Installing Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS Server release 64 bit on Raspberry pi 4 8GB Variant

I recently got a Raspberry pi 4. As mine is an 8 GB variant, I started to look for a 64 bit OS to be able to utilise the hardware to its full potential. So I chose Ubuntu. As I wish to run everything in headless mode, I chose the server variant to avoid GUI overheads.

1. First we need to download the Ubuntu image. Here, we will be downloading the Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS release.

• If you are comfortable using the terminal on Linux, use the following command in Terminal

curl -SL# https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/20.04.2/release/ubuntu-20.04.2-preinstalled-server-arm64+raspi.img.xz -o ubuntu-20.04.2-preinstalled-server-arm64+raspi.img.xz

• If you want to directly download from a web browser, use the following link

https://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/20.04.2/release/ubuntu-20.04.2-preinstalled-server-arm64+raspi.img.xz?_ga=2.244843781.1846767505.1618741259-2125754422.1618741259

2. Copying the image to sd card without rpi-imager:

• After connecting the sd card to your host, we need to find the device name:

lsblk -p
/dev/sdc 8:32 1 59.1G 0 disk 
├─/dev/sdc1 8:33 1 256M 0 part 
└─/dev/sdc2 8:34 1 58.9G 0 part

As my device is 64gb, I can say this is my device. Or you can run the above command without connecting the drive, and then run it after connecting the drive. The new device is your drive.

• Copying Ubuntu os to sd card:

of= in the following command is your device path that you got from the above command

xzcat ubuntu-20.04.2-preinstalled-server-arm64+raspi.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdc status=progress bs=4M 

xzcat command will uncompress the .xz file and pipe (|) it to the dd command to write it to your device.

3. After the completion of the above commands just insert the memory card into your rpi and boot.

4. After the boot up process is complete, Ubuntu will ask for username and password

• The default username is “ubuntu”
• And the default password is also “ubuntu”

After a successful login it will prompt you to change your password. Set the new password and we are done.