Hi I’ve read the threads from 2 years ago saying that Jetson Nano is not planned to support ubuntu 20.04-- but when I look at the release notes for L4T 32.7.2 it says clearly:
NVIDIA® Jetson™ Linux Driver Package (L4T) is the board support package for Jetson. It includes Linux Kernel 4.9, bootloader, NVIDIA drivers, flashing utilities, sample filesystem based on Ubuntu 18.04, and more for the Jetson platform.
Whereas in 32.7.3 and .4 the message is changed to:
NVIDIA® Jetson™ Linux Driver Package is the board support package for Jetson. It includes Linux Kernel, UEFI bootloader, NVIDIA drivers, flashing utilities, sample filesystem based on Ubuntu, and more for the Jetson platform.
It no longer mentions that support is limited to ubuntu 18.04. Does this mean its now expected to work? This is for a production application and we don’t really have the resources to do fullsome exploration. We don’t want our fleet of IoT devices to get stuck on a dead OS.
No, L4L 32.* goes along with Jetpack 4, which is based on Ubuntu 18.04. 20.04 is not officially supported, i.e. NVidia won’t help you with that.
However, there are projects like
I haven’t tried them, but they should work. If you use them especially in a commercial product you are totally on your own and won’t receive any help from NVidia.
In a commercial setting it might make sense to change over to Orin Nano which will also receive at least Jetpack 6 with Ubuntu 22.04, which will receive updates until 2027.
Thanks-- we might play arround with qengineering’s images but we probably won’t switch to Nano Orin, because of the cost of the module, the cost of recertification, and retrofitting them into existing devices.
We use balena for our device deployment so I will ask over there if anyone has had any success deploying Qengineering’s image.
Then be aware that your clock is ticking. Ubuntu 20.04 has got 18 month of support left until May 2025. You need to know that you are sitting on an aging platform.
The reason this is a pain point for us is that we are application developers using NodeJS. Definitely not experts in low level operating system stuff. We are currently stuck on Node v16 because precompiled binaries for Node v18+ depend on kernal 5+ so this means were stuck on a dead version of nodeJs and a dead version of multiple other packages.
I guess one solution would be to compile our own binaries of nodeJs 20.04. but that’s a rabbit hole we don’t really want to go down.
Please be aware, albeit they created an Ubuntu20.04 image for the Nano, it still is based on Kernel 4.9.253! There is no support for more recent kernel versions to my knowlege.