Download

We have done what we can to optimise the builds for the Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 but microSDHC I/O throughput is a bottleneck so we highly recommend that you use a Class 6 or Class 10 microSDHC card.

Ubuntu Core 16

Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 (330MB)

Ubuntu Classic Server 16.04

Raspberry Pi 2 (214MB)

Ubuntu Classic Server 16.04

Raspberry Pi 3 (216MB)

Lubuntu 16.04.2

Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 (707MB)

Ubuntu MATE 16.04.2

Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 (1.1GB)

Xubuntu 16.04.2

Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 (799MB)

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Making a microSDHC

The image can be burned to a DVD, mounted as an ISO file, or be directly written to a USB stick using a utility like dd, but we prefer ddrescue (from the gddrescue package, for example:

sudo apt-get install gddrescue
unxz ubuntu-mate-16.04-desktop-armhf-raspberry-pi.img.xz
sudo ddrescue -d -D --force ubuntu-mate-16.04-desktop-armhf-raspberry-pi.img /dev/sdx

The drive may be mounted on any /dev/sdX so use the command lsblk to check.

GNOME Disks

If you prefer a graphical tool we recommend using GNOME Disks and the Restore Disk Image… option, which natively supports XZ compressed images.

sudo apt-get install gnome-disk-utility

Making a microSDHC with Windows

If you want to make a microSDHC using Windows we recommend:

• 7-Zip to extract the image.
• Win32 Disk Imager to write the image.