Easily Take Notes on your Raspberry Pi with Obsidian

This quick Raspberry Pi project will show you how to install and run the note-taking application called Obsidian.

Obsidian is a self-hosted note-taking application designed to act as your personal knowledge base. All of your data is kept locally on your own machine in what Obisdian calls “Vaults.” These vaults are essentially just text files that store all of your information, formatted using Markdown.

You could consider Obsidian a self-hosted alternative for your Raspberry Pi to online-only solutions such as Notion. It is also a great alternative to Microsoft’s OneNote and can actually run on Linux.

The other great thing about Obsidian is that compared to the other paid solutions. You don’t lose out on a huge amount and keep full control over your data. The software is also very actively developed.

To run Obsidian on your Raspberry Pi, you must have a 64-bit operating system. If you are unsure if you are running a 64-bit system, we have a guide on how to check this.

All the main Raspberry Pi models since the 3 have support for using a 64-bit system.

Equipment

Below is a list of equipment we used when setting up Obsidian on our Raspberry Pi.

Optional

Raspberry Pi Case Amazon

This tutorial was last tested on a Raspberry Pi 5 running the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm 64-bit.

How to Install and Run Obsidian on Your Raspberry Pi

Over the following sections, we will be walking you through the steps required to install the Obsidian note-taking software onto your Raspberry Pi.

To achieve this, we will use Obsidian’s Flatpak distribution. This approach has the advantage of including everything required to get Obsidian running within a single package. Additionally, Obsidian only distributes its ARM versions through Flatpak or Appimage.

Preparing your Raspberry Pi

1. For the first part of this process, we must ensure that our Raspberry Pi is up-to-date. You can update the existing packages on your system by using the following two commands in the terminal.

The first command will update the package list cache. The second will upgrade any out-of-date packages.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -yCopy

2. Once your packages have been updated, we will need to install and set up Flatpak. This is fairly straightforward, as Flatpak is available through the official Raspberry Pi OS repository.

To install the software, we only need to use the following command in the terminal.

sudo apt install flatpakCopy

3. When Flatpak has finished installing to your Raspberry Pi, we will need to add a remote repository for it to use to install the Obsidian Fatpak. As Obsidian is hosted on FlatHub, we will be adding that repository.

You will want to use the following command within the terminal to add this remote repository.

sudo flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepoCopy

4. To ensure that the rest of your system reflects this change, reboot your Raspberry Pi by running the following command in the terminal.

Flatpak won’t work properly until your system has been rebooted, meaning we won’t be able to install and run Obsidian just yet.

sudo rebootCopy

Installing Obsidian onto your Raspberry Pi

5. Now that Flatpak has been installed, all we need to do to get Obsidian installed on our Raspberry Pi is to run the following command.

With this command, Flatpak will find and download Obsidian for ARM64 from the Flathub repository.

flatpak install flathub md.obsidian.ObsidianCopy

Launching the Obsidian Note-taking Software on your Raspberry Pi

6. Once Flatpak has finished downloading and installing the Obsidian software, all we need to do to launch it is to use the following command

flatpak run md.obsidian.ObsidianCopy

It can also be found by going through the start menu, opening the “Office” menu, and then selecting the “Obsidian” option.

Opening Obsidian on the Raspberry Pi using the Start Menu

7. You should now successfully have Obsidian up and running on your Raspberry Pi. You can now set up your own vaults and begin taking and storing your notes.