It would be a great help to me if there was an option to flash any of the Jetson machines with a system that’s not minimized–i.e., with documentation included. Currently, I get a system with a desktop environment including, e.g., LIbreOffice, which I have absolutely no use for, but lacking all documentation. What’s happened to me multiple times now is that I want some very specific information that’s not included, do the “unminimize” command (which reinstalls basically every piece of software in the system), and find that one or more or the reinstalls has broken some component in the JetPack suite, at which point I have to save my work to some external backup, reflash the system, and try to continue after restoring what I backed up.
The “minimized” system is not just lacking documentation, it has settings that prevent the install of documentation even from external packages that I build by hand. Yes, I could turn off the flag, but it’s a pain.
A much better workflow would be to start with a system that includes all of the documentation, but omits random useless bits like LIbreOffice. Removing the extra stuff is easy. “unminimize”, on the other hand, breaks things.
Hi,
The default sample rootfs is Ubuntu 20.04 for Jetpack 5 release. It is for reference and you can customize the rootfs to fit your use-case. Certain users think the default rootfs is a bit complicated so we now have steps for generating minimum rootfs. Please take a look at Root File System — Jetson Linux Developer Guide documentation
You may consider build your roofs from the minimum one.
Actually, what I’m asking for is a way to flash a JetPack release that is NOT minimized. Please reread my message. I really don’t care about LibreOffice–it’s easy to uninstall–what I do care about is that I need the man pages installed. I’ve seen numerous responses to messages on this forum that say “reflash your system”, but the problem is that when you do that you get a system that requires a cataclysmic reinstall of every single package if you do want documentation, unless you go through the whole collection one package at a time, which is not practical.
I like the JetPack, all I’m asking for is that when I install from the SDK Manager I at least have the option to get a system on which documentation is already enabled. Trying to add it after the system is up and running causes problems.
Not a direct answer, but perhaps of interest: If you look at the “apply_binaries.sh” script, this is run once after install of the sample rootfs. What this does is use QEMU to run commands in the sample rootfs (the host isn’t arm64/aarch64, but the rootfs is, so an emulator is used). This adds packages and configurations, basically the NVIDIA driver content to what was previously a purely Ubuntu rootfs (which is why it gets called “Linux for Tegra” instead of Ubuntu after that, but it really is Ubuntu).
There is also a script doing something similar, the “l4t_create_default_user.sh” script. This is used to perform the first boot setup ahead of time in the rootfs itself before flash, and operates on the same theme as apply_binaries.sh. Both of these are human-readable scripts, athough it does at time refer to binaries.
In theory, if you use that same theme, then you could edit one of those scripts (or write one following the QEMU content) and run the command “unminimize” directly on the rootfs (you’d only need to do this once). This is powerful, and could also be used for things like updating packages and installing optional content before flash ever starts. You’d want to be certain though that it all fits into the size of the flashed partition.
Or you could clone a rootfs and use the clone. You could unminimize prior to clone.