Raspberry Pi + ubuntu MATE

Well, after some time of experimentation with a few distros for the rpi2 I decided to stick with ubuntu MATE, because it provides the best user experience and a good environment for applications development, a big thank you to Martin Wimpress and Rohith Madhavan.

https://ubuntu-mate.org/raspberry-pi/

After downloading and decompressing the img file, instructions tell you to use

sudo ddrescue -d -D —force ubuntu-mate-15.10-desktop-armhf-raspberry-pi-2.img /dev/sdX

which fails with a 
ddrescue: Can't open input file: Invalid argument

but why?.. because fuck you, that's why, syntax is perfectly fine, and it even fails with absolute paths, so no fucking reason at all, anyway.. using the good old dd works fine:

sudo dd bs=4M if=ubuntu-mate-15.10-desktop-armhf-raspberry-pi-2.img of=/dev/mmcblk0

in addition, in a separate terminal you can use

sudo pkill -USR1 -n -x dd

to display progress, progress will be shown in the terminal writing the image.

Now just to be safe, type sudo sync to let all remaining operations finish, then you can safely remove the microSD card and boot your rpi2.

yaaay! we can see it booting and getting to the beautiful system configuration page, select your preferred settings and let it install everything for you and reboot.

Now login, connect to the network and update all packages:

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

time to resize file system to use all our microSD storage:

sudo fdisk /dev/mmcblk0
d,2
n,p,2,enter,enter,w
reboot
sudo resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p2

surprisingly enough, the last command gave me a "Permission denied to resize filesystem", even as root, it was complaining about "on-line resizing required", I went the easy way and resized it monuted in my laptop.

I had to go into recovery mode and run e2fsck to fix several issues, reboot again and rerun the command, it turned out to be a bad setting, I was using bs=1M in the dd command, that created wrong desc_blocks, so always use 4M.

We now have the 100% of our storage available, time for next steps:

Some useful packages are not installed

sudo apt-get install vim htop ntpdate

 

Date/Time is normally wrong 

Run and create a init script with this line:

$ sudo ntpdate -u ntp.ubuntu.com

$ sudo vi /etc/init.d/time-sync
> /usr/sbin/ntpdate -u ntp.ubuntu.com


$ sudo chmod +x /etc/init.d/time-sync

$ sudo update-rc.d time-sync defaults

Some overclocking settings, if you have a good power source

#safe overclock
arm_freq=1000
#arm_freq_min=400
sdram_freq=500
#sdram_freq=250
core_freq=500
#core_freq=250
over_voltage=6
temp_limit=80
boot_delay=0
disable_splash=1
gpu_mem=256
initial_turbo=60

#extreme speed, VOIDS WARRANTY!!
gpu_mem=256
force_turbo=1 #Voids warranty!
arm_freq=1100
sdram_freq=500
core_freq=500
over_voltage=6
temp_limit=80 #Will throttle to default clock speed if hit.
boot_delay=0
disable_splash=1

Troubleshooting

I connected a wifi dongle and worked out of the box, but I also used a dongle for wireless keyboard and mouse and at some times the power supply was not enough and rebooted my system, I added over_voltage=6 to /boot/config.txt in order to mitigate the issue a bit, it worked fine but it is preferable to have a good power source if you have this kind of issue.