Like any lab setup, this was kind of a headache. I'll save you the excruciating details and simply tell you what you actually need to get this thing going.
What I Really Needed
- MacBook Pro laptop
- Balena Etcher
- Jetson Orin Nano Super 8GB
- YahBoom! case for the Jetson Orin Nano Super
- Amazon Basic keyboard with built-in touchpad
- DisplayPort compatible monitor at 1080x768
- USB-C to MicroSD card converter
- MicroSD card - 127GB
- NVMe drive - 2 TB
All this and I had to order a second Jetson Orin Nano because the first one wouldn't boot.
Prerequisites to actually doing anything fun
- Check the boot step-by-step: Your instinct might be to wire everything up first and then boot the device. Wrong! As soon as the thing comes out of the box, plug in your DisplayPort and your keyboard and make sure the thing actually boots up.
- Flash the firmware ROM: For whatever reason, NVidia decided to ship the Jetson Super with old firmware that can't run their most recent OS, Jetpack 6.2. So yeah this is a pain
- Install the new OS: Once you flash the ROM using Jetpack 5.3, you need to re-image your microSD card so you can use Jetpack 6.2
- Turn on Super mode: The new OS is what raises the TOPS power on this chipset, so make certain this is the first thing you do once you have it running
- Don't install chromium through the wizard: Jetpack will use snap to install chrome and there's compatibility problems. Skip snap altogether and install firefox directly from their repo
- Install xrdp and setup sshd for headless operation: This is an essential step for any lab machine, unless of course you like maintaining multiple workstations. The Internet is abuzz with using nomachine on Jetpack for "performance" but I run xrdp on all my lab devices with no problems. I installed xfce because I was running to problems getting it to mesh with GNOME
- Setup a helper file for xfce for the terminal emulator: This is tricky but basically xfce will open terminals in the GNOME interface unless you set a helper file telling it to use xfce-terminal. Don't look at me! It's wierd but it's a thing
- Install jetson stats:
- This calls for installing the jtop service
- Also the nvidia-jetpack package, whatever that is
- Also you need to modify the
/usr/local/lib/python3.10/dist-packages/jtop/core/jetson_variables.py
to match your version of Jetpack to the version of L4T