My personal recommendations for installing Arch Linux on Raspberry Pi 3. Suitable for other platforms as well.

Arch installation guide: https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv8/broadcom/raspberry-pi-3

First steps:

Installing the bash skin:

echo 'export PS1="\[\033[0;0;1;31m\]\u \[\033[0;0;0;37m\]\w\[\033[0;0;1;31m\] > \[\033[0;0;0;37m\]"' >> ~/.bashrc && source ~/.bashrc

Update the system:

pacman -Syyu

Install cron:

1
2
3
4
pacman -S cronie
systemctl enable cronie
systemctl start cronie
echo 'export EDITOR="nano"' >> ~/.bashrc && echo 'export VISUAL="nano"' >> ~/.bashrc && source ~/.bashrc

Swap file:

Make sure you don’t have a swap yet:

free -h

Check available disk space:

df -h

Create a swap file:

fallocate -l 1.5G /swapfile

Make sure you reserve enough space:

ls -lh /swapfile

Turn it on:

1
2
3
chmod 600 /swapfile
mkswap /swapfile
swapon --priority 50 /swapfile

Final check:

1
2
3
swapon --show
free -h
htop

Make sure that /swapfile is enabled after a restart:

Create backup of /etc/fstab:

cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak

Execute:

echo '/swapfile none swap sw 0 0' | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab

Check:

cat /etc/fstab

FTP server

bftpd does not require additional settings, you can connect immediately after installation.

1
2
3
pacman -S bftpd
systemctl enable bftpd
systemctl restart bftpd

Tmux

tmux is a useful utility for creating bash sessions that can be connected and disconnected without interrupting the applications running in them:

pacman -S tmux

tmux manual:

  1. https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~ckuehl/tmux/
  2. https://tmuxcheatsheet.com/