The Jetson comes with some basic software installed (Ubuntu, CUDA, drivers, etc.).
However, the setup process on the Jetsono can be a bit whimsical and easy to get stuck in.
It's possible that somewhere along the line you (like me) will screw up the Jetson to where it must be re-imaged.
It's also possible that you (like me) will run out of disk space, and would like to clear out all of the software, keeping only the essentials.
Thus, I'll start with the process of 'flashing' the Jetson from a host machine.
To flash the Jetson, you must have a computer which is running Ubuntu 14.04 (it is possible with Ubuntu 16, but you may run into difficulties). Since I run Windows, this will require using a virtual machine. I followed the instructions found here to a tee, with one exception:
When you download an Ubuntu iso, don't do it from the Ubuntu Desktop site as they give you the latest version (18). Instead, download the iso image from here to get Ubuntu 14.04. Another tip is to make sure you have at least 30G of disk space clear on your main Windows machine before you start this process otherwise you will run out of space on your VM.
In the tutorial, they only have you flash the OS, we will also need CUDA toolkit as it is a prereq for pytorch. So after finishing the jetson image, we neeed to re-run the flash script, but checking the boxes for CUDA and CUDNN. The script will fail, but will get som .deb files which will be needed later on.
Now we're ready to operate on the Jetson directly. We will need to plug in a monitor to the hdmi port, a mouse, keyboard, and flashdrive to the usb port (need a usb hub to do this), and preferably an ethernet cable (although you can connect to wifi).
We are going to run out of CPU trying to install the necessary python packages. Thus, we will need to create a swapfile to allow the Jetson to free up space. Plug a usb drive (at least 8G, I used 32G) into the Jetson. Then run the code below to get and run a useful script for making a swapfile.
git clone https://github.com/jetsonhacks/postFlashTX1
cd postFlashTX1
sudo ./createSwapfile.sh -d '/media/ubuntu/[name of your usb]' -s 10 -aNow follow the instructions in this video walkthrough to take care of configurations for mounting the usb on startup. Finally, restart the Jetson.
I'll want to run python 3.6 since it's what I'll build the prototype in on my laptop (the Jetson initially came outfitted with Python 2.7).
# Get python3.6
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3.6
# Get pip3
sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
sudo apt-add-repository universe
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3-pipFor this project, I wanted to use pytorch as it is the library I've been focusing my 'deep' learning arounding (I got jokes). To this end, I followed these instructions to install pytorch from source, as well as all of the dependencies (this is where you will use the .deb files from before). The reason we have to do this in an atypical fashion is that the Jetson is running aarch64 and isn't compatable with standard package manager installation (i.e. conda).
The final step of this process is where I have gotten stuck (I get errors just trying to import torch), and unfortunately I ran out of time before I could overcome this issue.
Welp... even though it wasn't able to run on a GPU, I did do some lower resolution examples just on my laptop. You can open up the notebook titled Run_Style_Transfer.ipynb to see what I did. The examples still run in a few minutes, and still came out with some pretty pictures!
In the future, I would try to do something which is a little more established. Based on some poking around, it doesn't look like too many people are out there running pytorch on Jetsons, so I ran into issue after issue. This led me into a rabbit hole of flashing the Jetson, memory swap, etc. which are all tasks with which I don't have a ton of experience, and ultimately ran me out of time. I also wasn't well set up not having a Linux box and having to use an unreliable VM.