Raspberry Pi and Ubuntu Desktop
A little while ago I purchased the awesome Argon1 case along with the all new [Hot] Raspberry Pi 4 4GB. The case is a polished grey aluminium alloy and because of this provides passive cooling for the Raspberry Pi 4 which currently has a reputation for running excesivley hot, alongside the cooling ability of the case there is a software controllable fan inside for further temperature management.
With its clever redirecting board all the ports, USB, Network, Sound, HDMI and power are all sanely located at the back rather than as most of us know, sticking out all over the place.
Initially I installed Raspberry Pi OS (Formerly Rasbian) on it, well, it is the de rigure OS for Pi's and was happy with that until I came across Martin Wimpress's video on how to install Ubuntu Desktop on a Raspberry Pi. Officially there isn't desktop version of Ubuntu for the Raspberry Pi although rumours are floating around that there could be an official release in October.
What! Another Raspberry Pi?
I probably didn't need to but I thought it would be a good idea to purchase an 8GB Raspberry Pi just in case the 4GB one was not high spec enough. I set about swapping out the 4GB in the Argon 1 case with the 8GB and wiping the SD card in preparation. The installation comes in two stages. First we need to install Ubuntu Server (In my case 64bit) the easist way is to use The Raspberry Pi Imager, simply select the OS you wish to install, the SD card you wish to install to and the application does all the rest including downloading and writing to your SD card.
Next, log in with:
Username: ubuntu
Password: ubuntu
It's probably best to run an update on the install:
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y
Now we're ready for the fun part.
git clone https://github.com/wimpysworld/desktopify cd desktopify sudo ./desktopfiy -de ubuntu
The -de flag tells the script which desktop environment you want to install so for example if you prefer Mate then its -de ubuntu-mate. Take a look Here for the different Desktop Environments. It took a while for the installation to complete for me so I'd suggest having a coffee if you're American or a nice Cup of Tea if your British like me.
The moment of truth
Now its time to reboot and leave our Command Line environment and hopefully enjoy a fully fledged Graphical User Interface (GUI)
sudo reboot
SUCCESS
Interstingly, once I logged in I found almost immediately an update notification so after running that and adding myself as a user we were ready to start actually doing something with it.
Postscript: The official Argon One script for controlling the fan will not install on Ubuntu. It will cry about the Raspberry-gpio you will need to use this script from Cédric Meuter instead.
https://github.com/meuter/argon-one-case-ubuntu-20.04