Installing Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on Your Raspberry Pi 5

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, codenamed Noble Numbat, brings five years of security and maintenance support to the Raspberry Pi 5's Broadcom BCM2712 silicon. The single-board computer has enough grunt for desktop duties, lightweight servers, and home-lab experiments, while the ARM64 (aarch64) builds of Ubuntu are now considered first-class citizens rather than an afterthought. Whether you're rebuilding a Raspberry Pi that once ran as a lightweight home media box, configuring a low-power home server, or learning Linux for the first time, getting Canonical's flagship distribution onto the Pi 5 is more approachable than many guides suggest.

This walkthrough assumes you're comfortable with the command line but new to the Pi-specific quirks. It covers hardware preparation, image flashing, first-boot configuration, and the small adjustments that make life easier for anyone running a Pi in Australian homes — from the salty coastal air of Fremantle to the dry heat of a study in Toowoomba. By the end, you'll understand both what to do and why each step matters.

Gathering hardware and planning the install

The Raspberry Pi 5 draws more power than its predecessors, peaking near 8 W under load, so a genuine 27 W USB-C power supply is non-negotiable. Third-party chargers rated at 5 V / 5 A often trigger the under-voltage warning icon and quietly throttle the SoC, which leads to confusing slowdowns hours later when scripts fail for no apparent reason. Pair the board with a microSD card from the endurance or A2-rated category; SanDisk Max Endurance and Samsung Pro Endurance cards have proven reliable for Australian buyers sourcing from local shops like Core Electronics in Newcastle or the Jaycar retail chain across capital cities.

Decide early whether you'll boot from microSD or from an NVMe SSD mounted on the official M.2 HAT+. SSDs are noticeably snappier and shrug off the write-amplification issues that wear out flash cards during heavy apt usage, but they cost more and require the HAT+ to be fitted before first boot if you want PCIe Gen 2 speeds. A keyboard, mouse, and micro-HDMI-to-HDMI cable are needed for the initial configuration unless you're confident setting up a serial console over GPIO. An Ethernet cable is helpful for the first update run, because the on-board Broadcom wireless occasionally needs firmware that arrives via apt rather than bundled in the kernel.

Choosing and downloading the right image

Canonical publishes official Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu Desktop images for arm64 at the Ubuntu download portal. The Server image (around 1.4 GB) is the right starting point for headless setups, container hosts, or anyone who wants a minimal base. The Desktop image bundles GNOME and is closer to 5 GB. Raspberry Pi Imager can fetch either directly once you point it at "Other general-purpose OS → Ubuntu," which saves a manual download step and verifies checksums automatically.

If you grab the .img.xz file directly, verify it with sha256sum against the value listed on the Ubuntu release page before flashing. Skipping this step is the most common reason people end up debugging corrupted installs hours later. Australian mirror servers operated by Internode and AARNet are usually faster than the canonical default for users in Adelaide or Hobart, and Imager picks these up if you tick the "use custom" network option during the OS-customisation stage. Whichever route you choose, jot down the SHA256 of the file you actually download so you can sanity-check it before committing to a flash.

Flashing Ubuntu to your microSD card or NVMe drive

balenaEtcher remains the friendliest cross-platform flasher, but Raspberry Pi Imager has caught up and offers the bonus of preconfiguring Wi-Fi credentials, locale, and SSH keys before the first boot. That "OS customisation" panel is worth opening even if you plan to use Ethernet later, since it injects a YAML cloud-init config that the Pi reads on first power-up. For an NVMe install, flash the same image to a USB enclosure first, boot once, then use the official rpi-eeprom tooling from within Ubuntu to switch the boot order to NVMe before moving the drive to the HAT+.

Card readers built into laptops vary wildly; an external USB 3 reader is faster and more reliable. After flashing, don't simply yank the card — use the platform's "safely eject" function, especially on Windows where the journaling layer can quietly truncate a still-writing flash. The whole process takes only a few minutes, and Imager will report the expected capacity mismatch between the image size and the card size, which is normal because the rest of the card is unallocated until the first boot expands the partition. For NVMe users in Sydney, Brisbane, or Perth, the official M.2 HAT+ from the Raspberry Pi store is generally the path of least resistance, and the EEPROM that ships on Pi 5 boards from 2024 onwards already supports NVMe boot out of the box.

Booting your Raspberry Pi 5 for the first time

Power on with the HDMI cable connected and watch the rainbow splash screen give way to a black terminal. Recent Pi 5 firmware defaults to booting straight into the Ubuntu console at tty1, where you'll be greeted by the standard Ubuntu login prompt: username ubuntu, password ubuntu. The first login forces a password change, and you'll be walked through choosing a new credential. If the screen stays blank, double-check that you're using a micro-HDMI cable in the connector nearest the USB-C power inlet — the second port is HDMI-1, and some monitors handshake badly on it.

For users running headless from the start, the cloud-init configuration that Imager injected earlier will have already enabled SSH and connected to Wi-Fi. Find the Pi on your router's DHCP lease table, ssh in, and you're done. The default keyring accepts password authentication until you load your own public key into ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. If the Pi appears to power-cycle repeatedly with an ACT LED pattern of three long flashes, the bootloader is too old for the 24.04 kernel and you'll need to update firmware from an SD card booted into Raspberry Pi OS first. Once the bootloader is current, the EEPROM retains it across reinstalls, so this only ever needs doing once per board.

Initial configuration and system updates

Once you're at a shell, sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade -y pulls in any point-release fixes. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS point releases arrive on a predictable cadence, and the LTS enablement stack means the kernel and X server are refreshed even on the long-term branch. Set the timezone to something sensible for your latitude with sudo timedatectl set-timezone Australia/Sydney (or Australia/Melbourne, Australia/Perth, Australia/Adelaide, Australia/Brisbane, Australia/Hobart, or Australia/Darwin depending on your state — note that Brisbane and Darwin don't observe daylight saving, so leave the clock alone in those zones).

The default hostname ubuntu is fine for a single device on the bench but rename it if you have more than one Pi on the same network. sudo hostnamectl set-hostname pi-noble followed by a reboot keeps the Avahi mDNS service consistent for ping pi-noble.local from any Linux or macOS box on the same subnet. While you're at it, sudo apt install ubuntu-desktop-minimal gives you GNOME without the heavier full-desktop apps, a sensible compromise for a 4 GB or 8 GB Pi 5 if you want a graphical environment without giving up the lighter server baseline. For larger installs, set APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1"; in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades to let unattended-upgrades handle security patches automatically.

Adding a desktop or running headless

Headless deployments are usually simpler and more stable. Enable the firewall with sudo ufw allow OpenSSH and sudo ufw enable, install Fail2ban if the Pi is exposed beyond your home network, and consider a static DHCP reservation or a hand-rolled netplan YAML rather than relying on whatever IP the router hands out. For a media server, the popular route is Jellyfin or Plex inside containers, while Home Assistant enthusiasts use the OS as a base for supervised installs. Each of these projects benefits from a stable hostname and a known port range, both of which are easy to lock down once the basics are in place.

If you do want a graphical interface, the ubuntu-desktop metapackage installs the full GNOME shell and the standard Ubuntu application set, including Firefox, the GNOME Text Editor, and the Snap Store. GNOME on the Pi 5 is smooth at 1080p on Wayland but starts to feel sluggish if you push it to a 4K panel over HDMI — the Pi 5's VideoCore VII hardware does the heavy lifting, but only just. XFCE, via sudo apt install xubuntu-desktop, remains a lighter alternative that still looks at home on the desktop and uses roughly half the RAM. Whichever you choose, log out, pick the new session from the gear icon on the login screen, and sign back in.

Tips for Australian users and common pitfalls

Heat is the silent killer of Pi 5 boards in the Australian summer. A passive aluminium case is enough in Hobart or Melbourne for most workloads, but anyone running a Pi in a tin-roofed shed in Darwin or a west-facing window box in Perth should budget for the official Active Cooler or a 30 mm Noctua-style fan strapped to the SoC. The BCM2712 starts thermal throttling at 85 °C, and Australian ceiling temperatures regularly push uncooled cases past 70 °C in the shade. Australia's mains supply is 230 V at 50 Hz, well within the Pi's PSU tolerance, but cheap travel adapters sometimes lack the earthing pin and introduce buzzing that interferes with the on-board Wi-Fi.

Local Linux user groups — including the long-running Sydney Linux Users Group, Melbourne's Linux Users of Victoria, and Brisbane's BNE Linux — run install-fest evenings several times a year and are a friendly way to get hands-on help with the steps above. Online, the Ubuntu Australia mailing list and the AU LoCo Team on the Ubuntu wiki coordinate social events. Common pitfalls worth flagging: forgetting that the filesystem auto-expand only runs on the boot partition, using a non-endurance card that wears out after a year of swap writes, and accidentally flashing a Raspberry Pi OS image that lacks the Pi 5 EEPROM updater needed to keep boot order working after a kernel upgrade.

By April 2029 the LTS will reach the end of its standard support window, giving you five years from today's install to run whatever you decide to host. Monthly security updates keep the foundation sound, and a quick sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade every few weeks handles them in a single sitting. From here, the UbuntuNext publication carries follow-up tutorials for turning the same Pi into a NAS, a Pi-hole, or a Kubernetes node when projects call for more than a vanilla server. Until then, this little board will quietly do its job in a corner of your home network.