[Guide] Install manjaro ARM (all editions) headless on RPI4 (and other SBC) with WiFi

Note: this guide will not spoon feed you basic things which can be found by simply searching on the web.

This post will Guide you on how to install Manjaro ARM (All editions) headless on a RPI using wifi. Many people don’t have Ethernet and using a monitor to setup headless install is PITA. So lets use wifi and ssh to setup our headless install.

This will work on Any RPI version with wifi (3b, 3b+, zero w etc). Heck it may also work with any SBC with WiFi.

You will need:

  • A PC with Linux installed (Manjaro Preferred, but can work with any distro if you tweak some things) or boot into Manjaro Live USB.
  • Internet or WiFi connection
  • SD card to write Manjaro ARM RPI4 minimal
  • A brain (must)

Create Manjaro ARM bootable USB-Stick using BalenaEtcher

  • Download the manjaro image you want to flash from the official Website and BalenaEtcher
  • Flash that image using BalenaEtcher onto the sd-card/ssd.
    • Here is a guides for ultra-noobs.

Enable SSH and other services by chrooting into the root partition.

These steps are for Arch based distros but can be modified to work on any. Make sure you have installed AUR helper like pamac or yay.

We need to chroot into the root partition. To do that we need to install qemu-user-static-bin on our PC.

yay -S --noconfirm --needed qemu-user-static-bin

Then mount your sd-card’s root partiton and bind important directories. Mine was sdc2. so run below commands on your PC.

sudo mount /dev/sdc2 -o rw /mnt
sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev/
sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys/
sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc/
sudo mount --bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts

If you want to run binaries from different architecture you will need an Emulator. Qemu is a good candidate for this. Copy the static ARM binary that provides emulation.

sudo cp $(which qemu-arm-static) /mnt/usr/bin
sudo systemctl restart systemd-binfmt.service

For enabling networking, copy your resolv.conf to sdcard. you can also set other DNS servers if you like by editing this file.

sudo cp /etc/resolv.conf /mnt/etc/resolv.conf

And now finally chroot into the directory.

sudo chroot /mnt qemu-arm-static /bin/bash

If above command doesn’t work, try sudo chroot /mnt .

Once you have chrootod into the system, you can do whatever you want. We will enable SSH and install other software like tigerVNC. We will also enable NTP, cron, and fstrim services (fstrim is necessory for ssd’s)

systemctl enable cronie
systemctl enable fstrim.timer
systemctl enable sshd
systemctl enable systemd-timesyncd
timedatectl set-ntp true

Setup WiFi on the RPI4 SD card from your PC. Manjaro ARM switched to iwd for managing networking. so we will create iwd config file and fill it with our WiFi’s SSID and password. Create WiFi settings file. Replace ‘WiFi_name’ with your WiFi SSID

mkdir -p /var/lib/iwd
touch /var/lib/iwd/WiFi_name.psk

Add wifi details. Replace ‘WiFi_name’ with your WiFi SSID and ‘Password’ with your WiFi password in below 2 lines also.

echo "[Security]" | tee -a /var/lib/iwd/WiFi_name.psk
echo "Passphrase=Password" | tee -a /var/lib/iwd/WiFi_name.psk

Finally Unmount the sdcard. I did force unmount.

exit
sudo umount /mnt/dev/ -l
sudo umount /mnt/sys/ -l
sudo umount /mnt/proc/ -l
sudo umount /mnt/dev/pts/ -l
sudo umount /mnt/ -l

Now Plug the sdcard in RPI and boot. Then ssh using root@<ip-addr>. Now you can setup VNC server and other things to complete the setup. You need to do VNC or have some kind of graphical connection to the machine since these versions with DE installed will have GUI setup wizard.

Some useful Links and Resources

How do you intend to overcome the interaction required to connect to a wireless accesspoint?

save iwd config file in ROOT_MNJRO. see my other post for headless one

For other things i just chroot into the root partition and enable things like ssh.

Reserved