Full New Users Installation guide

Installation made easy Installing something without a graphical installer can be difficult or overwhelming. With Manjaro-Arm it is important to know that most of the hard work has been done. The overall process is simple and straight forward. You will essentially extract an archive of files known as a tarball to the MicroSD card for the Raspberry-Pi 2, and move some things around.

Making The Partitions

Find the device

The first step is to find the device. When you insert your MicroSD card, you should look at the output of 'lsblk' to see if the device is registered. Typically it will show up as /dev/mmcblkXX. If for some reason, it shows up as /dev/sdX, it is fine and everything will work as expected.

Using fdisk to make partitions

Once you have found the device, it is time to set up the card for the two partitions we will need, /boot and / (root).

# fdisk /dev/mmcblkX (replace X with the device number, not the partition number)

  type 'o' to clear the partition table
  type 'p' to ensure there is no partition listed
  type 'n' to create a new partition
  type 'p' to select primary partition
  type '1' to make it partition one
  press enter to set the default first sector
  type '+100M' to make the partition 100 MBytes
  type 't' and then 'c' to change the partition type to W95 FAT32
  type 'n' then 'p' to create a new primary partition
  press enter to select the default partition 2
  press enter twice to select the default start and end sectors (it will take up the space left on the device)
  type 'w' to write the partition table and exit

Making the filesystems

Now that they partitions are made, we need to create filesystems in them to hold our data. These commands will need to be done as root.

# mkfs.vfat /dev/mmcblkXp1 (replace the X with device number, the p1 stands for partition 1 [the 100MB partition we made for /boot])
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/mmcblkXp2 (p2 stands for partition 2 [the / or root partition we will be using]

If the last command gives you any kind of message saying that the partition already has a filesystem on it, go ahead and overwrite it.

Mounting the filesystems

We are almost finished. After we make the filesystems, we need to mount them to copy the data over.

$ cd ~
$ mkdir root
$ mkdir boot

These are going to be the directories that we will use for mounting. The rest of these commands will need to be ran as root (not using sudo)

$ sudo su
# mount /dev/mmcblkXp1 boot (change the X to the device number for your card)
# mount /dev/mmcblkXp2 root

Extracting the tarball

Assuming you have already downloaded the Tarball, you can extract it by:

# bsdtar -xpf ManjaroArm.tar.gz -C root/

This will extract the tarball to the root/ (mmcblkXp2). If you haven't downloaded it, you can get it here

Cleaning up and booting

After the Tarball is extracted, we need to move the boot files over to the boot partition

# mv root/boot/* boot/

You can go ahead and unmount the sdcard and remove it.

# umount boot/ root/

Once the MicroSD is inserted into your Raspberry Pi 2, apply the power and let it boot. If you are using it with a display, keyboard, and mouse. You will find that it will boot automatically into a desktop ready to go. The desktop is built with XFCE and the Menda theme from Manjaro.

If you are using it headless (no display, mouse, or keyboard) the ssh server is already started on boot (same with VNC) you can access your device by ssh

$ ssh manjaro@<ip>
password is manjaro

or as root

$ ssh root@<ip>
password is root

If you want to use VNC you need to be sure the device is hooked up to at least a display (TV, or computer monitor) so that X can start. Then you can VNC into the device and control it from there.

I have set up an autostart .desktop for VNC to make sure it is manageable. It contains a scaling line that you can use to scale the VNC to be able to use VNC from a smaller screen easily. This .desktop is located:

/home/manjaro/.config/autostart/x11vnc.desktop

Just comment out (#) the line with no scaling and uncomment (remove the #) the line with it, be sure to adjust the sizes to your requirements.