Build images on ARM

ARM Technical Assistance
1

Hi, I’m looking to setup my own slim client build on Raspberry PI 4’s potentially for voluntary groups and small businesses.

I’m thinking about providing a choice of desktops (Cinnamon/XFCE/Gnome), Citrix Workspace, VMware Horizon View clients, Remmina, Microsoft-office-web-jak, Firefox/Tor and LibreOffice for local/offline use.

It’s not clear to me where Architect and buildiso fit - what are the pro’s and con’s of these two build tools?

I briefly searched, but sorry if I have missed an appropriate article and someone else may have already created such a build.

2

Buildiso and architect are not really suitable for this. You should ask the arm team what they use to build images.

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3

Check out this wiki. This is the system build we use:

Wiki Contributing To Manjaro Arm

Start with a minimal image and build for whatever DE you want. Here is one I made a while back. Do a pacman -Syu and it should be current:

Manjaro-ARM-minimal-rpi4-20.06.img.xz

Then edit the files here to make the necessary changes for your distro then build and test the image:

/usr/share/manjaro-arm-tools/profiles/arm-profiles/

Be advised the gnome profile there has not been updated in a while and the last time I built the image it would not boot right so much had changed regarding upgrades over time. It was sluggish running on the pi4 and not a good fit.

I had not thought about Cinnamon. I might mess with it and see how it does.

4

Could be worth another try with Budgie?

5

I do not know what was the issue before you are referring to. We do maintain a quite of few things that keeps us busy and only release the most popular images as they take up server space and takes time to build.

I did mess with Budgie a little today and is not really a bad DE. I can not promise anything but I may work on building the profiles for it in my spare time.

budgie
budgie1360×768 135 KB

1 Like
6

What issue was this? Was it something I mentioned?

The Budgie DE was only a suggestion. I’ve previously found it to be a lot more lightweight than Gnome, but never really had a machine where I couldn’t run Gnome well enough to consider using Budgie instead. I thought it might be quite a good fit for the PBP and possibly other ARM devices. I’ve not seen any other distros use it, and I was wondering whether there was a reason why? Is it just not that popular? Are the Budgie Devs taking the project in a direction people don’t like?