I’m about 15-20 hours into trying to setup my Jetson Orin Nano Super dev board. I have “medium” experience with this kind of thing (electrical engineer & computational scientist, more than 20 years experience incl setting up rack-mount supercomputers/HPC systems), so I had thought this would be a 30 minute (if I was VERY lucky) to 2 hour kind of commitment to get my Jetson up and running.
I’m not going to go through the full blow-by-blow, but instead try and share things which I THINK would have made my experience faster, in case this is helpful to others.
- Parts: $250 Jetson Orin Nano Super Dev Kit; $50 1TB NVMe SSD; $30 enclosure; display port video cable (or HDMI adapter); micro SD card (at least 64 GB); good quality USB-C cable; wired keyboard; wired mouse/trackball
- Software & OS: As of December 2025, Ubuntu 22 is your best option. And you want this on bare metal. You should have at least 60 GB allocated to whatever system has Ubuntu on it. I tried with Ubuntu 24 on bare metal but couldn’t get it to work (I didn’t take notes on what failed). I also couldn’t get Ubuntu 22 in a VM to work (VirtualBox total fail, UTM was a bit better, but USB connection kept dropping). I jumped through lots of hoops on this, including turning a Windows 10 laptop into a dual boot system and along the way I stranded both the Ubuntu install and the Windows 10 install. My suggestion: have 3 USB thumb drives available (16GB, 4GB, 2GB) with Ubuntu ISO (12 GB), Boot Repair (2.5 GB), and GParted (1 GB) imaged onto them as bootable. I used all of these more than once to get a dual boot setup completed.
- Gotchas with the Orin Nano dev board: start by “just” plugging it in and powering it up, plugged into a display and with keyboard and mouse connected by USB. Make sure the “out of the box” firmware is working. A small green LED on the top of the board beside the USB-C port should come on. This is only visible internally, not once it is in the enclosure. Depending on how you have the jumpers setup on the “back side” (opposite the USB ports) the board may be set to auto-power-on. If not, you may need to use your enclosure’s power on/off button. I had my wiring backwards on the enclosure power button vs. the power LED light, and there was no way to tell until I took it all apart and started over. Lost an hour there. Read your enclosure install instructions carefully, count your jumper pins carefully. Left is pin 1, right is pin 12. More details [here]. The fan should spin up when it is turned on and you should get some initial setup on the screen. And in terms of setting up the out-of-the-box Jetson dev kit, keep your life simple and use the same username & password there that you also have on your Ubuntu host system (where you run SDK Manager). Otherwise you’ll need to keep your head straight about which username & password the SDK Manager setup is asking you for as you proceed. Sometimes it is referring to package installs on the host Ubuntu system (probably AMD64 arch), and other times it is asking for the username/password for the Jetson unit.
- Once you’ve got the dev board working on its own and Ubuntu 22 installed and updated with 45 GB (maybe more) free space on disk, you can proceed.
- Install NVidia SDK Manager either by downloading the DEB file or adding the PPA repo entry and installing with
apt. Fire up the SDK Manager and login. I had issues getting the login to work properly. If you’ve got a virgin Ubuntu install make sure you’ve started up Firefox at least once before you do this. The QR code login “sort of” works as an alternative. - In terms of expectations about what should happen next: from everything I’ve read and watched (but it was confusing, and I may have mis-interpreted) you don’t want to do the MicroSD card thing if you can avoid it. Obviously if your objective is for production Jetson cards run off a MicroSD then you’ll need to go this route. For me, I’m looking to run mini LLMs (SLMs) using the NVMe SSD. If you do go the MicroSD card route, the slot is basically hidden, just above jumpers 3-6 on the bottom side of the Jetson chip itself, “upside down”. Access only possible with enclosure open. Anyway, this summary is about my setup which was to go 100% NVMe SSD. So you are about to embark on what will take 20-30 minutes of “person time” and maybe several hours of “computer time” to pull down SDK packages and firmware, build images, setup the host dev system (Ubuntu laptop) as well as the Jetson dev board (Ubuntu OS + firmware updated to 6.2), with all the Jetson software pushed to the NVMe SSD and the firmware flashed to the board. So make sure this is setup somewhere that all systems have stable power, good networking connections, and can be out of the way while you get on with life during the downloads, package builds, and flash/push to dev board operations.
- Once you are logged in to your Nvidia account through the SDK Manager the selections should be relatively obvious. This is the moment when you should use the Jetson USB-C port to plug it into your host Ubuntu 22 system. You can then select the dev board as Jetson Orin Nano and the Jetpack version as 6.2 (v7 does not currently support Jetson Orin Nano). After that you need to scroll down or look at the bottom of the SDK Manager screen to tick one or two boxes and confirm the paths to package download and host system SDK install. Because I kept having so many problems with my installations I eventually decided to do two steps and just try to get everything downloaded successfully first, THEN to go back and do the installation. So I (eventually) ticked the “download only, install later” box. This still took a few hours to complete, I don’t know why (I have blazing fast internet 100+ Gb/s typically), could have been Nvidia servers, could have been old laptop/wifi adapter. You’re going to pull down over 30GB of files. I didn’t want these to swamp my laptop storage, so I put them onto a micro SSD (on the laptop, not the one I had for the Jetson) – maybe writing to that device caused the performance issues? After these finally downloaded successfully (again: several tries, looking in the terminal it wasn’t clear why they kept failing given Ubuntu could install/update normal packages through Snap just fine, plus
aptworked from the CLI without issue), I then repeated the whole SDK Manager installation procedure, just this time I DID NOT check the “download only” box. The SDK Manager will verify checksums of all the downloaded files (this takes ages: there are hundreds of files, more than 30 GB of data – but as I said I wanted to complete things one step at a time given multiple failures when attempting “all at once” install), so while it is slow it is still much faster than downloading them all again. And then the install process kicks off. This also takes hours to complete and at certain points it will ask for input from you. Best to just check in on it from time to time and see if it is waiting for you to confirm something. Many warnings about “this is taking longer than expected” (from SDK Manager, which I just said “keep waiting”), and also Ubuntu 22 kept telling me “Connection failed” for the wifi network, even though files were pulling down just fine. Furthermore: there are red “ERROR” messages in the SDK Manager “terminal” view that don’t mean the whole thing has failed: there seem to be lots of ignorable “ERRORS” or at least the system has ways to retry so things eventually, hopefully, work. If it really does crash out it will tell you. I couldn’t find useful ways to do anything to fix/change the situation other than try again. - As for what “extra” SDK boxes and packages to install with the SDK Manager: I had ticked several but after install problems I decided just to stick with the basics and then get the other “extras” installed after.
I hope that helps someone else with their process & management of expectations on how to get the Jetson Orin Nano Super updated to the v6.2.1 firmware. Comments & questions welcome, including if there are obvious paths to make the whole process work better (though I hope I don’t have to do it again, at least not for an Orin Nano Super – maybe a DGX Spark if I get rich/lucky).
