Today I installed Arch Linux on my Raspberry Pi. The Arch Linux guide is sufficiant and I followed it mostly overcoming few small hiccups which I plan on documenting here.
The general procedure is to take up a Micro SD card and write the preferred OS in it. Put the card in your pi, apply power, connect ethernet and you are good to go!
Step 1
The first step is to partition the SD card. We will create two partions in our SD card. After inserting the SD card in your computer find out its name in your computer. If your card is named as /dev/sdX you can easily follow the arch guide. In my Ubuntu 14.04 system (yeah I know thats old!) it was identified as /dev/mmcblk0p1. This was the minor hiccup I referred above. What it means is that the mmc sub-system of my computer has registered the device in its well known format mmcblkXpY.
- Each mmc device registered withing the Linux kernel receives it own mmc device number X.
- Each partition on a particular device receives it own number Y.More about this here
So just to make things clear when I do df I have
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mmcblk0p1 15541408 8 15541400 1% /media/arka/5E95-21CD
And on lsblk I get
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
mmcblk0 179:0 0 14.9G 0 disk
└─mmcblk0p1 179:1 0 14.9G 0 part /media/arka/5E95-21CD
First umount the device
umount /dev/mmcblk0p1
Now we have to create partition in this SD card. Start fdisk to partion:
fdisk /dev/mmcblk0
Delete old partions and create new one at fdisk prompt:
- Type o. This will clear out any partitions on the drive.
- Type p to list partitions. There should be no partitions left.
- Type n, then p for primary, 1 for the first partition on the drive, press ENTER to accept the default first sector, then type +100M for the last sector.
- Type t, then c to set the first partition to type W95 FAT32 (LBA).
- Type n, then p for primary, 2 for the second partition on the drive, and then press ENTER twice to accept the default first and last sector.
- Write the partition table and exit by typing w.
After this if you do lsblk you should have something like:
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
mmcblk0 179:0 0 14.9G 0 disk
├─mmcblk0p1 179:1 0 100M 0 part
└─mmcblk0p2 179:2 0 14.8G 0 part
Step 2
Now we have create and mount FAT filesystem in partion 1:
mkfs.vfat /dev/mmcblk0p1
mkdir boot
mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 boot
Step 3
Similarly create and mount ext4filesystem in partition 2:
mkfs.ext4 /dev/mmcblk0p2
mkdir root
mount /dev/mmcblk0p2 root
Step 4
Download and extract the root filesystem (as root, not via sudo):
wget http://os.archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM-rpi-2-latest.tar.gz
bsdtar -xpf ArchLinuxARM-rpi-2-latest.tar.gz -C root
sync
Step 5
Move boot files to the first partition:
mv root/boot/* boot
Step 6
Unmount the two partitions:
umount boot root
Step 7
Insert SD card in Raspberry Pi 3 , connect ethernet and apply power. We can connect to a monitor via HDMI cable and add a USB mouse and keyboard to get started. Better still use SSH to have remote access. Find out the IP of your Pi (via nmap, etc.) and then :
ssh alarm@192.168.0.101
alarm@192.168.0.101's password:
Welcome to Arch Linux ARM
Website: http://archlinuxarm.org
Forum: http://archlinuxarm.org/forum
IRC: #archlinux-arm on irc.Freenode.net
Last login: Sat May 27 13:37:59 2017 from 192.168.0.106
[alarm@alarmpi ~]$ pwd
/home/alarm
[alarm@alarmpi ~]$
- Login as the default user alarm with the password alarm.
- The default root password is root.
The procedure was simple, credits goes mostly to the well written arch guide. After meddling with the Pi soon you will find sudo is not installed! Hopefully I will get to document that in the future!
Edit: It is here