Arch linux on TB S [installation guide]

[Im4Tinker]

Hi forum,

I've previously wrote my devotion for arch linux. A rolling release that starts with the minimal setup.  Full freedom to choose what one wants to install in it. Of course that freedom has a bit of extra fee to add , the administration power.

That said, I've built and tested one set up. Thanks to the Armbian patches  is even possible to update Archlinux. Unfortunately is not fully functioning because I found the wifi module is a staging release and USB insert detection still not working. I didn't try a GUI yet (out of my current purpose)

I wish someone will try and give a little bit of clue to solve these small issues. I'm trying to learn more things but I have no much experience on programming and debugging such a huge volume of sources.

Then according to the guidelines, the patches shouldn't have to poke into the source but rather adjusted on the device-tree file. Then I'm reading the source and the patches to understand what it might be accomplished to compile (or not) the u-boot and the dtf.
I mean that the correct conditions will serve the standard kernel.

Herein attached the instructions to set up the Archlinuxarm. There is a thread on archlinuxarm forum
about the works.
Many thanks to Mr. Summers !

I think that the hardware might work for all distro compile for it, so it should be worth to try also this u-boot. Of course the harder part of that is to maintain it.
After all, even the story of u-boot has evolve along the years to supports a wider range of platforms. Then for certain cases it is prepared to boot most of the hardware.

BTW 7z format for attachments is 21% smaller than zip, but not permitted

EDIT

I installed LXDE and it seems pretty nice. Perhaps it might take some tweaking to use the graphic acceleration. Now is working just with vanilla mesa framebuffer.
There are just few programs because I don't expect to use much from the GUI.

[maniolias]

It's interesting that you get Arch Linux working on this board. Did you manage to get GPU working? We're working with chromium and we need GPU features (for video encoding and decoding).

[Im4Tinker]

Well, the actual situation is pretty embryonal, the kernel is just able to start, some hardware is not recognized yet. Graphic card is not yet tuned, mostly the GUI will work with a plain framebuffer style, no hardware acceleration.
I hope that the demand grows so more followers might get interested to help.
For your case, I think that Armbian has the most advanced research, for that.

Otherwise there could be the option to start the machine with linaro kernel (blocked) and use the archlinux packages.
Coarsely described:

• leave the first partition as it came by TinkerOS installation
  
• delete all file on the second partition, don't modify it : reformat or remake it (it means to keep the same UUID). Later may be change its size, as long as the UUID remains.
  
• Cast the Archlinux distribution
  
• Copy the linaro modules into the new installation
  
• run
  Code:

  depmod -a
  at the first boot so the wifi will be working.
  
• Modify the /etc/fstab to mount the first partition on /boot
  
• safeguard your kernel by rename it and modify its filename also in extlinux.conf
  
• you may go for the latest update
  Code:

  # pacman -Syu
  Which may bring a new kernel, but it won't take place. I've tried.
  
• Proceed to install the packages are wanted, if a GUI is desired. (light DE is the most convenience).
  
• At certain point there will be an unbearable situation that all dependencies will require a new kernel. I hope that will happen when we'll get a working genuine ALarm
  

For better description, kindly follow the posted links.

@manolias
For your user case
If you'll planning to do transcoding, in the ALarm packages there are mplayer and ffmpeg, but they might be also with these debian derived, like TinkerOS is. Then if you explain your purposes to do en/decoding, we may give a second option.
From my supposition, if you want to provide a DLNA whit trans-codification then there could be some package to try out from AUR. But no guarantee that they'll work.