Ubuntu 18.04.x (ARM 64-bit) is now available for the Raspberry Pi 4. While not an officially supported OS from either the Foundation or Ubuntu, James A. Chambers has been working on a port for the Raspberry Pi 4. A 64-bit OS is required to run 64-bit MongoDB 4.2.x. MongoDB (the company) just recently provided a 64-bit ARM version for Ubuntu 18.04. I will show how to install this version of MongoDB under Ubuntu 18.04 on the Raspberry Pi 4.

Note that my Raspberry Pi 4 has 4GB RAM. I believe from past experience that 2GB is sufficient to run MongoDB. I have had issues with a 1GB RAM system but worked around by creating a swap disk.

Please read my instructions carefully and copy and paste where you can. I have noticed a couple of typos on the MongoDB website where the “ARM” keyword was missing in some commands.

First, follow the instructions on James A Chambers website to install Ubuntu 18.04. I used “Release v17” but there may now be a newer release. Make sure you have updated the bootloader per James’ Raspberry Pi 4 Bootloader Guide. In short do a “rpi-update” and a “rpi-eeprom-update” under Raspbian BEFORE burning and booting-from the Ubuntu 18.04 image. I booted with ethernet connected to establish keys, etc. with Ubuntu. I chose not to use a GUI but again, James mentions several available in his write-up.

My wife, Claire, and I have been members of the Planetary Society since its founding in 1980. I was fortunate to be working at The Jet Propulsion Laboritory when Carl Sagen, Bruce Murray and Louis Friedman founded the society. Bill Nye, “The Science Guy” and space advocate, is now CEO.

The society’s mission has changed only slightly over the years and is now:

to empower the world’s citizens to advance space science and exploration. We advocate for space and planetary science funding in government, inspire and educate people around the world, and develop and fund groundbreaking space science and technology.

So, why this post and why this title? The Planetary Society has offered a year-free domain registration with the Top-level domain (TLD) of “space” to members. Well, I needed to take advantage of that and spread the word about this TLD. Being a big Science Fiction fan, the phrase, “Per aspera ad astra” came to mind. Several variants have already been taken so I had to be a (tiny) bit creative.

Until I think of “better” content and have time to put something together, the URL, PerAspera-AdAstra.space points to this blog.

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[UPDATE: 26 August 2017 – The binaries referenced in this post only work with Raspbian Jessie!  If you have upgraded to Raspbian Stretch on a R-Pi 3 or R-Pi 3B+, get the newer binaries]

The mongoDB documentation at mongodb.com states that 32-bit binaries are deprecated with release 3.2 and will be unavailable in future releases.  The latest version with 32-bit support (i.e. R-Pi with Raspbian) is 3.0.14 as of March, 2017.  I have compiled MongoDB 3.0.14 for Raspberry Pi 2 and 3.  I needed a few tweaks to the build process I used to compile 3.0.9 and associated tools. Use the installation instruction in my previous blog post to install and run MongoDB 3.0.14 on R-Pi.  The only change is to download newer files.  I have compiled MongoDB and Tools with the SSL flag — so the SSL option is available.

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