Manjaro 23.02 minimal on 1GB Radxa Zero

#1

The Manjaro 23.02 minimal image has the wrong root partition UUID in both extlinux.conf and fstab which prevents it from booting. The following procedure installs the image (which I had already downloaded), fixes the error and enables wifi. (The SD card shows up on my Linux box as /dev/sdb and I did all this as root; please don’t just follow these instructions blindly or you could trash your machine.)

zcat Manjaro-ARM-minimal-radxa-zero-23.02.img.xz | dd of=/dev/sdb bs=4M conv=fsync status=progress
mkdir /tmp/mnt
mount /dev/sdb1 /tmp/mnt
sed -i 's/c7787c7b/c778d49e/' /tmp/mnt/extlinux/extlinux.conf
umount /tmp/mnt
mount /dev/sdb2 /tmp/mnt
sed -i 's/c7787c7b/c778d49e/' /tmp/mnt/etc/fstab

That fixes the booting issue - if you are doing this manually, just replace c7787c7b with c778d49e in both files. Now (with /dev/sdb2 still mounted under /tmp/mnt) I set up my wifi connection:

cd /tmp/mnt
mkdir etc/iwd
cat > etc/iwd/main.conf << EOF
[Settings]
AutoConnect=true

[General]
EnableNetworkConfiguration=true
EOF
mkdir var/lib/iwd
cat > var/lib/iwd/YOUR_WIFI_NAME.psk << 'EOF'
[Security]
Passphrase=YOUR_WIFI_PASSWORD
EOF

Finally I download the Linux firmware and fix it for the 1GB model with an AP6212:

wget --no-check-certificate -O - http://mirror.archlinuxarm.org/armv7h/core/linux-firmware-20230210.bf4115c-1-any.pkg.tar.xz | xzdec | tar xf -
cd usr/lib/firmware/brcm
ln -s brcmfmac43430-sdio.AP6212.txt brcmfmac43430-sdio.txt
cd
umount /tmp/mnt
#2

  • Thanks for you effort with Manjaro minimal which I highly appreciate.

  • I am not a coder, but I appreciate to have some info about Manjaro on this device.

  • We have already an installation instruction for Manjaro

  • and some info that Manjaro partly works with 5 inch touch screens

  • I have put the links to this on my personal website:

https://petergamma.org/issues-with-radxa-zero-with-a-5-inch-touchscreen-running-manjaro/

  • If I remember right some users wrote here in the forum that they wanted to install Debian after they installed Manjaro on this device. What might be the reason?
#3

This post says, the Radxa zero is faster than the Raspberry Pi4:

XeroLinux Official made a demo #Fedora 37 on the Raspberry #Pi4… What to expect…:

Fedora 37 is slow in the example, web site rendering and YouTube is a problem, but still basic functionality is there.

NicoD’s SBCs made a demo how to install Manjaro on the Radxa Zero (see link above), but shows not more. But what to expect from Manjaro on Radxa Zero? Does it run similarly to Fedora 37 on the Raspberry Pi4?

skm installed Manjaro 23.02 minimal on 1GB Radxa Zero. What to expect from minimal Manjaro? Fedora 37 on the Raspberry Pi4 I know now what to expect and I would be happy with it to start with, but not with the Raspberry Pi4 because of his high power consumption. It is highly desirable to know what to expect from Radxa zero distros, and which one works best for our own special application.

#4

Hi,

Running Manjaro XFCE 23.02 and kernel 6.2.5 on a Zero with 4GB of RAM and 32GB emmc, as daily driver for several montsh now, with no serious issues.

Pacman an Pamac do a great job keeping the system up to date, upgrading the kernel and other packages. Way easier than Debian apt.

Last kernels with MGLRU feel zippy and allow to open a bunch of applications. The combination of this new virtual memory page management and zram virtual memory compression is great.

MGLRU is probably one of the most impressive technologies added to the kernel recently. I’m testing it also with a 2GB 2014 Intel tablet with Ubuntu with LXQT (optimized with minimum services loaded) and it allows to open quite a few apps with far less disk thrashing than before… :exploding_head:… It’s a blessing for systems with limited memory.

I also enabled fastcommit for ext4 and TRIM and it is working flawlessly.

The zero is very usable as a desktop replacement and Manjaro is very stable.

I use it mainly for browsing, coding quite complex apps and light image retouching with Darktable and Photopea.

It amazes me what you can achive with this tiny computer… :slightly_smiling_face:

#5

Thanks for sharing your experience with Manjaro on a Raxda Zero as daily driver, which is very helpful and I highly appreciate.

Can you make a YouTube video about it as XeroLinux Official made a demo of Fedora 37 running on the Raspberry Pi4 (see above)? So we can compare performance of Fedora 37 on a Raspberry Pi4 versus performance of Manjaro on a Raxda Zero?