How shoild I install manjaro 20.08 headless with wifi on raspberry pi 4?

need full details on wifi configuration before boot

There is no Raspberry Pi 5 yet.

And any kind of headless configuration needs LAN connection.
So how would you set that up, before the first boot?

My guess would be some kind of NetworkManager (if using GUI setup) or SystemD NetworkD (if using CLI only setup) config.

I can’t help you with the what the config should look like, since I always use either Ethernet or a monitor to setup my devices.

On first boot, LAN is not detected - in fact light on the LAN - yellow gets blinked but not green in rpi

There is a way of doing this, and it’s called PXE boot. (Pronounced “Pixie”) but the Pi 4 needs some configuring to allow this to happen, so if you’re going to do this for 100s of Pi 4’s, it’ll be worth your while.

If it’s just 10, you’re better off following @Strit 's advice and use a monitor and a brand new Ethernet cable.

Take a look at how to use wpa_supplicant.conf for headless wifi / ssh setup.

Hey strit, can we get a config file that copies wifi details on boot (like on rasbian or ubuntu server where you just enter wifi details in a file called ‘network-setup’ ) since i have been searching for past 5 days and have not found any solution for wifi problem. If i cant connect monitor to my pi when using wifi, then the option of using manjaro is not possible.

It would be actually great if we also get the option of enabling SSH on first boot by just placing ‘ssh’ file in boot/root partiton. Rpi’s are used mostly as headless, most people dont use them like PC with monitor so having these options is bare minimum for us.

This is not something we plan on doing. We have no mechanism to activate it if it finds it.

SSH is enabled by default on minimal editions. Just connect with root user and finish the setup. Then you can connect with your regular user.

Do you have a source for that statement?
I don’t think that’s true. Most people using Manjaro ARM on a Raspberry Pi do it as a “desktop” style machine. It might be true for Raspberry Pi’s in general, but not Raspberry Pi’s with Manjaro.

It’s not a focus we have, but I will gladly accept good MR’s/patches to implement this in our tooling.

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Can’t it be ported from rasbian source or ubuntu source?

The problem is that we need monitor to finish setup. Enabling ssh by placing a file in root dir will give control in hands of user so security will also not be compromised.

Manjaro is a great OS and it is a pleasure to use the minimal edition on Pi as server. However, believe me it needs wifi config when used as setup. I want to actually use it on my pi.

The thing is that i could not find anything on internet that would enable wifi like raspbian. If not manjaro, i would install endevourOS but it also doesn’t support this. And i am not so much expert at linux so i could only find copying networkmanager config by chrooting in rpi system. But that does not work. So do you know any way we can copy the wifi settings on pi without monitor?

What Strit is trying to say is: if you develop your own solution, you’re welcome to send a diff between your source code and the Manjaro Team’s source code and then they will able to incorporate it as they’re stretched too thin already.

Alternatively, if you’re a millionaire, donate a couple of 100K€ to the Manjaro project so they can hire an additional developer for the ARM team. :grin:

If none of the above:

  • Ideas are easy
  • Development is hard
  • Development is time-intensive
  • There are only 16h in a day in the life of a Manjaro dev. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: :crazy_face:

:bowing_man:

There arch wiki’s to manually set up wifi. If you want a menu driven solution to set up wifi networkmanager has a terminal app that should work in your case.

Install networkmanager:
sudo pacman -S networkmanager

Run in a terminal:

sudo nmtui

Here you will add your wifi device and configure it. Yo can enable the Security and enter your password if so inclined. The important things to not forget to do is enable these 2 lines before you save and exit:

[X] Automatically connect
[X] Available to all users

Enable the NetworkManager.service and reboot:

sudo systemctl enable NetworkManager.service
sudo reboot

nmtui

The networkmanager wiki talks about conflicts with other network services and I really do not know what is installed in the minimal image as to know if there will be an issue or not.

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This topic is a very old topic 11 months - necro bumped a couple of times … it really should be closed.

For very obvious reasons you cannot install headless using ssh over wi-fi.

No matter how you play it - it will require either a cabled switch connection using the minimal editon or the whole #! attached if you want the GUI edition - monitor, keyboard and mouse.

Not so long ago I wrote a topic on setting up a headless pi with GUI and VNC over SSH.

You are much better off using a cable for initial setup.

An idea is to dissect a working pi’s config then mount a fresh image and copy the necessary files to the image - plug it into the pi - power on - then scan the network to see if the device connects.

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It is possible to hack the wifi before boot