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by jck 766 days ago
I switched to archlinuxarm on my rpi4 cause I got sick of having to jump through hoops to do mundane things like needing a ppa to install ripgrep or downloading debs for less popular packages.

Apart from a little confusion about how to configure the bootloader(since rpi uses uboot as opposed to the usual suspects), my experience has been amazing. In typical arch fashion, I've had zero issues apart from on install day.
3 comments
snvzz 766 days ago
>I switched to archlinuxarm on my rpi4 cause I got sick of having to jump through hoops to do mundane things like needing a ppa to install ripgrep or downloading debs for less popular packages.

Been running it on the rpis for years for similar reasons. Besides having most stuff packaged, it follows Arch principles and thus doesn't make unnecessary/unreasonable changes to software, my main complaint with most software targeting raspberry pi.

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tyilo 766 days ago
I have tried twice to install it on my rpi4, but I never got it to boot properly :(
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an-unknown 766 days ago
Did you run into a boot loop because of some SDMMC controller problem? If yes: this is caused by hardware changes in newer rpi4 and old rootfs images from ALARM which don't support this yet but it's fixed if you update it. To do that, you have to play around with chroot + qemu-user to run a standard "pacman -Syu" on the rpi rootfs before the first boot on the real rpi4. Afterwards it should boot properly on the rpi4.

That being said, if you want to use e.g. the official RPi 7" touch display via DSI, you should also switch from the default upstream kernel to the rpi kernel unless you like to mess around with DTB and debug strange problems.

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snvzz 766 days ago
Using the serial port (I recommend a cp2104 or cp2102N usb-ttl adapter) is extremely helpful.

You'll need to become familiar with u-boot. Then you'll be able to boot this board and any other board with ease.

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johnwalkr 766 days ago
u-boot is so useful. Recently I used it to ping between 2 devices to prove a hardware issue, and not waste time troubleshooting linux things.
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schmidt_fifty 766 days ago
> needing a ppa to install ripgrep

Might be easier to just install cargo and use cargo to install rust tools. I've found it's much less hassle than using a generic package manager.

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