Setting up the Jetson Orion Nano Super Dev Kit for Reals (issues + solutions)
Published/Updated: April 12 2026
I recently got my hand on one of these for cheap and the NVIDIA instructions for this product does not fully help with setting up this device. I’m just going to briefly mention what issues I had and the overall process of how I fixed them.
First, you should know that you can just configure the Jetson using SSH if the device is connected to ethernet. You only need a screen if you are going to use any graphical processes or troubleshooting (which I did need it for!). I was able to set the IP address using the admin console of my router and I’ve had no issues since.
Now, when following the NVIDIA tutorial, there are two things to keep in mind. First, you should make the directory where the external drive will be connected unwritable by anyone. If you have the directory “/mnt/user” on the root file system (your SD card), then mount an external drive to “/mnt/user,” you may find that files may be written to the SD card instead of the external drive. The command I used was some form of “chattr” to prevent writes. The cool thing is that once you mount the external drive to the directory, chattr will not prevent writes to that location. This pretty much ensures that files will be written to the external drive instead of the SD card.
The second thing is that when you pull images with docker, they will be saved to the SD card regardless of whether you have moved the docker root to the external drive. To fix this, you need to move “containerd” to the external drive as well. As a bonus, you should make sure everything you do is either through docker or python venv if possible. Of course, there are some things you will have to do on the base system, but you know what those are!
Other miscellaneous things are setting your power usage which can be done through the terminal, and setting up the GPIO pins. For the GPIO pins, instead of using pinmux and reflashing, use jetson-io.py to set pins as input/output or you may find that pins won’t work/p>
This should solve the most major pain points for the general setup. The rest is up to you!