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Hardware Enablement

Introducing Ultramarine Linux on Raspberry Pi

It's now even easier to install Ultramarine on your Raspberry Pi 4.

Raspberry Pi holds a special place in my heart. It was my first introduction to Linux, and really the first time I started to care about how computers worked.

Raspberry Pi did this for a lot of people, and with Raspberry Pi 4, it moved from being a nice development and learning platform, to a comparable desktop.

Ultramarine has had varying degrees of Raspberry Pi support since UM38. In UM40 we formalized our support for the Pi 3 and 4 with desktop images, and proper documentation.

Today we're announcing our inclusion in Raspberry Pi Imager! This makes it way easier to set up your disk. It's a one stop shop to download and flash (it even saves a bit of time.)

Raspberry Pi Imager

That's not all! Our inclusion in imager means that you can install Ultramarine directly from your Pi!

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[Lea] I didn't even know this was a feature until a month or so ago. To be honest, I was blown away when Jade showed it to me.
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[Jade] It's always existed in some form, before it was in the firmware like this NOOBS served the same purpose. This is honestly a major upgrade, NOOBS had like 3 options and one of them was Windows 10 iOT, nobody uses that.

Make sure your EEPROM is up to date, then insert a blank microSD card and ethernet, and hit shift when booting up.

The overall goal of the Ultramarine Anywhere initiative is to meet potential users where they're at by supporting the hardware they already have. I truly do hope that Ultramarine on Raspberry Pi will inspire someone to get into Linux or even just computing at large, in the same way distros like Ubuntu MATE did for me.

Little me would have been so excited to use GNOME on her Kano kit, and I can't wait to see what we can do with more powerful hardware.

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[Lea] I personally got into Linux through running Ubuntu Server on my Mac Mini as a child. Even though x86_64 Macs aren't much of an exotic hardware platform, they're still a bit different than standard PCs and require special hardware support in cases. If that support wasn't there, I might have not gotten into Linux, and thus started Fyra Labs.
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[Jade] Ubuntu Server! We have common roots there! My first (non-Raspbian) distribution was Ubuntu MATE (also my first x86 distro was Ubuntu proper)

And honestly Macs being standard PCs was such a blessing for everyone involved, you got into Linux easily, and hackers like me get to build Hackintoshes.
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[Lea] It makes me so happy that the opportunity can live on for Apple Silicon through the Asahi Linux project.

Post your pictures with #ultramarinelinux and we'll boost the best ones!

Getting Support

Join one of our Chats, the subreddit, or Open an Issue on GitHub. We'll get you going again in no time.

Special Thanks

Thanks to Tom Dewey from Raspberry Pi for his assistance with getting this working. We appreciate all the help.

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[Lea] And as always, thank you to all of our users, contributors, sponsors, and business partners!

We hope you enjoy Ultramarine Linux on Raspberry Pi! Stay tuned for more Raspberry Pi updates :3

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