So, you have read How Do I Update, Upgrade And Install Software Before Flashing An Image? and were wondering whether you could use the native pacman against an ARM image instead of using an emulated version?
It turns out you can and it's not too hard. Make sure you have followed the instructions on How do I update, upgrade and install software before flashing an image? carefully and you have qemu-user-static installed correctly on the mounted system.
pacman.conf
The /etc/pacman.conf file controls pacman, and normally, we wouldn't need to edit it. However, there is a problem with the supplied pacman.conf when used in this way. It includes the directive
Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist
Unfortunately, this picks up the mirror list from your host system, which probably won't mirror ARM packages. Copy /etc/pacman.conf from your mount to an appropriate directory and replace that line with
Server = http://mirror.archlinuxarm.org/arm/$repo
You can find my adapted pacman.conf at github.
Running pacman
You can now run pacman. Assuming your config file is in your pwd, run
sudo pacman -r <mount-point> --config pacman.conf -Syu
References
- Github project, which is forked from @Jivings Github project.