Skip to main content

Raspberry Pi 5

This guide walks you through building and deploying Avocado OS to a Raspberry Pi 5 using an SD card.

Prerequisites​

  • Raspberry Pi 5
  • microSD card (8 GB+)
  • SD card reader connected to your host machine
  • macOS 10.12+ or Linux (Ubuntu 22.04+, Fedora 39+)
  • Docker Desktop installed and running
  • The latest version of the Avocado CLI
  • 8 GB available disk space
  • A TTY serial console USB adapter (this or similar) — must be set to 3.3V

If you have a serial console adapter connected, use a terminal program like tio:

tio -b 115200 /dev/ttyUSB0

Replace /dev/ttyUSB0 with the appropriate device path for your adapter.

Linux Auto-mounting

Some Linux operating systems, like Ubuntu, will attempt to auto-mount mass storage devices. This can interfere with Avocado's ability to finalize provisioning a device.

Before provisioning, disable auto-mounting. The following example is for Ubuntu (GNOME desktop); the same commands apply to other GNOME-based distributions such as Fedora Workstation.

Ubuntu (GNOME desktop)
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.media-handling automount false
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.media-handling automount-open false

Initialize​

Create a new project targeting the Raspberry Pi 5.

avocado init --target raspberrypi5 raspberrypi5
cd raspberrypi5

Install​

Install the SDK toolchain, extension dependencies, and runtime packages.

avocado install -f

Build​

Build the system image.

avocado build

Provision​

Insert your SD card and provision the dev runtime. The sd profile writes the image directly to the SD card.

avocado provision -r dev --profile sd

The CLI will detect available block devices and prompt you to select the SD card. Verify you select the correct device — this operation will overwrite the target disk.

Run​

  1. Insert the SD card into the Raspberry Pi 5
  2. Apply power to the device

The device will boot from the SD card with the provisioned system. Log in as root with an empty password.

SSH access​

Once booted, you can SSH into the device if you know its IP address:

ssh root@<device-ip>

The dev runtime includes an SSH server with passwordless root login for development purposes.