Hi, my first post so hope I’m doing things right…
I’m trying to install Manjaro Arm Xfce on a virutally btand new RPi5.
I’m trying to install from an SD card (which came with the RPi and originally had the RPi OS preinstalled). I downloaded Manjaro-ARM-xfce-rpi4-23.02.img.xz onto my Windows machine and installed it onto the SDcard using RPi Imager.
I was assuming it would overwrite everything on the card.
I then inserted in into the RPi5 and booted - it struggled with the boot process (Trying boot mode USB-MSD) and when I pressed ESC and got a message that concluded:
“Update the OS or set os_check=0 in config.txt tp skip this check”.
So moved the SD over to my desktop manjaro KDE setup, found what I take to be two partitions (?) in the card - ROOT_MNJRO & ROOT_MNJRO, which contained a config.txt file which I edited to add the os_check=0 line and saved it.
Returned to the RPi, inserted card rebooted and absolutely nothing happened didn’t even try to boot.
Badesktop, delete the new line, back to RPi and it tries but fails to boot with same message.
Please tell me what I’m doing wrong?
Bob
The images on the web page predates rpi5.
The best method to create an sd card is to use the manjaro-arm-installer script.
sudo bash manjaro-arm-installer <branch>
The branch may be arm-stable, arm-testing or arm-unstable
Do not use this image. It is way too old as a lot of things has changed that can make things problematic. Use the XFCE image from here:
https://github.com/manjaro-arm/rpi4-images/releases/tag/20241014
Completely wipe the sdcard clean of all files and partitions and format the card to a fat32 partition first before writing a new image.
Thank you both for that very swift reply - I think it’s going to be very helpful but you:
“Completely wipe the sdcard clean of all files and partitions and format the card to a fat32 partition first before writing a new image.”
Have tried everything and there a bunch of files and folder which are stubbornly saying “Cannot remove…read-only file system”
I’ve tried using sudo, rm -rf , chmod, nothing seems to work.
I don’t know the etiquette around here, so I apologise if this is not the place to raise this problem
Bob
Maybe installing gparted might be the easiest way to remove all of the partitions and create and format the whole sdcard to fat32. It’s GUI is pretty straight forward.
You can use RPI-Imager to “erase” the sd card. It is under “choose os”. You don’t even need that as when you try to write the new image to that sd, it will automatically erase it.
BTW, i am on Manjaro ARM on a RPI-5 and i am loving it. Better than the RPIOS. If you have any questions, hit me.
Thanks, I had just reached that conclusion myself and it was a breeze!
Hope you do not have any more issues. I am running XFCE on my pi5 and have no issues. XFCE is my favorite.
It’s now completed the install and I have RPi5 Manjaro. Brilliant. Thanks for all your help.
Well, I now have it up and running - would be great to compare impressions - which desktop do you use?
Bob
My favorite for arm is XFCE. Been using it for years.
Hi Sam, I’ve been putting it all through it’s paces this morning - bit of a shock when I first opened it up to find it was all in Welsh! My fault I now realise but some of the RPI-Imager questions were not exactly straightforward (I thought).
Any way, I have noticed that if I leave the mouse sitting doing nothing for a minute or so, I suddenly get an dark rectangle at the edge of the screen with 2 mouse pointers in it. As soon as I touch the mouse they disappear. Just wondered if you had observed the same thing or had any thoughts? Best, Bob.
I have had intermittent mouse issues in the past with xfce caused by Window Compositing. I always leave my Window Compositing turned off.
Well, first of all, i am not on XFCE, i am on KDE Plasma. But, still, i used to have mouse cursor rendering issues “before” (not anymore). So maybe something have been fixed in plasma but not on xfce yet, i don’t know. I think mouse cursor issues were related to RPI Linux kernel, so maybe if you update to the new “release candidate” kernel, things might get fixed. Just try it. Install the following two packages:
linux-rpi5-rc
linux-rpi5-rc-headers
In any case, i have been using the Pi as my main desktop for the last 4 years or so. First, it was a Pi-4 and now it is a Pi-5 (Pi 5 is so much better). The most important thing, in my experience, if you don’t need it for specific applications, do not use wayland on a Pi. Wayland halves the graphical performance in video playback and other rendering tasks in any application. When you switch to X11, you will experience a much faster and responsive Pi. Wayland might be good for powerful machines or x86 computers, but for the Pi, it is not good. At least not yet.
You can test my claim by playing a youtube video of 1080p 60fps in Chromium with both X11 as backend and then the same video with wayland. You will realize that on X11, the video plays so much smoother with near to no frame skips. On wayland it turns into a stop motion animation.
Also, in order to get proper hw acceleration in Chromium, you need to create a file named “chromium-flags.conf” in the folder "/home/username/.config/ (enter your username) with the following content:
--ozone-platform-hint=auto
--in-process-gpu
--ignore-gpu-blocklist
--enable-zero-copy
--use-angle=gles
Hi Sam & Darksky,
Well, I’m now having a rather frustrating time…
Lot of little things over the past day, screen freezing, mouse pointer flashing and jigging around which is annoying. Also found that I definitely preferred Dolphin to Thunar so installed that (and Konsole while I was about it) which seemed to make matters worse but it’s hard to be sure (was that a bad move, do you think?) - but then I rebooted and within about 20 secs the wi-fi disconnected and there’s very little I can find to encourage it to reconnect. It’s working on other machines so I don’t know what to think. Have rebooted several times - same outcome.
Then, I decided to ask your advice and went to my Manjaro KDE machine (I’m now writing this in windows) and tried to log in and my username/password was declared not valid (and I’m very confident I had it right because I used Bitwarden) so then I tried to reset it and gave my email address and waited for 10 mins, so then tried again and gave my other email (just in case) and still nothing.
Then I came over to my windows machine wondering how the hell I was going to get in touch with you and looked on my browser to find that I was still connected from our previous conversation - so I’m wondering if that was why I couldn’t login from a different place? Seems a reasonable guess.
So, not been a very productive afternoon. Any suggestions? Bob
Like i said, i don’t know about xfce. Never used it on a Pi. I don’t like XFCE. KDE plasma is my jam. And i can only suggest you to try a fresh install of KDE Plasma on a Pi-5. Everything works for me, out of the box. Didn’t have any issues. Just make sure your Pi is powered by a proper power source. As you might know, it requires 25 watts of power. 5 volt - 3 amp does it for me but if you connect too many peripherals to it which are power hungry, then you need the official power supply (25 watt one).
Did you go through a wpa_supplicant upgrade?
First to explain my current position. Since my last post I decided to ‘upgrade’ to KDE X11, so flashed a new SD card (manjaro-arm-installer is good) and I have it up but not exactly running - the WiFi connection is very intermittent.
Sometimes I get a message ‘w-fi deactivated’ within 30 secs of booting. other times it lasts for 30 mins or more then just packs up without any message.
You ask “Did you go through a wpa_supplicant upgrade?” the answer is not knowingly! I’ve never heard of it and reading archlinuxarm.org left me little the wiser. I’m still not clear if I should or not. sometimes it will reconnect for a while - other times it just says 'configuring interface@ and flashs up 2 error mgs every few mins - one says ‘wifi deactivated’ the other that ‘Network (Wlan0) can’t be found’. Then it goes back to ‘interfacing’. Should I try this wpa_supplicant upgrade? Maybe give up and use ethernet?
However, there’s also a new problem - it has started to log me off for no apparent reason. Sometimes it is practically immediate (so no time to get anything else running) - other times I can use it for 20-30 mins and have plenty of other apps running and then it goes. I get 30 secs warning and I can delay it but not stop it.
I found one article from 2015 which blamed it on X11. I don’t know what to try. Any clues?
Sam - thanks for that - I do have a 25w supply but zero peripherals so far!.
See this post. I have no clue how his netwokd services go t enabled. I can not find any config enabling it; only the minimal image.
https://forum.manjaro.org/t/networkmanager-and-networkd-conflict-in-manjaro-arm-kde-plasma/170734
Well this is something I have never herd of before. Seems there are some weid things going on lately that no one has reported before. Some seem to have issues while others do not with the same images.
If you are away from the router, RPI will have connection issues. It doesn’t really have any antenna you know. I actually had to use a “repeater” to get it connected to my home wifi network, and it was just in the next room 
RPI is not a good wireless device. I suggest you to either get a long ethernet cable or find some other means of ethernet connection (powerline network adapters) to the Pi.
Also, if your Pi is in a metallic case, it adversely effects its wireless connectivity, be it wifi or bluetooth.
Another option i could recommend is to get a usb wifi dongle. But first make sure it works with Linux.