Category: Ubuntu

resurrecting my jetson xavier nx development kit

whbeebe
neofetch output

As I’ve been clearing out the collected detritus of a lifetime around my house, I’ve also been collecting and reorganizing all my various computers. One of those computers is the nVidia Jetson Xavier NX Developer kit.

I purchased it in May 2020 from Amazon for the $300 initial asking price. I figured that if I were going to be locked in due to the pandemic I’d spend my time doing something useful. The Xavier was advertised as an entrée into edge-of-the-network machine learning. I also purchased a third-party enclosure to wrap it up and protect it a little better than leaving the bare board exposed to the world. My first post about the kit was May 2020 (see below), while my last post was December 2021. Along the way I brought up various versions of Python, Emacs, and even got Visual Studio code to work. I also complained about the OS being based on Ubuntu 18.04. I didn’t do nearly as much as I had planned to do, what with all my time being sucked into a project that started in July of 2020.

When I powered the Xavier back up I re-acquainted myself with the state I’d left in in a year-and-a-half ago. All the hacks and patches, all the special Python 3.x builds, all of it. I noted that Ubuntu 18 look-and-feel. I then checked the nVidia on-line references and discovered that the Xavier had been end-of-lifed and a substitute, the Orin, was being sold in its place. I don’t know what’s special about the Orin, but whatever it is nVidia sells it for twice what they sold the Xavier. That puts the Orin squarely outside my discretionary budget.

I also discovered that the the latest version of JetPack, the software stack for the Xavier, had updated the Ubuntu portion to 20.04. I tried to upgrade the version of Ubuntu already on the Xavier from 18.04 to 20.04, but that ended in a hot mess. I downloaded a new image and started over again. You can see what I’m running via neofetch shown above.

So far things are better, I guess. What’s taken a hit is my enthusiasm for this device. That hit is due in part to the fact I can’t get official Visual Studio Code to run, and I don’t want to live inside of Emacs on this little device. VSCode really is needed on this tiny machine.

Time to wrap this post up.

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bringing up jetson xavier nx developer kit

switching back to linux mint 21

whbeebe1 Comment

Four days ago I switched from Linux Mint 21 to Ubuntu 22.10, the interim release of Ubuntu. I stated a number of reasons why I switched, the biggest being the updated kernel and critical tools. Yesterday I swapped the SSD with Linux Mint still on it back into my machine in place of the SSD that I’d installed Ubuntu on.

The primary reason I switched back was the lack of certain types of development support. For example I had to install everything necessary to support a full build-out of Python 3.11. There were other missing library and development support packages. When I had to install the Fuse file system library support to run some AppImage applications, that’s when I realized I’d made a mistake for my daily driver usage and that I needed to switch back to Linux Mint. Fortunately for me I’d not made any changes that I hadn’t already saved elsewhere, such that switching back was completely painless.

Now that I’ve had this experience I’ve come to realize that Linux Mint can be considered the more supportive developer distribution compared to Ubuntu. That is, I can do more development without having to hunt down and install various libraries to make it all work. For example I run several AppImage applications. Before they would even execute I had to install the libfuse2 library. I did check with my Ubuntu 22.04 Parallels virtual machine, and that support is there. But it was missing in Ubuntu 22.10. Installation is all of 60 seconds, but the fact it was missing makes me suspicious, especially because Ubuntu is pushing (hard) Snap packages over all others. Was support for AppImage deliberately dropped in 22.10? As they say, things that make you go “hmmm.”

Ubuntu 22.10 will appeal to fans of Ubuntu and fans of the latest Gnome, and they’ll install it and use it without a second thought. But if you’re a developer, especially an embedded/IoT developer, make sure nothing breaks if you decide to install Ubuntu 22.10 and make it your daily driver. You may be unpleasantly surprised like I was.