Mention Raspberry Pi and we think Raspberry Pi OS (Raspbian), but there are many more distributions available for the Raspberry Pi. In this tutorial we’ll download and install Manjaro Arm on a Raspberry Pi 4. Manjaro Arm is a 64-bit operating system designed for the Raspberry Pi 3, 4 and 400. We’ll cover how to update our system and install software using the pacman package manager. Finally we’ll learn how to use the GPIO with Python in Manjaro.
Manjaro Ar
Manjaro for Arm CPUs comes in a range of flavours. We chose the XFCE version from https://manjaro.org/ download/#ARM and then downloaded and extracted the image from the archive. To write this to an 8GB or larger blank micro SD card, we used Balena Etcher (www.balena.io/etcher) and followed the simple process of flashing the image to the micro SD card. When the process is complete, eject the micro SD card and insert into the Raspberry Pi 4, then connect your peripherals and finally insert the power to start the boot process.
The Manjaro Arm boot process is a little different to Raspberry Pi OS, in that we need to specify our language, localisation and create a standard user account. Take your time here because the installer, while simple to use, has many options that have to be set correctly before we can use Manjaro Arm.
On first boot we’re presented with the XFCE desktop. In the bottom left is the application menu, and next to this there are quick launch icons for the file manager, terminal and Firefox browser.
Armed with Pi
Updating the system is the first thing to do after installation, and we can do this via the GUI, the icon for which is in the bottom right of the screen. It resembles a shield with a tick.
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