Jetson TK1 Upgrade OS to Ubuntu 16.04

Muhammad Yunus
2 min readSep 10, 2021

A couple days ago, I am finally decide to upgrade Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04 in Jetson TK1. Little bit scary, I am worried if upgrading procedure failed then broke my Jetson TK1.

You can find full instruction here,

Don’t do this while you remote the Jetson TK1, if there is network related issue during upgrade, there would be broke your installation. and need to reflash the Jetson TK1, with L4T OS.

  1. Open New terminal and run,
sudo add-apt-repository main

2. Enable repositories,

sudo add-apt-repository universe
sudo add-apt-repository multiverse
sudo add-apt-repository restricted

3. Do update & upgrade,

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

4. Hold Xorg packages during upgrade to 16.04,

sudo apt-mark hold xserver-xorg-core

5. Run below command to upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04,

sudo do-release-upgrade

This upgrade procedure need several hour to finish, some people in the forum reporting that upgrade process leading to system freeze and wouldn’t finishing the upgrade. For this reason, I am recommending you all to add swap space (~2GB) from attached SD card.

6. If there is asked question, just answer with the default

7. After downloading, building & configuring new package done, there shoulde message like,

Continue [yN]  Details [d] YES

9. Just hit y to confirm delete obsolete package,

10. After completed, just reboot the Jetson TK1

11. after booting up install,

sudo apt-get install gnome-session-flashback

12. Then logout from session, in Ubuntu Login screen, choose Gnome Metacity then do login.

13. After that, don`t forget to enable autologin

NOTE :

we can use VS Code + Remote Development Extension to remote Jetson TK1

libopenblas-dev available to be install via apt.

Installing CUDA 6.5 after Jetson TK1 upgraded to Ubuntu 16.05 is not possible.

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Muhammad Yunus

IoT Engineer, Software Developer & Machine Learning Enthusiast