Martin Wimpress and Rohith Madhavan have had the great pleasure of announcing the first ever release of the highly anticipated Ubuntu MATE image for the Raspberry Pi 2 single-board computer (SBC).

The Raspberry Pi 2 image of Ubuntu MATE is currently based on the recently announced Ubuntu MATE 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) computer operating system and provides users with a fully functional MATE desktop environment.

The system is based on a standard Ubuntu ARMhf image instead of the more recent Snappy Ubuntu Core operating system, which means that the OS is using Debian packages and the apt-get package management tool.

Also, the installation procedure is identical with the one of the standard Ubuntu Linux OS. Users can also build the Ubuntu MATE 15.10 for Raspberry Pi 2 image themselves, and the developers recommend using the F2FS filesystem and a 4GB or higher microSD card.

"We have done what we can to optimise the build for the Raspberry Pi 2 and one can comfortably use applications such as LibreOffice, which in fact is a joy to use," says Martin Wimpress. "But the microSDHC I/O throughput is a bottleneck so we recommend that you use a Class 6 or Class 10 microSDHC card."

Tips and tricks

Users are also informed that the Ubuntu MATE 15.10 for Raspberry Pi 2 image does not contain predefined user accounts, so they will need to create one during the first time boot, through a setup wizard. Also, please remember to configure regional settings.

Another interesting feature of Ubuntu MATE 15.10 for Raspberry Pi is that you can use the entire unallocated space on the microSD card by resizing the file system, just like the Raspbian distro does.

Lastly, please note that the first boot will be slow, but that will change immediately after completing the first boot configuration. Without further ado, you can download the Ubuntu MATE 15.10 for Raspberry Pi image right now.