Raspbian may be the most common OS on Raspberry Pi devices, but it’s not the only OS on the market. Arch Linux is one such competitor, offering minimal disk images that can be customized and specialized from scratch for any task with the help of Arch Linux’s excellent package manager Pacman. Masu.
The Arch Linux Arm office website contains all the necessary files and detailed instructions for initial setup. After a fairly simple process, you’ll be able to connect your Raspberry Pi and use a command line interface (CLI) similar to the old Microsoft DOS.
Fortunately for those who prefer a graphical interface, Arch Linux supports a wide range of things in its official repositories, but that requires the Internet. While many tutorials detail how to connect to common home Wi-Fi, Eduroam is a little trickier. To save you hours of trawling through Wikis and forums, we’ll focus on his Eduroam below.
First, you need root privileges. By default, this can be done with the following command:
su
After entering the password, you will need to create the file.
nano /etc/wpa_supplicant/eduroam
Quick note: You don’t need to name the file eduroam.
Now that you’re in the nano text editor, you need to write the configuration for eduroam. You must copy everything exactly except the ID and password fields. This tutorial is proposed by John Smith, jsmith@umass.edu, password Smith12345.
network={
ssid=”eduroam”
key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
eap=TTLS
phase2=”auth=PAP”
identity=”jsmith@umass.edu”
password=”Smith12345”
}
Note: Quotation marks are required. It won’t work without quotes.
Now that the configuration is complete, you need to set the file permissions to root only. It’s never a good idea to make your passwords in insecure plain text.
chmod og-r /etc/wpa_supplicant/eduroam
To make sure everything is set up properly, run:
ls -l /etc/wpa_supplicant | cut -d ' ' -f 1,3-4,9
The correct output would be:
-rw------- root root eduroam
If you named the configuration file something other than eduroam, that name will appear in the output.
Now that all settings are complete, you can finally connect to the Internet.
wpa_supplicant -i wlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant/eduroam &
If everything is configured correctly, you should see “wlan0: link become ready” in the middle of the last line of the page and just press Enter to add one more command.
dhcpcd
Now, ping Google to make sure it’s connected.
ping google.com -c 5
If everything is configured, you can see that 5 packets were sent and 5 packets were received.
Now that you can connect, it’s best to do a full update
pacman -Syyu
At this point, you are free to do whatever you want with Arch. For the sake of brevity, I’ll omit it here, but if you need additional help, I highly recommend the official Arch Linux Wiki. For a graphical UI, we highly recommend setting up XFCE4 and a network (Wi-Fi) manager.
Customized XFCE4 desktop example by Erik Dubois
Disclaimer: UMass IT does not currently provide technical support for Raspberry Pi.
