Status of Ubuntu MATE 18.04 for Raspberry Pi 3 B & B+?

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 :slight_smile: 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? :frowning:

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.

Another bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/livecd-rootfs/+bug/1765628

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Bug to enable hardware accelerated video playback in chromium https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/chromium-browser/+bug/1799686

FWIW, I have Ubuntu 18.04.1 / MATE 1.20.1 running on an ODROID XU4 and it is MUCH smoother and faster than a MATE install I did on a Pi. Don't get me wrong, I am a Pi user and in fact have built a major work-related printed-circuit board interface gizmo around the Pi that works great. However, the Korean-built XU4 is a much more capable small computer than the Pi and is what I use for my cheap home Linux machine. The ODROID community is smaller but very devoted. Worth a look.

Check out the direct Pi3-to-XU4 comparison graphs in the links below:

https://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php

Here's a drop-in, ready -to-burn Bionic Beaver disk image for the XU4:

https://wiki.odroid.com/odroid-xu4/os_images/linux/ubuntu_4.14/20180501

https://www.hardkernel.com/main/shop/good_list.php?lang=en

Does mainline kernel manage VPU video hardware decoding for pi ?
I am not sur about that, I think that only work wirh raspberry pi kernel and binary blob (32 bits only so armhf).
So I don’t think omxplayer neither tomxplayer will work with ubuntu kernels (~mainline).

Not currently, but it should do soon*. Patches for vc4 using v4l2 have been knocking about since early this year.

Ubuntu has a Linux-raspi2 kernel which is what is used in ubuntu-core and the server images.

*I say soon, but note that 6 years after the original pi, they still have not had a sound driver fully accepted into the mainline kernel.

I currently can’t install linux-image*raspi2 on my Pi 3. Wish I know what’s missing.

Edit: I just realized you’re the same guy who replied :smiley:

Hi wimpy,
New raspbian image include VLC with hw decode. Still some bugs but almost perfect. Maybe it can be a good idea and package it with next release ?

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