Ubuntu Core

Roger Cheng

Ubuntu and ROS on Raspberry Pi

Since I just discovered that I can replace Ubunto with lighter-weight Raspbian on old 32-bit PCs, I thought it would be a good time to quickly jot down some notes about going the other way: replacing Raspbian with Ubuntu on Raspberry Pi.

When I started building Sawppy in early 2018, I was already thinking ahead to turning Sawppy from a remote-controlled toy to an autonomous robot. Which meant a quick survey to the state of ROS. At the time, ROS Kinetic was the latest LTS release, targeted for Ubuntu 16.

Unfortunately the official release of Ubuntu 16 did not include an armhf build suitable for running on a Raspberry Pi. Some people would build their own ROS from source code to make it run on Raspbian, I took one attempt and the build errors took more time to understand and resolve than I wanted to spend. I then chose the less difficult path of finding a derived released of Ubuntu 16 that ran on the platform: Ubuntu Mate 16. An afternoon’s worth of testing verified basic ROS Kinetic capability, and I set it aside for revisiting later.

Later on in 2018, Ubuntu 18 was released, followed by ROS Melodic matching that platform. By then support for running Debian (& deriviatives) on armhf had migrated to Ubuntu, and they released both the snap-based Ubuntu Core and Ubuntu ‘classic’ for Raspberry Pi. These are minimalist server images, but desktop UI components can be installed if needed. Information to do so can be found on Ubuntu wiki but obviously UI is not a priority when I’m looking at robot brains. Besides, if I wanted an UI, Ubuntu Mate 18 is still available as well. For Ubuntu 20 released this year, the same choices continue to be offered, which should match well with ROS Noetic.

I don’t know how relevant this is yet for ROS on a Raspberry Pi, but I noticed not only are 32-bit armhf binaries available, so are 64-bit arm64 binaries. Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 have CPU capable of running arm64 code, but Raspbian has remained 32-bit for compatibility with existing Pi software and with low-end devices like the Raspberry Pi Zero incapable of arm64. More than just an ability to address more memory, moving to arm64 instruction set was also a chance to break from some inconvenient bits of architectural legacy which in turn allowed better arm64 performance. Though the performances increase are minor as applied to a Raspberry Pi, ROS releases include precompiled arm64 binaries so the biggest barrier to entry has already been removed and might be worth a look.

[UPDATE I found a good reason to go for arm64: ROS2]

Roger Cheng

Raspberry Pi Web Kiosk Boots Faster On Raspbian Than Ubuntu Core

My adventures into the lightweight Ubuntu Core operating system was motivated by a 14-year old laptop with Intel CPU. By multiple measures on the specification sheet, it is roughly equivalent to a modern Raspberry Pi. (~1 GHz processor, ~1GB RAM, ~30GB storage, etc.) As a test drive, I had tried setting it up as a web kiosk and failed due to incomplete graphics driver support. (Though I did get it working on a modern laptop.)

Which leads to the next question: how well does Ubuntu Core perform on a Raspberry Pi performing the exact same web kiosk task? And how does that compare to doing the same thing on Raspbian OS? They’re both variants of Linux trimmed down for less powerful hardware. Raspbian is packed with features to help computing beginners get started, and Ubuntu Core has almost no features at all to offer a clean baseline.

My workbench is not a comparison test lab so I didn’t have many copies of identical hardware for a rigorous comparison. Two monitors were close but not quite identical in resolution. (1920×1080 for the LG, 1920×1200 for the Dell.) The two Raspberry Pi should be identical, as should the microSD cards, but they’re not powered by identical power supplies. To establish a baseline, I set them both up for Raspberry Pi web kiosk using my top search hit for “Raspberry Pi Web Kiosk”. Then launched them side-by-side a few times to see how close their performance were from power-up to rendering a web page. (For this test, the Hackaday.com site.) This took approximately 40-45 seconds, sometimes one is faster and sometimes the other is faster. For some runs, the two systems were within one second of each other, sometimes they were almost 5 seconds apart. Establishing the fact this comparison method has a measuring error of several seconds.

With an error margin established, I removed one of their microSD cards and installed Ubuntu Core for Raspberry Pi 3 on it. Once initial configuration were complete, I installed snaps for the web kiosk tutorial I followed earlier for the Dell laptops. I was very curious how fast a stripped-down version of Ubuntu would perform here.

The answer: not very, at least not in the boot-up process. From power-up to displaying the web page, Ubuntu Core web kiosk took almost 80 seconds. Double the time necessary for Raspbian, and that was even with a full install of Raspbian Buster with zero optimizations. There are many tutorials online for building a Raspbian-based web kiosk with stripped-down list of components, or even starting with the slimmer Raspbian Buster Lite operating system which would only get faster.

There may be many good reasons to use Ubuntu Core on a Raspberry Pi (smaller attack surface, designed with security in mind, etc.) but this little comparison indicates boot-up speed is not one of them.

Roger Cheng

Ubuntu Core 18 Web Kiosk Experiment on Dell Inspiron 11 3180

While experimenting with Ubuntu Core 18 on a 14-year old Dell Latitude X1, I ran into problems and wanted to verify it was a hardware support issue and not a mistake on my part. So I brought my much younger Inspiron 11 (3180) up on Ubuntu Core 18 as well. It verified the issue was indeed hardware support and not my mistake, hampering functionality on the Latitude X1.

After I got my answer, I thought since I’ve already got this Inspiron 11 up and running, I might as well continue experimenting on it. I proceeded to follow through the rest of the steps in the tutorial for setting up a web kiosk on Ubuntu Core. Since this machine had recent hardware, I encountered no hardware issues and got a dedicated web kiosk machine up and running.

Browsing a few web sites, basic browser functionality seem to be present. The first missing functionality I noticed was a lack of sound. A little poking confirmed that Linux audio system ALSA is not installed as part of Ubuntu Core. If someone wants sound on their Ubuntu Core machine, they’ll have to install it. This is fits with my expectation for a bare minimum “Core” OS.

Another feature I noticed is the lack of persistent state. As far as I can tell, everything is ephemeral and lost upon reset. No cookies are preserved across sessions, and it appears the cache is flushed as well. Whether this is a bug or a feature depends on application. It would be desirable for public use web terminal where we really want to wipe everything and start over for every new user.

And it isn’t intended to be a general use web browser, anyway. The cursor can be hidden and so can the navigation bar. I enabled the navigation bar expecting a normal browser tool bar, but it is actually a very minimalist bar with a few buttons like back and refresh. There is no URL input field, as appropriate for a kiosk dedicated to serving specific pages.

Sometimes this is exactly what I would need making Ubuntu Core an ideal bare-minimum OS for an Intel-based machine. But in this day and age, those aren’t our only options. Projects along these lines are also commonly built with a Raspberry Pi. How well does Ubuntu Core work on a Raspberry Pi, compared to Raspberry Pi’s standard Raspbian OS?