“Proper” download can be a number of ways, but not necessarily the same effort. By far the best method is to download JetPack/SDK Manager, run that, uncheck flash, and leave checked anything you want to add. The Jetson would not be put in recovery mode, but is fully booted, and has a network connection with the host PC. Then just run JetPack and have it install the checked components (presumably you’ve unchecked flash).
Note that you know your L4T release is R32.7.6, and you can start JetPack/SDKM like this and see particular releases if needed:
sdkmanager --archived-versions
(far enough in the past it was “--archivedversions”)
Jetsons are full Linux computers, with Ubuntu installed (L4T is just Ubuntu plus NVIDIA drivers…Ubuntu documentation applies). With a network connection you would typically update packages with:
sudo apt update
sudo apt-get upgrade
(this is just package update, not major version update)
You can find packages as well, but one problem people sometimes run into is if something was skipped in install, then sometimes one of the NVIDIA-specific repos was not enabled. More generically, even if the content is not for NVDIA-specific repos, then you might still need to enable a report to see special packages, e.g., debug packages, source code packages, so on. You might need to just check if something you want is visible or not, and if it is visible with something like “apt search <package name or key word>”, then use the Ubuntu mechanism (e.g., “sudo apt-get install <package name>”.
Some packages must only be from the Jetson repositories. GPU drivers are the most common case. The GPU is an integrated GPU (iGPU) wired directly to the memory controller, whereas the drivers you see for non-Jetson products are intended to work with discrete GPUs (dGPU) attacked indirectly via the PCIe bus.
You don’t necessarily need any of the repositories which are commented out in “/etc/apt/sources.list”, but you could examine it and look at the ones which are commented out as there might be something you are looking for not fitting in the default repo categories. If you uncomment one, then run “sudo apt update” so package searches will see the new content.
Regarding SDKM having trouble connecting to the download server, can you give some more detail?
The problem of not using sdkmanager is that you’ll have to know the package you are interested in. As an example, there might be confusion if running “apt search cuda”; in theory only compatible cuda packages would show up, but a lot which is compatible won’t be there unless the correct repo is enabled, and if you don’t know the exact name of a package, then you can spend a long time searching for it before finding it (JetPack/SDKM knows the exact package list and does not have that issue).
As long as the GPU or bootloader is not involved, then pretty much every Ubuntu arm64/aarch64 package you see in an either apt search or from an outside .deb provider will work. CUDA and GPU drivers are on the list of things which you never want to install from non-Jetson repos.
It is probably easier to fix the JetPack/SDKM issue than to search for every package name, but someone else here probably has a list, or at least repository list. If JetPack/SDKM cannot be saved (it usually can if the host PC is the correct release…login and network issues can be fixed), then it might be good to start a new topic to get the list of optional package names and their repository specs (if you have that list it is trivial to install everything without JetPack).
