Raspberry

The latest Pi firmware has an option for a boot menu so you can boot from SD, USB or SSD.
The hotkey during boot is the .

Copying an Image to SD

Using `dd` Command

How to copy from your Linux PC an image file to an SD-card.

dd bs=4M if=<image-file> of=/dev/sdX status=progress

Where bs=4M means a block size of 4 MByte is used. Where conv=fsync means to physically write output file data before finishing also write metadata. Where status=progress makes it show progress.

This is all done as root user of course.

Using Raspberry Pi Imager

Install package rpi-imager.

Run the imager and do an easy installation.

Change the Hostname

To change the hostname use the command hostnamectl. Do not edit the file /etc/hostname.

hostnamectl set-hostname <hostname>

Set Root Password

From the default user use sudo set the password.

sudo passwd <root-password>

Setup Networking

See page on network manager for that.

Disable Display Manager

When no graphics is needed free up resource by disabling the display manager The display manager for Ubuntu Mate is gdm.

systemctl stop gdm.service
systemctl disable gdm.service

Install Some (Needed) Packages

apt install joe mc git

Copying SD to Local Storage

Create Image File from SD

First an image needs to be created from the SD-card using another system.

dd bs=<sector-size> if=/dev/sdX of=<image-file> count=<amount-sectors> status=progress

When the initial image is 7650410496 bytes and the SD is bigger then that copy should be limited. So when the sector size is 512, the amount of sectors than is 14942208.

Resulting in:

dd bs=512 if=/dev/sdX of=<image-file> count=14942208 status=progress

Copying SD to Local Storage (when applicable)

dd bs=<sector-size> if=<image-file> of=/dev/mmcblkX status=progress

Overclocking System

On the fat32 boot partition modify the file config.txt and add the following section to that file. When the Pi is running the same file is located here /boot/formware/config.txt.

RPi4 Config

[all]
over_voltage=6
arm_freq=2000
gpu_freq=750

RPi5 Config

[all]
max_framebuffers=2
arm_freq=2900
#arm_freq_min=1000
gpu_freq=1050
over_voltage_delta=60000

Install KDE Desktop on Ubuntu Server (24.04)

Install the package kubuntu-desktop.

When the sddm service is not starting and the startx application reports an error like the following in the log file:

VGA arbiter: cannot open kernel arbiter, no multi-card support

Create the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-fbdev.conf having the following content.

Section "Device"
    Identifier "Framebuffer"
    Driver "fbdev"
    Option "fbdev" "/dev/fb0"
EndSection

Enable the sddm service if not already.

systemctl enable sddm

Set the default target opf systemd from multi-user.target to graphical.target so sddm can start without errors.

systemctl set-default graphical.target