Today I plugged in my Raspberry Pi 3 which had RetroPie installed on it. It notified me, that the installation is out of date and not longer supported and I should reinstall the system.

Since I had to do a reinstall anyway and didn't want to be bothered again in the future, I decided to try out ArchLinux ARM, so I just get the rolling releases without a need to do re-installs.

Installation

To install the base image I followed mostly the guide from ArchLinux ARM: https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv8/broadcom/raspberry-pi-3

For the setup I needed to connect it with an Ethernet cable, since the guide doesn't explain how to set up WiFi prior to first booting it.

After that I logged in via ssh. I needed to enforce password authentication, since otherwise ssh would just try all my ssh keys to authenticate which lead to a Received disconnect from 192.168.0.31 port 22:2: Too many authentication failures

ssh -o PreferredAuthentications=password alarm@alarmpi
# switch to root user
su
# From the install guide
pacman-key --init
pacman-key --populate archlinuxarm
# Update the whole system
pacman -Syu

During the update step I got a scary warning while building the initramfs:

(12/14) Updating linux-rpi initcpios...
==> Building image from preset: /etc/mkinitcpio.d/linux-rpi.preset: 'default'
==> Using configuration file: '/etc/mkinitcpio.conf'
  -> -k 6.1.64-2-rpi-ARCH -c /etc/mkinitcpio.conf -g /boot/initramfs-linux.img
==> Starting build: '6.1.64-2-rpi-ARCH'
  -> Running build hook: [base]
  -> Running build hook: [udev]
  -> Running build hook: [autodetect]
  -> Running build hook: [modconf]
  -> Running build hook: [kms]
  -> Running build hook: [keyboard]
  -> Running build hook: [keymap]
  -> Running build hook: [consolefont]
==> WARNING: consolefont: no font found in configuration
  -> Running build hook: [block]
  -> Running build hook: [filesystems]
  -> Running build hook: [fsck]
==> Generating module dependencies
==> Creating gzip-compressed initcpio image: '/boot/initramfs-linux.img'
==> WARNING: errors were encountered during the build. The image may not be complete.
error: command failed to execute correctly

I tried to figure out what went wrong and then decided to just reboot and see if we can still do that, which worked without problems.

Configuring WiFi

Since I didn't want to bother with connecting the raspi with an ethernet cable at the location were I wanted to run it, I needed to configure WiFi before continuing.

Since it will run stationary, it is enough to just hard-code a single network:

wpa_passphrase SSID PSK > /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant@wlan0.service
systemctl start wpa_supplicant@wlan0.service
systemctl enable wpa_supplicant@wlan0.service

Then we tell systemd-network to enable DHCP for the wlan0 interface by creating /etc/systemd/network/wlan0.network with the following content:

[Match]
Name=wlan0

[Network]
DHCP=yes
IgnoreCarrierLoss=3s

After reloading with systemctl reload systemd-networkd.service WiFi was connected.

Update 2023-12-14

After a while I noticed, that the systemd-networkd-wait-online.service blocks the startup of the pi for about 2 minutes. This is due to the fact that it will wait for all links to be fully configured by default. (See https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd-networkd-wait-online.service.html)

This can be changed by only waiting for wlan0 to be up:

sudo systemctl disable systemd-networkd-wait-online.service
sudo systemctl enable systemd-networkd-wait-online@wlan0.service

Installing Kodi

Since I wanted to run Kodi on the Pi (along side RetroPi / Emulation station) I followed this guide: https://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Install_Kodi_on_Raspberry_Pi

pacman -S kodi
# selecting kodi-rpi

After installing the output of pacman showed the following:

>>> Remove any manual tweaks made to /boot/config.txt particulary a line such
    as gpu_mem=xxx.  Driver setup for Kodi is stored in /boot/kodi.config.txt

    Manually append the following to /boot/config.txt to make them active:
    [all]
    include kodi.config.txt

    A reboot will be required to activate them if this is a fresh install.`

Optional dependencies for kodi-rpi
    afpfs-ng: Apple shares support
    bluez: Blutooth support
    linux-rpi: HW accelerated decoding [installed]
    python-pybluez: Bluetooth support
    pulseaudio: PulseAudio support
    pipewire: PipeWire support

So I edited it accordingly, enabled the kodi service and rebooted:

sudo systemctl enable kodi.service

So far everything is working quite nicely and one of the next things will be to get a spotify plugin to run on the Raspberry Pi.