Lessons Learned: How to flash the Jetson and connect to it via SSH?

[richard.koerner]

Just wanted to put this up here for the sake of helping out people who might have just as much trouble as I did.
Hopefully some crawlers will put this up.

I had trouble connecting to the Jetson at the start. It always said permission denied. A thread in the forums said that this must have been a hardware issue, but I didn’t believe it, since I got it fresh from my company.

Notes:

• I myself didn’t have a HDMI Monitor
• I didn’t want to put the Jetson near the router as it was too far away from me. The rest of my home is an unsafe environment for company equipment.
  This is why I needed Wifi and SSH

Ubuntu Host Device:

1. You have to have Ubuntu installed. Virtual Machine doesn’t work (according to the forums). I was running on a live USB with persistent storage. Because of issue 3. I blieve this might apply to live USB sticks too.
2. remove thunderbird, unnecessary language packages and libreoffice. You can do this with apt remove --purge libreoffice*. It took me forever to update my distro
3. update and upgrade your distro. For some reason it wouldn’t install the sdkmanager without doing that first.

When using the SDK Manager:

4. This might seem obvious but at the time of writing version 20.04 was not supported. Yet somewhere I read that it was. You might be able to download and install the SDK Manager, but it will not let you go past step 1 as you cannot select the operating system that will be flashed to the Jetson.

Setting up WiFi to Router. You don’t need the Antennas for that.
I suggest doing it via nmcli as described in Part 3. of this answer on stack overflow.

SSH:

5. If it is connected via the micro-USB you can connect to it via SSH on the IP 192.168.55.1. However this did work for me only on the Host Ubuntu Machine. I had another Arch Laptop on which I prefer developing on so I wasn’t satisfied with that. I wonder if this would have been fixed by 6.
6. SSH will use the same username as the device you are using it on. If your username on the computer you are using SSH from matches the username on the Jetson you can use ssh 192.168.55.1 and it would work. If it differs you have to use ssh jetson-username@192.168.55.1. Also you can enable verbose logging with ssh -vvv ...

I hope this will save some people a lot of time and headaches.
Good Luck!

[kayccc]

Thanks for your sharing to the community!