M1 Mac Manjaro ARM (aarch64) in VM installing help needed

ARM General ARM Discussion
1

I tried to install Manjaro ARM (aarch64) in a VM on the M1 Mac several times.
I used images with and without EFI support.
As VM software I use VMWare Fusion as well as UTM (QEMU).
No matter which image I use, I always end up at the UEFI prompt after booting.
In principle, aarch64 Linux as well as BSD runs as VM on the M1 Mac - no problem with Debian, Fedora, FreeBSD aarch64 to install and run them!

What do I have to do to get Manjaro ARM to run in a VM?

2

Manjaro’s arm images is not installation images - they are ready-to-run when you have unpacked the archive.

As such they must be written to the target disk using a tool like dd or another tool capable of writing the image to a target disk.

EDIT
Thinking out loud.

No success - working on a different approach

Download a generic Manjaro ARM image - place it in your Download folder
Unpack the xz to create the img file
Use virtualbox to create a virtual machine
Disk size could be e.g. 32GB
Attach any Manjaro live ISO
Boot the virtual machine
Don’t install Manjaro
Instead map a network folder
Insed the vm open the network folder
Use dd to write the unpacked image file to the virtual disk
When done shutdown the virtual machine
Then use the virtual media manager to copy the disk as a vmdk file.
Transfer that vmdk file to your macbook
Use the file as virtual disk for a new vm in fusion
Start the vm
If success you will get the Manjaro OEM installer to finalize the vm

3

We have a dedicated internal installer which installs the OS natively as a Linux distribution based on the works Asahi did. However there are some parts not yet supported, like Speakers and other things may not work correctly.

4

What I am fidling with is to be able to run as a virtual machine on top of macOS.

I have found some work by arch developer Tobias Powalowsky and looking into how I can amend it to create a Manjaro Arm boot ISO.

5

I did some tweaking and figured out the secret recipe to get Manjaro Arm Plasma Desktop to work on UTM on my Mac M1.

  1. Get the generic EFI file
  2. Use tar xzvf
  3. Use disk utility to increase the size of the .img file (at least a couple gigabytes).
  4. In UTM click create new vm → Linux-> virtualize
  5. Use Apple Virtualization (I haven’t gotten it to work with QEMU)
  6. Leave the “boot from kernel” blank
  7. Use the resized .img file instead of a .iso file.

The downside is that you will always need that .img file attached. I found that it doesn’t matter what size hard disk you create because everything is being run and written to the .img file.

6

Hello there, I am posting this reply because I was also looking for this and managed to install Manjaro ARM on a M1 Mac with Parallels. I used the instructions from Yusuke Izume on the DEV forum, this also works with VMWare Fusion, there are more details in the forum post. In principle the idea is to download first any other ARM distro ISO, create a new VM using that distro without installing the distro and from there download the Manjaro ARM Linux image and install the Manjaro image on the virtual disk, then reboot and it should work. I followed the instructions and is working OK. Hope it helps to anybody in the same situation! → Installing Manjaro on Parallels with Apple Silicon - DEV Community

7

I have it running with UTM.

This is a very good article though. He found a way to install Manjaro using Fedora Live image :smiley:

We should have an ISO to but it takes a lot of work and not many end users.

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