This port has been done by a developer in the community

Mar 9, 2015 10:27 GMT  ·  By

The Ubuntu MATE community has been very active and supportive of the project, so much so that someone has just released a version of the Ubuntu MATE distro for Raspberry Pi 2.

Raspberry Pi 2 is a new mini-PC that runs an ARM processor and it already has support from a few other distros. One of those OSes is a Debian-based one, so it's not a big leap to think that Ubuntu MATE can do the same thing. This is not an officially-supported architecture, or at least not yet. For now it's still under development, along with the 15.04 branch.

Ubuntu 15.04 is the first version of the distro as an official flavor and it would be the first to provide proper Raspberry Pi 2 support, if we ignore the Ubuntu Snappy Core, which is a different kind of ball game.

Ubuntu MATE 15.04 for Raspberry Pi is still under construction

The OS will become stable by the end of April, so it's easy to understand why the Raspberry Pi 2 version will have to wait at least that long until it is properly introduced to the world. One of the developers from the Ubuntu MATE project has already said that he's following this new port closely and that he might consider providing hosting.

"This image is based on the regular Ubuntu armhf base, and not the new Snappy Core, which means that the installation procedure for applications is the same as that for the desktop version, ie using apt-get. You'll need a microSD card which is 4GB or greater to fit the image. The filesystem can be resized to occupy the unallocated space of the microSD card, similar to Raspbian," wrote Rohith Madhavan, the developer of this fine port.

You can access the above link to also download the image, but please keep in mind that this is early work and you will likely encounter bugs.