Upgrading Nvidia Jetson TK1 from 14.04 to 16.04

This is a blog which will continue with further posts that leads along a path of hacking, modding, updates and general tinkering.

Since I have had my Movidius Neural Compute Stick I haven't really touched my Nvidia Jetson TK1 board for a while. It has just been collecting dust.

Recently I thought what if I could connect both the TK1 with the Neural Compute Stick?

So I gave it a shot.

Hey, if the Raspberry Pi can handle the Movidius Neural Compute Stick....So can TK1.

Very quickly I discovered that the TK1 board is incompatible due the internet telling us the TK1 uses Ubuntu 14.04 and is 32bit board.

But I don't quit.

Here I found that some have updated the TK1 to 16.04>>>> LINK

They recommend using a clean install of 14.04 before updating to 16.04 as the TK1 only has 16GB of emmc storage and if the update procedure exceeds 16GB, the device will brick, and you will have to connect it to a laptop using usb and compile 14.04 again which will take forever.

I just gave it a shot anyway. I deleted cuda examples, and all large folders, downloads folder contents, everything that is not system files. This left me with 5GB emmc space with which to update.

I followed the commands as per guide:

1. sudo add-apt-repository main
2. sudo add-apt-repository universe
3. sudo add-apt-repository multiverse
4. sudo add-apt-repository restricted
5. sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
6. sudo apt-mark hold xserver-xorg-core
7. sudo do-release-upgrade
8. sudo apt-get install gnome-session-flashback

I was very patient, I panicked a couple of times convinced it had bricked, but eventually I booted into Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial on the Jetson TK1. Cool. Now this showed a whole bunch of improvements, I could install Chromium and it ran better than before allowing youtube 1080p and video streaming, spotify, and ublock origin adblocking which was not available on 14.04 before.

Perhaps the TK1 isnt going into the box on the shelf just yet. Perhaps I don't need to blow thousands on the New Nvidia Xavier Board.

So this made me happy. I hope it works for you too.

Next article I will build something with it.