Boot to Archlinux from USB on Raspberry PI

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Boot to Archlinux from USB on Raspberry PI

Postby mathewparet » Sun Jun 21, 2015 2:19 pm

I am planning to install Arch Linux on my new Raspberry Pi.

But I have a requirement. Raspberry Pi always boots from SD card. But I want it to boot from USB. This is because I already have a USB disk bootable with Arm Linux installed. I had took a lot of pain to install a lot of stuff and configure the OS earlier on my hard disk (it was attached to a TonidoPlug which got burned 2 days back). I am trying for options to make sure I don't need to re install all stuff and configure everything again. So I wish I could boot from the existing boot partition on my USB disk.

I found this link which says how I can boot to Raspbain OS from USB (a hack on the boot config) -> https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/view ... 66&t=12015

Is it possible to configure ArchLinux such that I can boot from USB like above?
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Re: Boot to Archlinux from USB on Raspberry PI

Postby moonman » Sun Jun 21, 2015 3:30 pm

Tonido plug is armv5, rpi 1 is armv6 and rpi2 is armv7. You can boot armv5 userland on higher arm version, but you will lose performance and graphics libraries. You stll need the sd card with firmware and kernel but in cmdline.txt specify a different root. Also make sure you mount /boot on sd card
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Re: Boot to Archlinux from USB on Raspberry PI

Postby mathewparet » Sun Jun 21, 2015 4:38 pm

Thank you moonman.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'Y')ou stll need the sd card with firmware and bootloader but in cmdline.txt specify a different root. Also make sure you mount /boot on sd card


So I first need to install a complete arch Linux on SD card and then change the command line to the USB. Could you please guide me on mounting /boot on SD? I am OK with Linux, but not that great.
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Re: Boot to Archlinux from USB on Raspberry PI

Postby moonman » Sun Jun 21, 2015 4:53 pm

Just remove everything from within /boot on your Tonido USB installation and edit fstab to mount sdcard on /boot. Actually now that I'm thinking about it you won't be able to update firmware/kernel for rpi since it is not in armv5 repo. It will still boot, but you will have to update it manually along with putting all the modules in the right directories on usb. An easier way would be to transfer all configs and take a note of all the installed packages and reinstall everything on rpi.
Pogoplug V4 | GoFlex Home | Raspberry Pi 4 4GB | CuBox-i4 Pro | ClearFog | BeagleBone Black | Odroid U2 | Odroid C1 | Odroid XU4
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Re: Boot to Archlinux from USB on Raspberry PI

Postby mathewparet » Sun Jun 21, 2015 5:11 pm

Now that you say that, I too think so. I think I better do a fresh install and copy all my scripts and Config.

One more question. TonidoPlug image comes with ssh enables by default. So I had no issues. What about Arch Linux for rpi2? I haven't bought a keyboard and prefer to use ssh to configure the installation. So will ssh be enabled by default?
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Re: Boot to Archlinux from USB on Raspberry PI

Postby WarheadsSE » Sun Jun 21, 2015 5:24 pm

All images for ALARM have DHCP & SSH enabled by default.

/EDIT: except for devices that have gadget ethenet only, those use the gadget-deadbeef package.
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Re: Boot to Archlinux from USB on Raspberry PI

Postby mathewparet » Tue Jun 30, 2015 12:26 pm

I installed ArchLinux on my pi and did my first boot. But it looks like "apt-get" command is not found!

From one of the previous replies I can see that TonidoPlug also used ArchLinux but it had apt-get. Any idea how I can get apt installed in ArchLinux for Pi 2?
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Re: Boot to Archlinux from USB on Raspberry PI

Postby WarheadsSE » Tue Jun 30, 2015 2:34 pm

Don't. We are not a debian based system, and there is no sane way to use such a tool.

If you had truly had ALARM on your TonidoPlug, then you would not have had apt-get.
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Re: Boot to Archlinux from USB on Raspberry PI

Postby sdjf » Tue Jun 30, 2015 8:19 pm

mathewparet: There was no mention of apt-get in this thread except by you and answers to your asking about using it. You likely got confused trying to use instructions written for Raspbian, where they use apt-get. We use pacman instead, that comes preinstalled.
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Re: Boot to Archlinux from USB on Raspberry PI

Postby mathewparet » Wed Jul 01, 2015 12:17 am

I start using Pacman it seems better ☺. Thanks anyways.
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