Raspberry Pi - Arch Linux Install Notes

Image SD Card

Download and image your SD Card with the image located at Arch Linux ARM.

Linux

dd bs=1M if=/path/to/archlinux-hf-2013-07-22.img of=/dev/sdX

Windows

Download and install Win32DiskImager.

Initial Boot & Configuration

First we need to update the system to make sure everything is current. Login to the system using the root account with the default password of root and run pacman to update the system. After this it is safe to reboot to enact the changes.

pacman -Syu

systemctl reboot

Now that the system is up to date we can install packer and update the RPi firmware/kernel to the latest version. In addition to this we will be installing arm-mem, which contains special modified versions of certain system functions (memcpy/memset/strcpy) to increase overall performace on the RPi, and a few utilities. Then again reboot the machine to enact the changes.

pacman -S packer arm-mem-git linux-headers-raspberrypi-latest linux-raspberrypi-latest vim colordiff

systemctl reboot

Upon login you should be able to see that you are now running the latest available kernel version. I now take the time to setup the actual system itself as if you just rebooted into a fresh Arch Linux installation.

Begin by setting the hostname. I will be using the hostname archey.

hostnamectl set-hostname archey

Set the timezone. For me this is US/Pacific.

timedatectl set-timezone US/Pacific

Setup the appropriate locale. First edit the /etc/locale.gen file and un-comment the lines that correspond to your language selection. Generate the needed locales and finally set the with the system.

vim /etc/locale.gen

en_US ISO-8859-1 en_US.UTF-8

locale-gen

localectl set-locale LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

Finally we can install and enable ntp. This is not required but as the RPi does not have a hardware clock it is useful to use a time syncing service.

pacman -S ntp

systemctl enable ntp