Installation Guide

This page will explain how to install ArchMobile? onto a SD card which then might be used in whatever device capable of running our distribution. But before you can go on with that, go to our Pre-Installation Site. We got Pre-Installation Sites for specific Devices, look at the WikiIndex, for example AM/Freerunner/PreInstallation. If there is none for your Device, go to our general PreInstallation Site.

This page is assuming an advanced linux user as reader. We won't cover essential tasks like formatting or creating a filesystem. If you cannot consider yourself that advanced yet, don't worry. Arch Linux is a learning distro and thus we provide seperate pages covering those tasks. Just read on.

Additionally there are several installation methods. This pages covers the installation using our installer script [source:util/archmobile archmobile]. But you can also perform a manual installation? or use one of our snapshots. Also you can install ArchMobile? on the internal Memory of your Device, if it has enough space(~250mb for base, no X and stuff). You maybe make a union-fs with internal memory and your extern memory. Example: AM/Freerunner/InstallationOnNAND

Preparation

For the next steps we assume you have partitioned and formatted your SD card properly and that you have mounted it under /media/sd_storage.

Note: that some Bootloader may want a special Filesystem or Partition Table.

If you have not, consider reading one (or several) of the help pages on those topics:

1. Partitioning
2. Creating a filesystem

Download archmobile

First thing you need is our installation script. Just get the most recent version from our Git repository: [source:util/archmobile].

Note: Be adviced that although we try to avoid bugs the script comes with no warranty. It needs root privileges at some point and thus it can potentially harm your system. If you feel paranoid you can always read the source. :-)

Download pacman

Our script archmobile relys on Arch Linux's package manager  pacman. If you are already running Arch Linux or a distribution using pacman you can skip this step and proceed with the actual installation.

If you don't have pacman in your PATH don't worry. We have made static packages available for i686 and x86-64 architectures. Just grab the right package from one of our mirrors.

$ wget http://repo.archmobile.org/i686/archmobile/pacman-static-3.2.2-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz

After retrieval extract the static pacman binary somewhere in your PATH.

# tar -C /usr/bin -xf pacman-static-3.2.2-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz usr/bin/pacman-static

Note: On Ubuntu 9.04 I used the following. This may apply to other systems too.

# tar -C / -xf pacman-static-3.2.2-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz usr/bin/pacman-static

Note: It might be that the version of the packages has been updated while this guide has not. Please look for the correct package on the mirror manually. And edit this wiki page, of course!

You can use the which command to check if everything went well:

$ which pacman-static
/usr/bin/pacman-static

If it reports the correct path to the executable you may now proceed.

Installation

All preparation done we're now going to install the base system to /media/sd_storage. To remind you, this is where your SD card should be mounted.

Note: This script uses sudo. If you don't have sudo installed execute the installer as root and with --nosudo appended.

$ archmobile --targets 'base kernel26-openmoko' /media/sd_storage

Note: The --targets used here are the only combination yet working. Replace the Kernel with the Kernel you need after the Script finished, if necessary.

Note: There could be some Error Message from qemu like "unsupported Syscall" or "failed removing qemu". Do not mind them, they are not fatal.

With this command our script will prepare the target directory and then call pacman to install a base of packages. You'll see a lot of text scrolling by.

If it finishes without an error condition Arch Linux Mobile has successully been installed. Before booting you should do the most basic configuration though.

Now go to your device-specific Post-Installation Site, or to our general one here.