Running Arch Linux

Introduction

This guide will help you to get your B3 up and running with the latest release of Arch Linux.

Prerequisites

• A serial console
• The latest community u-boot (Tips for flashing can be found here + here)
• A USB device with the Rescue System

The Arch part

Setting up the root device

There are several ways of doing this, depending on whether you are using a USB device or HDD as root device.
I'm going to assume that you are using a HDD.

Now - Boot up your rescue system.

Once booted download the latest Arch tarball

 wget http://archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARM-kirkwood-latest.tar.gz

Write a partitiontable on the device you want to use as root device

 cfdisk /dev/sd? # new -> primary

And format it as EXT4

 mkfs.ext4 /dev/sd?1

Now mount it and unpack the good stuff

 mount /dev/sd?1 /mnt
 tar xvf ArchLinuxARM-kirkwood-latest.tar.gz -C /mnt
 umount /mnt

If everything goes well you should have a bootable Arch system. (login root/root)

 [root@alarm ~]# uname -a
 Linux alarm 3.16.1-1-ARCH #1 PREEMPT Fri Aug 15 20:35:00 MDT 2014 armv5tel GNU/Linux

Last but not least, ReedWood has made a repository with B3 specific things for Arch, that you might want to take a look at.