Random thoughts on having the Ubuntu Server 21.10 running on top of Raspberry PI 3.

Installation

Simply follow the Raspberry PI Ubuntu Page tutorial, download appropriate image, flash it and boot it. I’m running aarch64 Ubuntu Server on my Raspberry PI 3 with 1GB of RAM, however there’s no real advantage over aarch32 and aarch32 takes up less disk space and memory, therefore I advise you to go with aarch32.

I’d recommend not to go with Ubuntu Desktop - Raspberry PI 3 is simply not powerful enough / doesn’t have enough RAM to run Ubuntu Desktop properly - both Gnome Shell and KDE are sluggish as hell.

Wifi

Using netplan with ubuntu works for me well: when configured properly, Raspberry PI will automatically connect to wifi on boot and you can simply ssh to it.

I have the following file /etc/netplan/00-wifi.yaml:

network:
  wifis:
    wlan0:
      dhcp4: true
      optional: true
      access-points:
        "<YOUR_AP_NAME>":
          password: "<YOUR_AP_PASSWORD>"
  version: 2
  renderer: networkd

Make sure you have the netplan.io package installed. Then, run sudo netplan --debug apply and your wifi should be up - you can verify that by running ifconfig -a.

Controlling GPIO

• Python: see gpiozero
• Kotlin: see ktgpio-example-app