Installing CentOS on Jetson Nano

Hello everyone,
I was wondering if anyone has been able to successfully install CentOS on the Jetson Nano? I’m pretty new to installing Linux in general (I normally just flash sd card images), so if anyone could point to a tutorial/resource that could help me out that would be greatly appreciated. I saw a few forum posts here of people trying this, but I didn’t see one where someone was successful.

how about using ubuntu?
please refer to developer guide, Setting Up Your File System.
there’s ubuntu sample root file system you could also have customization,
thanks

Hey @JerryChang, thanks for that link. I had read about creating the root file system, but hadn’t found a good link that walked me through it. I’ll take a look at what you shared and see if I can customize the root file system to my needs. Thanks!

I run Fedora on several Nanos but there are several gotchas…

  • The Nano-specific nvidia graphics packages and drivers aren’t available for anything other than Ubuntu 18.04.
  • You still need to use the custom 4.9 kernel so the /boot directory has to be the one from the supplied image.

If you want to go down that route with CentOS, let me know, I can give you some pointers. I’d stick with Ubuntu 18.04 if possible though.

Hey @gtj, thanks for the reply. I’m kind of leaning towards sticking with Ubuntu right now. My company uses CentOS for other projects, so we are looking if it’s possible to put on a jetson nano for a project for simplicity sake. If there are reasons, though, like nvidia graphics packages and drivers, that I should use Ubuntu then I’ll just stick with Ubuntu. I’m really just in the gathering info/learning phase right now, so thanks for the info!

No problem! That’s probably a good plan until you find a compelling reason to not use the stock Jetson Ubuntu image. In my case, I have existing custom packages and monitoring stuff that’s all RedHat based whic is why I’m using Fedora. I did also repackage some of the Jetson drivers as rpms and they seem to work fine but I wouldn’t have done that without already having a few years of Jetson experience and a few decades of RedHat experience. :)