Getting Started with Nvidia Jetson

October 3, 2025 · 2 min read

I’ve worked with the Nvidia Jetson family of products professionally to deploy software on the edge. But it’s been a while since I last had to set one up for development and deployment. Setting one of these devices up took more time and precision than I expected, so I wanted to use this blog as a place to store notes and hopefully make the next setup quicker and less painful.

The best official guide I found is located here. I’ll try to summarize, but that link should be treated as the gold standard. I found other Nvidia articles confusing and not particularly helpful for what I set out to do.

Warning: If you do not have a computer that can boot an x86 Ubuntu image with a desktop environment (no headless servers), consider alternative devices or buy a pre-flashed device. I struggled with this and couldn’t find a workaround.

What You Need

You might think it’s like a Raspberry Pi, just the computer and a microSD card, right?

Wrong. The bare minimum I found you need is:

  • Nvidia Jetson
  • NVMe drive (I used 1TB to be safe; during setup I recall seeing a note about needing at least 256 GB, so fair warning)
  • USB-C to ??? cable, to connect the Jetson (USB-C end) to your host computer (??? end)
  • A host x86 computer running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (no exceptions), with a desktop environment, since you’ll need a web browser for SDK Manager
  • An Ethernet cable (the Jetson has a DisplayPort, but no HDMI port, so I had to plug it into my network and remote in)

Trying to cut corners here turned out to be a patience-testing endeavor.

Fun Oddities

  1. Ubuntu 22.04 x86 with a desktop environment: Once you have this running on a host machine, you’re set. Until then, you’re stuck.
  2. Nvidia developer account sign-in: If you signed up with Apple/Google/etc., the SDK Manager login flow is awkward. When prompted for an email, enter something like [email protected]. On the next page, you’ll see more sign-in options—choose the one you actually want. If you sign in before launching SDK Manager, it won’t pick up your session.
  3. No HDMI port: The Jetson only has a DisplayPort. I had to connect it to my network via etherent and remote in.