Manjaro Arm v8
les pounder takes a look at an alternative operating system for the Raspberry Pi – can it topple the mighty Raspbian?
Les Pounder takes a look at an alternative operating system for the Raspberry Pi.
We really wanted to love this distro. Installation and configuration was a little more involved than a typical Raspbian install, but it offered so much hope. The first boot was longer than Raspbian’s – almost a full minute in fact – but that’s OK as it had a lot to do. We waited patiently and then it appeared as if everything had stopped. Was it a failed install? Did we need to flash again? Thankfully not, we thought, as the login screen eventually appeared.
Logging in, we saw the lovely Manjaro LXQT desktop, and everything looked great – the menu and system tray looked just like a proper Linux desktop. We hoped that this trend would continue, so we connected to the internet via Ethernet and opened Firefox to a few websites. But we were hit with security warnings for certificates, even for known-working sites. After a little head-scratching we noticed that the time and date were off, and by quite some margin. Setting the time and date using NTP resolved this issue, but it really shouldn’t have been an issue to start with.
Firefox then worked quite well and we were able to visit a few sites and watch a Youtube video, which was a little slow but acceptable. For audio, we connected a Bluetooth speaker and after some tinkering in the config – and trial and error with the Bluetooth application – we managed to get audio playback working. Looking in the system tray we noticed that pacman was present, and indicated that we had 172 updates to perform using Octopi, a frontend for pacman. We triggered the updates, and patiently waited for some time.
Returning to the update after 20 minutes we noticed that it had stalled; in fact, the system was frozen, forcing us to do a hard reset. The system rebooted OK and after logging back in we ran an update from the terminal. This too stalled, forcing us to again reboot. But this time the system failed to start, so we flashed a fresh Manjaro ARM
install. This time we skipped the update for fear of wrecking the microsd card…
We wanted to use Manjaro ARM to control the GPIO of our Raspberry Pi, so with Python 3 already installed we chose to install the GPIO Zero library to control the GPIO. But pip wasn’t installed, and there was no installation candidate from the pacman archives. No problem there: a workaround is to use the getpip.py command, and this installed pip, enabling us to install GPIO Zero. Hurrah, we thought, and quickly connected an LED to test.
We wrote some test code and then ran the code in the terminal, to a screen full of errors. Turns out that the dependencies were not installed and we had to manually install a pin factory (used by GPIO Zero to control the pins). After tracking one down and trying to install… well, it failed. We abandoned the GPIO test and plugged in our USB flash drive to save screenshots, but noticed that our drive was missing. We found an app in the system tray that mounted our drive and this worked quickly, enabling us to transfer our screenshots. Wi-fi connectivity is also handled from the system tray and worked well.
Manjaro ARM is a proper Linux distro for the Pi, but the Pi is just too slow (even our Pi 3B+), and there is too little to tempt users to switch from Raspbian.