The developers who are in charge of the Ubuntu Mate project which is a distro derived from Ubuntu officially recognized by Canonical, using the MATE desktop environment, they have made known Few days ago that make the first beta of Ubuntu Mate 18.04 available to the public for the single board minicomputer "Raspberry Pi".
With which now many of the users of this single-board computer (myself included) will be able to enjoy the benefits that the most recent LTS version of Ubuntu gives us, that is, 18.04.
Since at the moment the current "stable" version of Ubuntu Mate for Raspberry Pi is based on Ubuntu 16.04.
With this release of this new version of Ubuntu Mate 18.04 for Raspberry Pi, lUbuntu MATE developers officially released two standalone images of armhf (7-bit ARMv32) and arm64 (8-bit ARMv64), optimized for Raspberry Pi, mainly compatible with Raspberry Pi Model B 2, 3 and 3+.
These two images were released on the official blog of the distro along with a small message:
Ubuntu MATE for the Raspberry Pi provides a complete and familiar desktop environment that can be used for basic desktop computing.
It is also of interest to all those who are targeting Ubuntu for their projects. With which you can prototype ARMv7 or ARMv8-based IoT devices in a comfortable desktop environment, including the creation and testing of your applications.
Main news of Ubuntu MATE 18.04 Beta 1 for Raspberry Pi
As mentioned This version includes support for Raspberry Pi 2 B, Raspberry Pi 3 Model B and Raspberry Pi 3 Model B +.
Hardware acceleration is another strong point of this new Beta of Ubuntu MATE 18.04 for Raspberry Pi, as it allows users to watch videos and use advanced desktop functions.
This beta 1 has the fbturbo driver pre-installed, hardware assisted video decoding for the VLC Media Player and encoding via FFmpeg.
As well it is possible to enable experimental VC4 driver for better performance at the cost of loss of stability and VideoCore IV hardware acceleration available for arm64 images.
Also, the operating system comes pre-installed with a Raspi-config utility port for Ubuntu, the official Ubuntu kernel as well as support for the installation of Minecraf: Pi Edition and Steam Link app.
How to get and install Ubuntu Mate 18.04 Beta 1 for Raspberry Pi?
For those who are interested in being able to try this beta version, they can obtain the image that they offer us directly from the official Ubuntu Mate blog, so we must go to your website and download the image, andThe link is this.
It is important to remember that this is a beta version, so you may still find some performance or stability errors. So I can recommend that you install this beta version on a different Micro SD.
Well, Once the image has been downloaded, we will go to our system to be able to record the image system in our SD, we will open a terminal and execute the following commands:
sudo apt-get install gddrescue xz-utils
With the necessary tools installed, we will proceed to decompress the file we downloaded of the system image, we must have identified where we save it to proceed with the following command:
unxz ubuntu-mate-18.04.2-beta1-desktop-arm64+raspi3-ext4.img.xz
Already extracted the image of the system, now we proceed to connect our SD card to our computer and we must identify which mounting point it hasOnce this is done, we will save the system image with the following command:
sudo ddrescue -D --force ubuntu-mate-16.04.2-desktop-armhf-raspberry-pi.img /dev/sdx
Where SDX is the path that your SD has as a mounting point.
And ready with this We now proceed to place the SD card in our Raspberry and confirm that everything has been installed correctly.
Process from Windows
If you are going to perform this process from Windows, you can do it in a simple way, you just have to download the image from the given link.
After unzipping the file you can record the image on your Micro SD with the help of Etcher or with the help of win32 diskmanager.