Arch Linux ARM on Pi

I do this over, and over again. I own quite a few Pi’s. There a couple of permanently-powered ones — my RaspBMC media centre attached to my living room TV, and there’s the one on my worktable’s bulletin notice which is where I perform my day-to-day general coding and testing.

I do have a panel of 4x Pi’s which some buddies call it a cluster. That too is permanently powered. But it isn’t really a computing cluster, it’s there for me to test power consumption and further inspire to read on power manangement techniques. I also have a couple more Pi’s in my wannabee robots; Hagar the rover and Mosfet the cat.

Where does all the above leave me? Everytime I pass by a shop that has a cheap SDcard , or a bigger one which is affordable, or a better one with higher performance, which happens every two or three months: I get the itch to upgrade! Also, everytime there’s a new Operating System distribution image uploaded to the Internet: upgrade!

Why is this a problem? Imaging an SDcard over, and over again is tedious. Even though I do this quite “repeatedly”, I tend to forget some steps. Yeah, yeah I have these steps written down in text file notes here and there, in a notebook too, but the steps aren’t always the same, and sometimes making sense out of different notes is totally confusing. So here I am: I shall (hopefully) use this page as the final one for myself.

Step 1: goto archlinuxarm.org and pull the image…
… flash it
… resize it

… mount it

… change hostname

… copy /etc/hosts from known source

… copy /etc/skel/.* from known source

…

adnan@pav:~$ ssh -Y mosfet

adnan@mosfet’s password:
X11 forwarding request failed on channel 0
Last login: Thu Jan 1 07:30:22 1970 from pav

edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config

#X11Forwarding no
# test 2 – must set next line
X11Forwarding yes
…