obviously this is an inefficient way of doing it, but it is easier than re-writing large chunks of livecd-rootfs. The flavour-maker script could also be adapted to do it.
My own feeling is that we shouldn’t be providing images, but should be providing install media that works like other architectures. I’m sure a lot of people may disagree with me on that.
I’ve got a bug open to enable the pi modules in the generic armhf kernel. I’ll probably send a patch to the kernel mailing list to try and nudge it along. If I can get that fixed, then I’ll start playing around with grub2 and see what needs to be done to start producing generic armhf/arm64 isos for 19.04.
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Fedora 29 has WiFi working out the box now https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]/thread/ZLO7EAYV7VRX3ZBWJ2IBSMPDQNOMKXPD/
Bug I raised on launchpad about this https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-firmware/+bug/1713276
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How is it working for you? Everything functioning as it should be?
Please don’t go offtopic. Let’s have this pots only for ubuntu mate py version . Use internal massaging for offtopic chat’s. Thanks
I’m not sure about Bluetooth, but other things work as expected on my RPi 3B+ running Ubuntu MATE 18.04.1 LTS.
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Bug to enable hardware accelerated video playback in chromium https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+bug/1799686