Support for Raspberry Pi 4?

I won't be giving at ETA because I'll be working on this project in my spare time which will be in short supply in the coming months. I have 2 Pi 4 devices and am just as keen to get them running Ubuntu MATE as anyone else :slightly_smiling_face:

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Totally understand and look forward to any developments....keep up the superb work... :+1::+1:

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This is an attempt to bring some realism, honesty and a 'can do' attitude to this thread.

Old images won't work with a pi 4 because they won't have the new bootloader firmware or Linux kernel. The Ubuntu packages that deal with these are Linux-firmware-raspi2, flash-kernel and Linux-raspi2. You can check for updates by looking them up on launchpad.net. Wimpy does not/never has maintained these packages. They are spin offs from Ubuntu core. For progress on Ubuntu core see this thread https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/support-for-raspberry-pi-4/11970 . Ubuntu core will also require a new version of u-boot for the pi4 (yet to be written).

Until these packages are in place there is nothing for Wimpy to do. And then it is just the trivial task of re-spinning the images.

For pi4 progress in the generic linux kernel check out this thread https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]/thread/OFIGDPUDFOA3BB33GVCDHTSGZ2Q77APK/

If you want to run Ubuntu on the pi4 now then I suggest you copy the kernel and firmware from Raspbian. This is how ubuntu mate 16.04 used to work. If you don't know how to do this then look up the many threads on getting the 3B+ working.

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Is anyone at Canonical working on this for Ubuntu Server or any other flavor? anyone knows of any update?

Seems to be some progress in Core - https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/support-for-raspberry-pi-4/11970/23 Hopefully this leads to progress on MATE release

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While not an official installation, I have managed to bring Ubuntu-MATE 18.04 up on a Pi 4 as described in the thread "Is there Ubuntu MATE for the Pi 4".

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I see that 18.04.2 Ubuntu Raspberry Pi 3 image download links are down everywhere. Does this mean we might be getting Pi 4 support soon?!?!?!? Let conspiracy theories start.

Maybe... maybe not.... the script that deploys the website was pointing at non-existent Beta 2 images... :thinking:

The downloads for the current versions has been fixed. :+1:

I have two of the Pi 4's w/4gb on order ...should be here in a week. (Aug 16th.) Was hoping the Ubuntu Mate for the 4 would coincide, but my review here indicates there is NO date set.

Your efforts are appreciated by many. Thank You.

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Hi, I am very interested on the progress here. My Raspberry Pi 4 is ready and waiting for Ubuntu Server and/or Ubuntu Mate.

Keep up the good work.

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@Hal58 has written a guide on how to get the existing Ubuntu MATE 18.04 running on a Raspberry Pi 4, using Raspbian and a Raspberry Pi 3:

It's worth having a look in the meantime until a new image is produced.

Was super excited to get my raspberry pi 4!

The Rpi3 B+ was just not fast enough to make a server, but the Rpi4 is. Torrents, DVR for IP cameras, and video player (it should be better at 4k than my Nvidia Shield TV is).

Got the pi4 in, installed Raspbian, plugged in my 8TB external drive and of course, ERROR. Won't recognize file system. Checked for solutions, seems like not many people have the rpi4 yet so I couldn't figure it out. Tried multiple external drives, none of them work! No worries, I'll just install Ubuntu!

That got me here. Will have to wait! Excited for the first release!

What file system is on your hard drive?

Ntfs. Nothing fancy. I have not tried a freshly formatted drive. I cant.. I don't have an extra 8tb lying around to copy it over if it works.

All the drives work fine in windows.

The second post I made in that thread describes how to get a Pi4 up with MATE 18.04 via an upgrade from 16.04 and actually results in a more stable system. I have done it several times and just put a 4 GB Pi 4 in service as a workstation with an SSD in a USB3 enclosure with a clone of the 'PI_ROOT' partition on the SSD. Over 300 MB/s reported by hdparm and it is FAST!

The first procedure I documented has a glitch in that the system won't show the login prompt until I press CTRL-ALT-F1 (or F2, 3, etc) and then just wait and the login prompt will appear. Another problem that seems to appear in all installations is that is you don't see the powerup script try using the other HDMI connector. I have had different installations using alternate video ports.

That’s because Ntfs is a proprietary file system of windows. That’s why a Linux install can’t read the drives out of the box. There are some workarounds, but if you want to use the drive dedicated with the pi it’s better to reformat in something like ext4. Ubuntu is not going to help you with this any way better than raspbian.

There is a distro called RaspEX Build 190807 is now available to download, though it's not based on Ubuntu Mate: https://news.softpedia.com/news/raspex-project-brings-ubuntu-19-10-eoan-ermine-with-lxde-to-the-raspberry-pi-4-527133.shtml

It looks like Raspbian, which already works on the RPi 4.

Here is the way how I got Mate running on RPi4:

This method is based on installing Ubuntu Server and then replacing the firmware by Raspbian firmware and is based on the following instructions:

  1. Get image from:

http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/releases/bionic/release/ubuntu-18.04.2-preinstalled-server-armhf+raspi3.img.xz

  1. Unpack and burn into SD Card:
xz -d ubuntu-18.04.2-preinstalled-server-armhf+raspi3.img.xz
sudo ddrescue -D --force ubuntu-18.04.2-preinstalled-server-armhf+raspi3.img /dev/sdx

Insert/mount the micro SD card in your computer and navigate to the “boot” partition. Delete everything in the existing folder so it is completely empty.

  1. Download firmware from:

https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/archive/master.zip

The latest firmware is everything inside master.zip “boot” folder (including subfolders). We want to extract everything from “boot” (including subfolders) to our micro SD’s “boot” partition that we just emptied in the previous step. Don’t forget to get the “overlays” folder as that contains overlays necessary to boot correctly.

  1. Create/Update config.txt and cmdline.txt

Navigate to the micro SD /boot/ partition. Create a blank cmdline.txt file with the following line:

dwc_otg.fiq_fix_enable=2 console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 rootwait rootflags=noload net.ifnames=0

Next we are going to create config.txt with the following content:

## Enable audio (loads snd_bcm2835)
dtparam=audio=on
[pi4]
[all]
hdmi_force_hotplug=1
hdmi_ignore_edid=0xa5000080
hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=82
disable_overscan=1
  1. Final steps

Connect Ethernet cable, put in the card into RPI and boot.
It may take up to 10 minutes to boot, especially if mouse is not connected, so be patient.
Once Raspberry is running, connect to it using ssh, with user/password : ubuntu/ubuntu
and then run the following commands as root.

apt-get update && apt-get -y upgrade 
apt-get -y purge unattended-upgrades
apt remove flash-kernel initramfs-tools
apt-get -y install mate-desktop-environment lightdm
apt-get -y remove lxd lxd-client
apt-get purge cloud-init
rm -rf /etc/cloud/
rm -rf /var/lib/cloud/
apt-get -y install haveged
systemctl enable haveged

  1. Update firmware
    Finally, you may want to update the firmware and install modules:
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware
cp -r firmware/boot/* /boot/firmware/
cp -r firmware/modules/* /lib/modules
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