Hi all, I’m trying to get an IMX296 camera working on a Raspberry Pi 5 running Ubuntu 24.04 (noble), but it’s just not being recognized at all. libcamera doesn’t see it no matter what I try. Has anyone run into this before? I know the Pi 5 with Ubuntu can be a bit tricky.
Thanks for the report. Could you share a bit more about your setup - which camera module, what hardware, and the exact OS version? Also, if you have any error output from libcamera or the system logs, that would help narrow things down.
Sure. The camera is an IMX296, and the hardware is a Raspberry Pi 5. The OS is Ubuntu 24.04 (noble). I’m building a robot and eventually want to use this with ROS 2 Jazzy on Ubuntu 24. I don’t have specific logs yet - the camera just doesn’t show up when I try to use it with libcamera. I’ve tried the usual detection steps but no luck so far.
That matches a known issue we’ve been tracking. libcamera does not work properly on a Raspberry Pi 5 under Ubuntu 24 (noble). There’s an open bug filed for it here: Bug #2038669 “Add Raspberry Pi 5 support” : Bugs : libcamera package : Ubuntu. Unfortunately it hasn’t received much attention upstream yet.
Ah, that explains a lot. Is there any workaround in the meantime? I really need to get this camera working for the robot, so waiting on the bug to be fixed isn’t great.
Yes, there is a workaround. You can build libcamera yourself on Ubuntu OS to get past the broken package. We have a prior discussion that walks through the build steps here: Discord. Follow that to build libcamera on Ubuntu, and the IMX296 should then be recognized on the Pi 5.
Great, I’ll follow that and give the build a try. Just to confirm my understanding - once libcamera is built from source on Ubuntu 24, the IMX296 should work on the Pi 5, right? Then I can move on to setting it up with ROS 2 Jazzy.
Right. The current workaround is to build libcamera on Ubuntu OS following that referenced discussion. Once libcamera is working, you should be able to use the IMX296 camera on the Raspberry Pi 5 with Ubuntu 24.04 and continue with your ROS 2 Jazzy setup. Keep in mind the underlying Ubuntu bug is still open, so a proper distro fix may come later.