Installing Google Coral on Ubuntu 23.10

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MAY THE 4TH BE WITH YOU!… and also this guide.

I have not tested it in Ubuntu 24.04 but it may work. Let me know in the comments if you try!

This brief guide has been revised from:
https://coral.ai/docs/m2/get-started#2-install-the-pcie-driver-and-edge-tpu-runtime

This will essentially be the first part of a few parts coming for Frigate and Home Assistant.

First, we need to setup the apt repository, and install the required packages:

echo "deb https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt coral-edgetpu-stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/coral-edgetpu.list

curl -fsSL https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/google-coral-edgetpu.gpg

sudo apt update
sudo apt install gasket-dkms libedgetpu1-std

If gasket-dkms fails (it probably will — if it doesn’t, skip down to the udev rule section):

sudo apt purge gasket-dkms
git clone https://github.com/KyleGospo/gasket-dkms
apt install dkms libfuse2 dh-dkms devscripts
cd gasket-dkms; debuild -us -uc -tc -b

You’ll have a .deb file one folder up:

cd ..
ls *.deb
dpkg -i gasket-dkms-*.deb

We need to add a udev rule for permission to the hardware device:

sudo sh -c "echo 'SUBSYSTEM==\"apex\", MODE=\"0660\", GROUP=\"docker\"' >> /etc/udev/rules.d/65-apex.rules"

If you don’t want to use the docker group, replace docker in the udev command string:

sudo groupadd apex
sudo usermod -a -G apex your_linux_username
sudo sh -c "echo 'SUBSYSTEM==\"apex\", MODE=\"0660\", GROUP=\"apex\"' >> /etc/udev/rules.d/65-apex.rules"

REBOOT!

Verify the device is detected and available:

ls -alh /dev/apex*
crw-rw---- 1 root docker 120, 0 May 4 20:34 /dev/apex_0

7 thoughts on “Installing Google Coral on Ubuntu 23.10”

  1. I had an issue on Ubuntu 24.04 where the “debuild” command would fail with:

    dpkg-checkbuilddeps: error: Unmet build dependencies: debhelper (>= 9)

    I had to add “debhelper” to the end of the list to install with “apt”.

    Reply

  2. I spent all day trying to get coral working again after upgrading, following different approaches. Arrived back here on my thousandth google search and remembered having tried this too… Then read the reply about adding the `debhelper` package. OMG! Thank you all so much!

    Reply

  3. dpkg -i gasket-dkms-*.deb should read dkms_* with an underscore, not a hyphen, at least when I did this on Ubuntu 24.04. Other than that, great guide!

    Reply

  4. Thank you so much for sharing this solution – it helped me a lot after struggling with the “gasket-dkms” build failure. Thanks to your instructions, my Coral PCIe chip is now working perfectly with Frigate in Docker on Ubuntu 24.04.2 LTS (kernel 6.8.0-60-generic). Great job!

    Just a quick note: I also had to install debhelper using “sudo apt install debhelper”.

    Reply

  5. Excellent write up! It worked for me on 24.04 and like Sebastian I needed the additional dependency of debhelper

    Reply

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