Hi all!!
OK probably this will sound stupid but i’m a beginner with the jetson and since i wasn’t able to find any guide to help me trought this step i prefer just to ask…
I run for the first time my jetson tk1, I followed the instruction on the quick start guide and now i’m looking at my desktop environment but…i found that linux is not installed is just pre-configured and in fact there is the icon in the dock the guide me through the installation, now…i want ubuntu on my jetson, so should I follow this procedure to install ubuntu on the jetson and in that case which partition i should select or i need to download an OS image from the repo and flash again the jetson?
Jetson arrives with Ubuntu LTS 14.04 installed (settings are customized for Jetson, but it is still pure Ubuntu). Running the nVidia-specific script will then install it’s non-Ubuntu files which provide firmware and hardware accelerated file versions to replace or add to the Ubuntu installed on it. Once this is done you can refer to it as “L4T” (Linux for Tegra), but it is still Ubuntu 14.04 in terms of administration and software repositories and other packages.
In particular the home directory of a new Jetson arrives with NVIDIA-INSTALLER subdirectory…the “installer.sh” script is what adds the nVidia firmware and files and migrates from pure Ubuntu to hardware accelerated L4T.
There are times when documentation is not accurate or complete since L4T is used on more than just Jetson and has actually been around a long time. Note that the desktop is in fact X11 and must have linux running for X11 to run…X11 window managers in particular look and feel and behave quite differently from one flavor to another…which means if you were used to one graphical desktop then another may look entirely alien but still be linux…perhaps it is a different desktop than you are used to. In the case of any embedded system it is likely a smaller footprint desktop is installed compared to something like a full PC. One can separate look and feel from the underlying linux this way and provide different options depending on individual taste.
I remember some of the outdated installation procedures I saw before seem to believe Jetson arrives without an operating system…which clearly is not the case (those instructions are apparently for something before Jetson and not for Jetson itself). So yes, just use Jetson normally after it arrives. You do want to run the installer script inside of the “NVIDIA-INSTALLER” folder of your home directory to get hardware acceleration. Full operating system installation instructions are only needed to upgrade from R19.2 to something newer.
If you wish to do any kind of system update (Ubuntu package updates, such as security updates), then it is normal administration to update any system, including Jetson. Beware that there is an X11 graphics update which will overwrite one of the nVidia hardware accelerated graphics files and cause graphics mode to fail until it is put back in place. For the full story, see: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/775070/embedded-systems/notice-on-apt-get-upgrade-libglx-so-corruption/
Running the installer again should place libglx.so back in working order if you ever update Ubuntu packages and find the graphical desktop failed.