Linux ARM can be installed in an ARM CPU guest of QEMU, which runs under a Windows in an x86 CPU. Let's head straight to deploying an Arch Linux ARM, then. Running an Arch Linux instance as a QEMU guest is not that hard because of all the available resources we can download from the internet. For demo purposes, we will be using a pre-installed image of Arch Linux and running it in QEMU. Prepare to download these files:

• QEMU: https://qemu.weilnetz.de/
• Arch Linux image: http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/arch/images/archlinuxarm-29-04-2012/archlinuxarm-29-04-2012.img.zip
• System kernel: https://github.com/okertanov/pinguin/blob/master/bin/kernel/zImage-devtmpfs

Extract the image file from archlinuxarm-29-04-2012.img.zip to a new directory, and copy zImage-devtmpfs into the same directory.

Open a command line in the image and kernel file's directory. Then, execute the following line:

"c:Program Filesqemuqemu-system-arm.exe" -M versatilepb -cpu arm1136-r2 -hda archlinuxarm-29-04-2012.img -kernel zImage-devtmpfs -m 192 -append "root=/dev/sda2" -vga std -net nic -net user

Here, change C:Program Filesqemu to the path where QEMU was installed. This should fire up QEMU with Arch Linux running, as shown here:

Now, log in using these credentials:

alarmpi login: root
Password: root

You can go ahead and play with it like a regular Linux console. Arch Linux is a popular OS installed by enthusiasts of Raspberry Pi.