Install Ubuntu on Raspberry Pi directly

This tutorial will guide you through installing Ubuntu on your Raspberry Pi without the need for an additional machine. You will need the following:

  • A Raspberry Pi Model 4B or later

  • Storage media; one of:

    • microSD card sized 16GB or larger

    • SSD drive with an appropriate USB3 adapter

    • NVMe drive with an appropriate HAT (Pi 5 only)

  • A monitor

  • A keyboard

  • A mouse

  • An ethernet based internet connection

Note

This procedure will not operate over wifi as the bootloader cannot configure wifi at this time.

Hardware setup

  1. Connect your blank storage media

    • A microSD card can simply go in the slot underneath the board

    • If your media is USB-connected, ensure you connect it to the one of the blue USB3 sockets (between the ethernet and the black USB sockets)

    • If your media is NVMe, ensure you have installed your M.2 HAT correctly, particularly that the PCIe flat cable, then install your blank NVMe drive in the HAT

  2. Connect the monitor, keyboard, mouse, and ethernet to the Pi

  3. Switch on the monitor

  4. Switch on the Pi and wait for the boot screen to appear

Software installation

The Raspberry Pi boot-loader screen, displaying the prompt to hold SHIFT to start the installer

The Raspberry Pi boot-loader screen, display the prompt to hold SHIFT to start the installer

  1. When prompted, hold Shift until the boot screen indicates that the installer (an embedded version of rpi-imager) is being downloaded

  2. Once the installer is downloaded, it will launch automatically. When it appears, wait until a valid IP address is displayed in the lower half of the screen

  3. Click the first button, CHOOSE DEVICE, to select your model of Pi. This is optional, but limits the OS image selection to those images compatible with your board

  4. Click the second button, CHOOSE OS to select an OS image. For the purposes of this tutorial, we will select:

    • Other general-purpose OS

    • Ubuntu

    • Ubuntu Desktop 24.04.1 LTS (64-bit)

  5. Click the third button, CHOOSE STORAGE to select the destination media. In our case there’s only a single choice, our SD card

  6. Click NEXT to write the card, and choose YES to indicate you wish to overwrite everything on the target media

  7. Writing the image, especially a desktop image, takes some considerable time depending on the speed of your media, and your Internet connection. However, be prepared to wait at least 10 minutes

  8. Once writing is complete, it will re-read the media to verify the image was written successfully, then immediately reboot into your selected OS

  9. Proceed with OS setup as normal:

    • On Ubuntu desktop images, the first-time setup wizard will guide you through locale selection and user creation

    • On Ubuntu server images, cloud-init will handle initial user creation and setup. The default username and password can be customized by rpi-imager, but if this is skipped the default username and password will be ubuntu