Archerry

Arch Linux on Rasberry Pi

This repository contains instruction and scripts to configure your Raspberry Pi to work with Arch Linux ARM installation and expose network on the USB Type-C port

This allows you work with you to power and connect over network from your iPad Pro/Air simultaneously

Original idea by Tech Craft

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Installation

Prerequisites

• Raspberry PI with aarch64 support. That means ARMv8 instruction set. Supported ISA could be checked in specification of model
• SD card. Recommended minimum size 16Gb
• Another Linux host (virtual machine, e.g VirtualBox, could work too with USB passthrough configured properly) for creating initial bootable card. Of course hub or builtin port for SD required too
• Availability to connect Raspberry Pi to Ethernet Network or dedicated workspace (monitor and keyboard) for it

Step-by-step instruction

Step 1: Prepare initial boot disk with vanilla Arch Linux ARM

Image could be created according instruction or with script

IMPORTANT: this script requires sudo and works in not interactive manner. Be careful specifying device for formating, you could lose all your data or harm your system

Result: bootable SD card with vanilla Arch Linux ARM. DHCP for Ethernet should be enabled and default user alarm should exist. sshd should be enabled as well.

Step 2: Migrate to Raspberry Pi Linux kernel

Why upstream kernel should be replaced?

The short answer is bugs. There are some bugs in upstream kernel (especially for RPi4 8Gb) related to peripherals and interfaces (e.g. USB), and the simplest way to get rid of them is to switch to supported and tested version of kernel provided by RPi developers. If initial distribution of Arch Linux ARM will switch to the supported aarch64 kernel this step will not be needed in future.

Script could be used for non-interactive configuration. Requires sudo and reboot host at the end.

If you want to do steps by hand, always rember to modify fstab file accordingly, otherwise machine will not boot.

Result: Pi now runs new Linux kernel

Step 3: Configuring wireless networks

Because solution to share iPad connection to the Internet over Ethernet was not found the main solution of connecting Pi to network while using with tablet will be wireless network

Script could be used as interactive tool for configuring.

It adds only one network to the wpa_supplicant configuration. Additional networks could be added with wpa_cli.

Result: Pi could connect to specified WiFi network automatically

Step 4: Configuring USB Type-C port as network interface

Script could be used for non-interactive configuration.

Result: special daemon configures usb0 device each boot allowing to use it as network interface, mDNS provides name resolution of RPi host for iPad

Step 5: Connecting Pi to iPad and post installation configuration

After previous steps it is finally possible to access Raspberry Pi from iPad using <raspberry_pi_hostname>.local name. If all configured properly iPad should show Ethernet connection in its settings with ipv4 : 169.254.*.*

Post installation configuration steps:

1. In most cases base-devel package is required by Arch Linux users
2. Create new user
3. Configuring sudo
4. Installing AUR helper (e.g. yay)

Image creation

After creation of configured environment for specific device it's good idea to save it as image for easy redeploying in future.

1. Creation of new image file from device

   # probably requires sudo on your platform
   dd bs=1M if=/dev/<sd_device> of=<image_name>.img 

2. Shrinking it to actual size - PiShrink is a good solution for this task

After redeploying of image the process of expanding volume required.

fdisk /dev/<sd_device> <<EOF
p
d
<root_volume_number>
n
p
<root_volume_number>
p
w
EOF

resize2fs /dev/<root_volume>

TODO

• Share pre-built images