Hi everyone, I have an Arducam IMX219 Quadrascopic Camera Bundle Kit (the 8MP 4-camera version). It works perfectly when I boot Raspberry Pi OS on my Raspberry Pi 5, but I really want to run it on Ubuntu 24.04 instead. I can’t seem to find any documentation, tutorials, or example projects for using this camera kit on Ubuntu. Is there any way to get this working, or any guide I’m missing?
Thanks for the post. Before we dig in, could you share a bit more about your setup? Which exact OS build are you running on the Pi 5, and what actually happens when you try to use the cameras on Ubuntu? Any error messages or logs would really help narrow things down.
Sure. I’m on a Raspberry Pi 5 running Ubuntu 24.04 (not Raspberry Pi OS). Honestly I haven’t gotten very far - it’s a fresh Ubuntu install and the cameras just aren’t showing up at all. I don’t have any error logs yet because I’m not even sure where to start with the camera stack on Ubuntu.
Got it. Let’s start with a couple of basic checks to see whether the kernel even detects the camera hardware. Can you run these and paste the output?
dmesg | grep -i imx219
ls /dev/video*
That should tell us if the IMX219 driver is loading and whether any video device nodes are being created.
I ran both commands. dmesg | grep -i imx219 returns nothing at all, and ls /dev/video* gives “No such file or directory”. I also tried libcamera-hello --list-cameras but it said libcamera isn’t even installed, and apt couldn’t locate the package. Is Ubuntu using a completely different camera stack than Raspberry Pi OS?
That matches what I’d expect on Ubuntu. The kernel configuration and camera stack are quite different from Raspberry Pi OS. One more thing worth checking: on Ubuntu on a Pi, the boot config lives at /boot/firmware/config.txt. Could you check whether there’s an imx219 overlay entry in there, or a camera_auto_detect=1 line?
I checked /boot/firmware/config.txt and there was no imx219 overlay line. I did still have camera_auto_detect=1 in there from an earlier attempt, but that didn’t change anything. I also tried manually adding dtoverlay=imx219 and rebooting, but still nothing shows up in dmesg and there are still no /dev/video nodes.
Thanks for trying that. Unfortunately that confirms the situation. This camera kit is only officially supported and tested on Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye and Bookworm - there’s no official driver support for Ubuntu on the Raspberry Pi 5. The kernel modules and libcamera configuration the kit relies on are developed specifically for Raspberry Pi OS. Ubuntu ships a different kernel configuration and camera stack implementation, so the overlays don’t load the same way and the camera won’t be detected, as you’ve already seen.
So there’s really no driver or package I can install to make it work on Ubuntu? I’d strongly prefer to stay on Ubuntu for this project if there’s any workaround.
Correct - there isn’t an official driver or supported libcamera setup for Ubuntu on the Pi 5 with this kit. The supported route is to install either Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye or Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm. On those operating systems, the necessary kernel modules and libcamera configuration are included and the quadrascopic bundle works out of the box.
That’s a bit disappointing, but it makes sense. Just to confirm: if I switch my Pi 5 over to Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm, the IMX219 quadrascopic cameras should work like they did before, right?
Yes, that’s correct. For full functionality and optimal performance with the IMX219 Quadrascopic Camera Bundle Kit, install and use either Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye or Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm. Ubuntu 24.04 on the Raspberry Pi 5 isn’t officially supported for this kit, which is why the cameras aren’t detected. To sum it up: stick with an officially supported Raspberry Pi OS and the kit will work as expected.