Through the Arch

You’re able to run Arch Linux directly on a dualboot system, though currently driver issues prevent a graphical interface. Once Developer Mode is on dive into a shell and type sudo su then enable USB booting with: crossystem dev_boot_usb=1 dev_boot_signed_ only=0

Reboot and we can format, partition and install Arch onto the SD card. This works on USB drives too, just replace mmcblk1 with sda for the USB drive.

We need to unmount, format, partition, download, extract, configure and boot Arch, like so. Use unmount mmcblk1 to unmount everything. To create a new GPT partition use fdisk /dev/mmcblk1

and type g and w to create and write the GPT table. To partition it use:

cgpt create /dev/mmcblk1

cgpt add -i 1 -t kernel -b 8192 -s 32768 -l Kernel -S1 -T 5 -P 10 /dev/mmcblk1

To add a root partition we need to calculate its size, use cgpt show /dev/mmcblk1 to list the devices size. Under the start column use the second to last figure (the larger one) and deduct 40960, use this in place of the XXXX: cgpt add -i 2 -t data -b 40960 -s XXXX -l Root / dev/mmcblk1

We need to refresh then format the new partition with: sfdisk -R /dev/mmcblk1 mkfs.ext4 /dev/mmcblk1p2

We’re now going to download and extract the Arch build, cd /tmp and download with wget http://archlinuxarm.org/os/ArchLinuxARMveyron-latest.tar.gz (if you get a failed download or corrupt archive use the -c switch to resume) use mkdir root and mount /dev/mmcblk1p2

root then extract the archive with: tar -xf ArchLinuxARM-veyron-latest.tar.gz -C root

Finally we’ll flash this to the partition, unmount and reboot using: dd if=root/boot/vmlinux.kpart of=/dev/ mmcblk1p1 umount root sync

Reboot and use Ctrl+u to boot off the SD card. Log in as root, password root and use wifi-menu to get online. So that you have a base installation of Arch Linux, run an update using pacman -Syu but currently you’re unable to get a graphical desktop due to driver issues, which means that you will need to install both the X.org driver and Mali EGL with pacman -S xf86-video-armsocrockchip veyron-libgl but from here you are on

your own!