Initial setup experience for home use is miserable

Accelerated Computing DGX Spark / GB10 User Forum DGX Spark / GB10
1

The user experience on the initial DGX Spark setup is.. improvable.

(more or less the experience i witnessed, felt pretty bad watching ngl)

  • plugged in network cable expecting to be able to just set up
  • couldnt find the device, tried phone, realized thats potential user error
  • phone was able to connect to the hotspot but not to the actual printed on the slip site (iphone)
  • same issue for ipad
  • had to find a compatibe mouse and keyboard since no USB is possible
  • only had a keyboard, not a mouse, so local setup it is
  • keyboard only navigation is awful
  • keyboard layout setup doesnt properly work with just keyboard attached
  • struggled hard with scrolling down the tos (so slow)
  • picked basically random things for layout and language
  • picked user name and password
  • it started updating but then got stuck in some update loop “Updating Your DGX Spark”
  • the green bar first processed normally, then the update bar kept flashing from empty to full
  • waited about an hour to see if it fixes itself, tried to connect with nvidia sync (errored out)
  • looked up the device traffic on router, it downloaded something but then went silent and stopped , definately no more traffic and no visible progress
  • was able to reach the same inteface “Updating Your DGX Spark from my pc but had the same flashy green bar just go 0 to 100 and back
  • got worried but decided to just long-hold power button and restart it, unplugged network cable
  • got back into setup, it briefly flashed the ubuntu desktop before we went to redo the setup again
  • redid setup and failed again to properly pick keyboard language and layout with keyboard navigation only
  • made dinner and took a nap while holding the down button scrolling down the tos
  • the device proceeded to download its updates again (visible from network traffic on router)
  • now watching the green bar creep up with no other indicator if things are succeeding , no means to check progress other than hoping and waiting
  • download traffic has gone to 0 and im waiting on this thing to update but progress is extremely slow or not existant, cant tell
  • waited forever as it seemed stuck on like 35%
  • oh suddely i get a different screen just the nvidia logo and a bar at 35% (looks like reboot or sth)
  • its been a good 25min or so since the initial download traffic spike
  • oh i think something is happening again, its been 5min since the last network traffic is shown, not sure whats going on
  • oh god i think its actually rebooting a few times now
  • waiting lets see
  • oh i think the green bar is actually going up
  • â– â– â– â–  something beeped, oh wait i think that was my keyboard
  • looking at bar again its going up again (i think its rebooting a few times)
  • oh no something creaky beeped again?!
  • jeez it was just my keyboard again
  • yo i think its loading up now
  • wait i can log in ??
  • i think its worked boys
4

Thank you for the feedback. We have had some reports of slow or stopped updates occurring yesterday we believe was a temporary degradation from Canonical’s servers which may be why you had issues with the update process. I am still a little confused on your description of why you could not complete setup remotely through the hotspot as you said you could connect.

5

This is what I am going through right now. All it has done so far is download about 806 Bytes of data from nVidia and stuck at Preparing system updates. Restarting it helped get it moving at least.

6

There is something wrong with ports.ubuntu.com currently - all updates are slowing down to a crawl, not just the initial setup. Based on the posts in this forum, it’s been going on for a few days.

7

Once you have connected to the hotspot (shows connected on iphone) the spark makes, the link you get (.local i believe it was?) on the network landing page did not work - i couldn’t open it in safari or firefox on the iphone. Not only wasn’t it a clickable link , but copy pasting it manually into the browser also didn’t work.

We have since managed to set it up properly, hard to tell on my end if it was ubuntu or what the issue was retrospectively after changing to the setup via monitor/mouse directly.

8

Can you add an option to skip the updates? It was also extremely frustrating for me, but it wasn’t because of Ubuntu servers acting up.