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To my understanding, the Raspberry Pi supports Debian. Has anyone had any success running Ubuntu on it?

Oliver Salzburg
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5 Answers5

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From the Official FAQ Page:

What Linux distros will be supported at launch?

Fedora, Debian and ArchLinux will be supported from the start. We hope to see support from other distros later. (Because of issues with newer releases of Ubuntu and the ARM processor we are using, Ubuntu can’t commit to support Raspberry Pi at the moment.) You will be able to download distro images from us as soon as the Raspberry Pi is released, and we will also be selling pre-loaded SD cards shortly after release.

Edit

It seems that since the launch of Raspberry Pi 2, Snappy Ubuntu Core can be run on RP2.

Thanks to a very successful collaboration between the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, we are pleased to announce that Snappy Ubuntu Core is available for the Raspberry Pi 2, the latest Raspberry Pi family member.

-- https://insights.ubuntu.com/2015/02/02/snappy-ubuntu-core-on-raspberry-pi-2/

However, it should be noted for the anxious that this is not a desktop version of Ubuntu.

Edit #2

It seems that now both Raspberry Pi 2 and 3 support installing Ubuntu. You can find official documentation for installing Ubuntu on a Raspberry Pi in Ubuntu's Developer Documentation.

Community
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Kyle Macey
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  • Thanks, @Jesse! I'll see if I can update it soon with current information. Or feel free to submit an edit yourself if you'd like. Either way! – Kyle Macey Dec 11 '17 at 16:54
  • I hope my comment did not sound offensive, my intention was actually to warn people reading the answer, and I forgot that you would be notified. I see now that the comment could easily be taken as offensive from your side :-( –  Dec 11 '17 at 17:42
  • @Jesse No problem at all! Thanks for the reminder to keep things updated! – Kyle Macey Dec 11 '17 at 22:17
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Short answer. You cannot currently install Ubuntu.

There is no port for ARMv6. Earlier versions (jaunty, karmic) had limited support.

Alex Chamberlain
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Jivings
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A community maintained Ubuntu 14.04 LTS install image for Raspberry Pi 2 Model B (RP2). This will NOT work on RP1. Change log current as of 2015-04-06
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM/RaspberryPi

This image was initiated by an employee of Canonical (the company that makes Ubuntu) but he did so on his own personal time. http://www.finnie.org/2015/02/16/raspberry-pi-2-update-ubuntu-14-04-image-available/

Rick
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Yes, on a Raspberry Pi 2. Any Raspberry Pi 1 will not run Ubuntu.

The Pi 2 can run Ubuntu Mate: https://ubuntu-mate.org/raspberry-pi/

Merlin04
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As @Merlin04 said, a raspberry pi 2 runs Ubuntu Mate 15.04. However, I've found that the OS by default is a bit heavy and slow at times (videos and audio are really bad).

To combat this, I use the LXDE desktop environment instead of the default Mate environment (sudo apt-get install lubuntu-desktop); it has very light applications for file-handling, etc. For videos, I use SMPlayer and set the cache size to 20,000 kb.

Aside from these two issues, no complaints :) it works exactly like the normal Ubuntu.

Side note: you can also install Ubuntu Mate 15.04 Core, which is just the command line (~50MB vs ~1.2GB for the full desktop with GUI)

Abhishek Divekar
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