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Flash Ubuntu MATE onto a microSDHC

For Raspberry Pi using OSX

DIYODE Magazine

Issue 3, September 2017

This guide is for Mac OSX users and will walk you through flashing your SD Card with Ubuntu MATE ready to run on your Raspberry Pi.

Linux/Windows users please refer to the guides on https://ubuntu-mate.org/raspberry-pi/

Download Ubuntu MATE

Download the Ubuntu MATE for Raspberry Pi image from https://ubuntu-mate.org/download/
Then unzip the downloaded image

Format your microSDHC card

Insert your SDHC card
Open Disk Utility
Select the SD card and then click Erase and choose MS-DOS (FAT) format.

Now open a terminal and type the following to locate the cards disk ID

diskutil list
In our case the SD CARD is /dev/disk1

Now Unmount the disk. Replace disk1 with your SD card ID

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1

Write image to disk

Warning: The dd application should be used with great care as you risk erasing disks unintentionally if used incorrectly.

Browse to directory containing image.
Run the following command ensuring to replace disk1 with your SD card 

cd ~/Downloads
sudo dd if=ubuntu-mate-16.04.2-desktop-armhf-raspberry-pi.img of=/dev/disk1 bs=2m

This process will take a while to complete and may appear frozen. It took around 30 mins for us.

Result: