Ubuntu 22.04.1 Jammy LTS Base Release Notes

Ubuntu Base images offer our smallest and lightest images with just the bare essentials to manage the board hardware and connect to networks. It uses systemd for most basic system services. The default user credentials are as follows:

Username: root
Password: root

It will prompt you to change the password after login for security reasons.

Image Layout

  1. Board specific bootloader which not listed in partition table
  2. FAT32 EFI partition 1 with GRUB (/boot/efi)
  3. BTRFS root partition 2 (/)

Configuring System Settings such as First User or Hostname

To setup additional users:

adduser USERNAME
apt install sudo
adduser USERNAME sudo

Hostname: modify the hostname file

/etc/hostname

Configuring Network Settings such as WiFi or Wireless

The base images do not use an active network manager like the desktop images. Initial network configuration is set through Ubuntu’s default netplan.io which applies the network settings through systemd-networkd.

To modify the network settings on a booted system, modify /etc/netplan/eth0.yaml.

By default, the file looks like this:

network:
  version: 2
  renderer: networkd
  ethernets:
    eth0:
      dhcp4: true
      optional: true

After plugging in a WiFi dongle, find the name via cat /proc/net/wireless. Change the netplan file /etc/netplan/wireless.yaml to something this:

network:
    wifis:
        NETWORK DEVICE:
            optional: true
            access-points:
                "NETWORK SSID":
                    password: "NETWORK PASSWORD"
            dhcp4: true
    version: 2

Replace NETWORK SSID with the wireless network name you would like to connect to. Replace NETWORK PASSWORD with the password to the wireless network. Change NETWORK DEVICE to your wireless device interface name. To get a list of wireless device interface names:

cat /proc/net/wireless

Reboot the system or sudo netplan apply.

To enable ssh, run sudo apt install ssh.

As a note, Grub appears to have a default 30s timer before selecting Ubuntu. Would be nice if it was shorter for headless systems.

For headless systems:

** Wait 45 seconds ***
type root enter
type root enter
type root enter
type new password enter
apt install openssh-server
now you should be able to access the system I believe. Ufw isn’t installed by default apparently in base so you shouldn’t have a firewall blocking you.

Base means very barebone. You might be interested in the server version if you would like ssh. Also firewalld is preferred over ufw.

3 Likes

yes, please keep it very barebones.

It seems like there is no vi nor nano. How would you guys recommend us to edit file with Ubuntu base?

sudo apt install vim nano
Ubuntu base is meant to have very few packages to minimize the size of the image.

Then you have a dependency problem per your directions – you can’t configure a wireless adapter if you don’t include a text editor. At least not via the notes you’ve provided. And what if you needed to modify the eth0 adapter?

nano is 760kB installed. Is that really worth leaving out of your image? (it’s not).

You can use vi or ed which should be included in most base images from Ubuntu.

I tried base 22.10 (rather than 22.04.1) https://distro.libre.computer/ci/ubuntu/22.10/ubuntu-22.10-preinstalled-base-arm64%2Baml-s905x-cc.img.xz and it did NOT include vi nor vim.

sensible-editor was installed but when ran, failed to find/load an editor.

It looks like an editor requires a network connection and install. The Server image does have a usable editor.

You can use echo or cat heredoc.

1 Like

To get wifi working on this Base image with netplan, I also had to install wpa_supplicant with:

sudo apt install wpasupplicant

you may also need iwconfig which can be installed with the wireless-tools package.