lnxrepo

Unofficial arm64 · Raspberry Pi

Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon for Raspberry Pi

Mint's desktop, rebuilt natively for arm64 from Mint's own source packages and published as a ready-to-flash SD-card image. It updates through Update Manager like any other Mint install.

Download image How to install

Linux Mint 22.3 “Zena” · Cinnamon · Ubuntu 24.04 base · 2.1 GB download

What's in it

  • Mint's desktop, built for arm64

    Cinnamon, Muffin, Nemo, XApp, Xed and the rest of Mint's ~65 architecture-specific packages are rebuilt natively from Mint's source packages. The ~95 architecture-independent ones, such as Update Manager, Software Manager and the artwork, are Mint's own, unchanged.

  • Ubuntu 24.04 underneath

    As on a PC, Mint 22.3 sits on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS “Noble”. The base system, security updates and Ubuntu's Raspberry Pi kernel come straight from Ubuntu's arm64 archive.

  • Updates the Mint way

    Update Manager and Software Sources work as usual, against a signed arm64 repository laid out like Mint's: main, upstream, import and backport.

  • Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice

    Firefox comes from Mozilla's arm64 apt repository and Thunderbird from the Mozilla Team PPA. LibreOffice and Flatpak (with Flathub) are installed too.

  • GPU-accelerated on the Pi 5

    X runs on the kernel's vc4 display driver, with glamor acceleration on the Pi 5's V3D GPU.

  • No Snap

    As on Linux Mint, snapd is blocked. Firefox and Thunderbird are real .deb packages, not Snap stubs.

Install

  1. Download and check the image

    Get the image and its checksum file, then verify the download:

    curl -O https://apt.lnxrepo.com/mint-arm/images/linuxmint-22.3-cinnamon-arm64-raspi.img.xz
curl -O https://apt.lnxrepo.com/mint-arm/images/linuxmint-22.3-cinnamon-arm64-raspi.img.xz.sha256
sha256sum -c linuxmint-22.3-cinnamon-arm64-raspi.img.xz.sha256

  2. Write it to a microSD card

    Use a card of 16 GB or more. Everything on it will be erased.

    In Raspberry Pi Imager, choose Use custom under Operating System and pick the .img.xz file. Don't apply Imager's OS customisation; it's made for Raspberry Pi OS.

    Or, from a Linux terminal, find the card with lsblk and replace /dev/sdX with it:

    xzcat linuxmint-22.3-cinnamon-arm64-raspi.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=4M conv=fsync status=progress

  3. Boot and log in

    Put the card in the Pi and power it on. On first boot the system grows to fill the card. Log in as mint with the password mint. You'll be asked to choose a new password straight away.

Hardware

This is a young port. So far it has been tested on real hardware on one Raspberry Pi 5.

BoardStatusNotes
Raspberry Pi 5 Tested Boots to the accelerated Cinnamon desktop, and Ethernet works. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, audio and EEPROM updates haven't been checked yet.
Raspberry Pi 4 Untested Not tried yet.
QEMU virt (arm64) Tested Boots the image's own kernel to the desktop with a virtio GPU.

Known issues

Black screen (“No signal”) after the boot text, or a very slow desktop

Some small HDMI panels don't hold the HDMI hotplug line steady. The kernel then switches the output off, or floods X with display-change events, which makes the desktop crawl.

The fix is to append vc4.force_hotplug=1 to the single line in /boot/firmware/cmdline.txt, then reboot. If the screen is black, edit cmdline.txt on the card's boot partition from another computer. Use 2 for the second HDMI port, or 3 for both. The image doesn't set this by default, because it would make Cinnamon treat an empty HDMI port as a screen.

No Chromium

Mint's Chromium package is compiled with Google's x86-only toolchain, so it isn't rebuilt here. Firefox is installed. For Chromium, install org.chromium.Chromium from Flathub.

Thunderbird is the ESR release

Mozilla publishes no Linux arm64 builds of Thunderbird to repackage, so the image uses the Mozilla Team PPA's build, which follows Thunderbird's extended-support release.

Some Mint tools assume a PC

Driver Manager has nothing to offer on a Pi. In Software Sources, the source-code and debug-symbol options add repositories with no arm64 content. Update Manager can't show changelogs for Mint's packages.

Apt repository

Installed images already use this repository. It holds Mint's packages for arm64, signed with the key below. The Ubuntu base comes from ports.ubuntu.com.

deb https://apt.lnxrepo.com/mint-arm zena main upstream import backport
Signing key
mint-arm.asc
Fingerprint
32C5 DD66 0D10 A369 102B 45CD 781E B977 BAB4 13F7