Installing OpenClaw on a Jetson Nano

Nice writeup. The security concern is valid — running an AI agent with shell access on your main machine is risky. Dedicated hardware is the right approach.

FWIW if you're buying new for this use case, the Orin Nano Super (not the original Nano) is a much better fit. It runs Ubuntu 22.04 natively so you skip the entire glibc/Bun workaround. Node 22 installs cleanly, 67 TOPS for local inference, and it draws about 15W so it can run 24/7 without thinking about power.

I've been running OpenClaw on one for months — Telegram bot, browser automation, cron jobs, the whole stack. The original Nano works (as you showed) but the 4GB RAM is tight once you add any local model. The Orin Nano's 8GB unified memory makes a real difference for running quantized models alongside the agent.

The Bun shebang fix is a good find. Worth noting that openclaw update will clobber it every time, so wrapping both sed commands in a post-update script saves headaches.

I was too scared to install OpenClaw on my main laptop but happened to have an old Jetson Nano lying around. Despite being 18.04 un-upgradable release, I managed to install OpenClaw (thanks to the bun runtime). I've documented the setup process in the blog post so that others don't have to suffer the same pain.