I recently picked up a Raspberry Pi 400 for my in-laws. Having gifted them many a hand-me-down laptop over the years, I was immediately struck by the simplicity of the new offering from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and at $140 CAD, the price point couldn’t be beat.
When the Pi arrived, I continued to be impressed by the packaging. The box contains everything that you need to get started (aside from a wall outlet and an external monitor with an HDMI input), and apart from the included mouse, all components feel well made and are pleasant to use.
Setup was simple – just plug in the power cable, the monitor, and the mouse, and the machine comes to life. Like previous iterations of the Pi, the machine boots from an SD card, and it doesn’t have a hardware power switch, so it turns on just as soon as power is connected.
The SD card comes inserted into the Pi, and is flashed with Raspbian GNU/Linux 10 (buster). On first boot, it asks for some locale information and prompts you to change the password for the default pi account, after which it downloads and installs updates.
Now, my in-laws have only just started to learn basic computer skills in the past few years. I have installed Ubuntu on the laptops that we’ve given them in the past, and I wanted the new Raspberry Pi to present a familiar user interface, so I opted to purchase a 32GB SD card and flash it with Ubuntu 20.10 to ease the transition to the new machine.
The Ubuntu blog confirms that the latest release of the OS can indeed be installed on the Raspberry Pi 400, and the article links to a tutorial for flashing Ubuntu onto an SD card destined for a Raspberry Pi 4. Presumably, the internals of the two models are similar enough that the same binaries work on both.
I downloaded the Raspberry Pi Imager for Windows, launched the app, chose Ubuntu Desktop 20.10 for the Raspberry Pi 400, selected the SD card to flash, and clicked the Write button.
One of the great things about a machine that boots from an SD card is that there’s really nothing to install. I just popped the card into the Raspberry Pi, powered it on, and it immediately booted into Ubuntu.
From there, I followed the steps on screen to configure the system, installed updates, and it was ready to go.
