Compile Raspberry Pi5 Camera library on Ubuntu 24.04

This is a comprehensive guide on how to get Camera Module 3 working on Raspberry Pi5 on Ubuntu 2404. This guide is mainly based on the official camera software guide but more focus on how to get it to work on Ubuntu 2404.

Do not install libcamera from apt-get.
We will build all libraries in the following order, libcamera / rpicam-apps / libepoxy.

If building everything using the steps described below is overwhelming, try using the precompiled binaries (tested on Pi5, Ubuntu 24.04LTS as of May 2026). Extract the files to /usr/local and skip to test section.

Building libcamera

for libcamera during “step to configure build environment” use this command instead meson setup build -Dpycamera=enabled -Dpython.platlibdir=/usr/local/lib/python3.12/dist-packages
1. without this command you will get module binding error “ImportError: dynamic module does not define module export function (PyInit__libcamera)” when “import libcamera”

Building rpicam

for rpicam-app change ‘-Denable_libav=disabled’ to disabled

Building pykms

for pykms
1. run ```sh git clone https://github.com/tomba/kmsxx.git cd kmsxx/ sudo apt install libfmt-dev libdrm-dev git submodule update —init meson build -Dpykms=enabled sudo ninja -C build install
```
1. copy build output to correct python lib location `sudo cp -r /usr/local/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/python3.12/site-packages/pykms /usr/local/lib/python3.12/dist-packages/`
```
pip install opencv-contrib-python opencv-python

Post building setting

allow dynamic linker sudo ldconfig
add to .bashrc export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/local/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH" (ref)[https://askubuntu.com/questions/1550540/libcamera-issues-with-ubuntu-24-04-lts]

Test

try run rpicam-hello should give you preview. rpicam-hello --list-cameras should give you connected camera
1. if getting this error “dmaHeap allocation failure for rpicam-apps0”
2. run sudo rpicam-hello should temporary solve the problem
3. to permanently fix the issue, run the following command to allow current group. ref
```
sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/99-dmaheap.rules <<EOF
SUBSYSTEM=="dma_heap", GROUP="MY_CURRENT_GROUP", MODE="0660"
EOF

sudo udevadm control --reload-rules
sudo udevadm trigger
```