Pinephone Pro (with Tow-Boot) - Installing a new OS on the eMMC

In my previous Pinephone Pro, I was describing how I was coming up to speed on the different storage mechanisms on the Pinephone Pro: SPI vs eMMC vs microSD.  

Contextually, we are talking about block storage, and there is a well known command that one can run to see block storage on a Linux device: lsblk.  Running this command on your Pinephone Pro - in a Terminal - can help you understand "what is what and where". And it's important to understand this.

One concern I had, was installing a new OS to the eMMC, and blowing away the boot process. I had installed Tow-Boot on the phone, but had to make sure it was in its own spot (it was, SPI) - away from where a new OS was going to go - especially if you plan to clean or format the eMMC before installing a new OS. So my previous post discusses how I had to figure all of this out, and learned that Tow-Boot was installed on the SPI - making it safe to install a new OS.

Here was my process for installing this new OS, with comments:

1. Download the image
• Figure out what display manager you want. 
• Phosh? Plasma? Gnome? Xfce? There is not shortage of choices.
• I went with Plasma - because it worked well when I ran the OS on the microSD
•  I went with 20250206
• Check the md5 hash - which is always wise to verify the integrity of the image.
• Unpack/Uncompress the "xz" file.
• NOTE: In Mac Pro, xz did not work, and neither did tar xvfz. Using the GUI and clicking the file in File Manager invoked the Archive Utility to unpack the file. But in Linux, xz or tar should work fine.
  
2. Make sure your Pinephone Pro is sufficiently charged. 
• At least 50%, preferably 75%, and optimally fully charged at 90% or greater. 
• I should note that with Manjaro, the power charge percentage was not always accurate.
3. Power off your Pinephone Pro.
4. Connect the Pinephone Pro using USB-C connector, into a USB-C connector of your laptop.
5. Power the phone up, and after first vibration, hit the Volume-Up button
• You are looking for a blue light on your Pinephone Pro, signifying that you are in USB Mode.
6. Make sure the laptop/computer sees the Pinephone Pro as a device.
• In my case, on a Mac Pro, I used File Manager.
• Examine the /dev devices and this is IMPORTANT! Because if you install your OS onto your laptop partition, you have a big big problem.
• I quickly noticed that /dev/disk4 had the BOOT_MJRO volume name on it, ensuring that disk4 was the disk I wanted to install the new OS to.
7. Unmount the disk
• because you cannot format or do an image copy on a disk that's already mounted. 
• on a Mac Pro, diskutil was used for this: sudo diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk4 
  
8. Clean the partition
• sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk4 bs=1M count=100
9. Copy the image to the eMMC 
• Tools like Balena Etcher can be used for this.
• The "dd" tool is a Linux tried-true way to do this and this is what I chose:
• sudo dd if=20250206-0046-postmarketOS-v24.12-plasma-mobile-5-pine64-pinephonepro.img of=/dev/dis
  k4 bs=1M status=progress
10. Watch the progress, and once finished, eject the phone. 
• sudo diskutil eject /dev/disk4
11. Power the Pinephone Pro down
12. Unplug the USB-C connector that is connected between Pinephone Pro and the laptop/computer.
    
13. Power the Pinephone Pro back up.
• You will see a terminal show up on the screen - don't mess with it - just wait.
• Eventually the Plasma Display Manager will (or should) light up.
• The OS will take some minutes to initialize, and to be responsive to user input.
14. Log into the phone

Pinephone Pro - Booting an OS off SPI vs eMMC

I finally got a chance to pick the Pinephone Pro back up and play with it some more.

I was able to charge up the battery, and boot the phone and verify that Tow-Boot was installed on it properly. That was my first step. I believe I verified this by holding the volume down button, and waiting for the light to turn aqua (note, it may have been volume up, I should check this for correctness).

Next, I rebooted the phone,  and it booted into the Manjaro OS which is installed on the eMMC drive of the phone.

Next, I put the PostMarketOS into the microSD card slot, and booted the phone. Apparently Tow-Boot uses the following boot order:

1. SPI - more on this in a bit, I had to learn what this is
   
2. microSD Card
3. eMMC (which has Manjaro on it)

I didn't get a Boot Menu - but maybe a key sequence (volume up?) would give me such a menu. It booted straight into the PostMarket OS. 

I proceeded to experiment with PostMarket OS, and did a complete update of all of the packages on it.

Next, I wondered how I could "replace" the default Manjaro with the PostMarket OS, which was newer than Manjaro, such that it would boot PostMarket OS on the eMMC, allowing me recycle the microSD card for perhaps another OS distribution I could take a look at later. 

It turns out, that there is a PostMarketOS "on-disk installer".  It is called pmbootstrap.

THIS is where I had to learn about SPI. Because there is a warning about over-writing your Tow-Boot installation, if Tow-Boot was not installed on SPI. 

so...what is SPI? (more search required)

SPI Flash is a type of non-volatile memory that uses the Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) protocol for communication. It is commonly used in embedded systems for data storage and transfer, allowing devices to retain information even when powered off. 

Apparently it is a newer (or improved, perhaps) concept, found on phones with System-On-A-Chip (SOC) architectures. 

so...how do you know if you even have SPI?

Answer: I had to figure out which version of Pinephone Pro I have. 

I finally learned that there is a Developer Edition of the Pinephone Pro, and there is a Explorer Edition. The Explorer Edition supposedly has the SPI. 

But what confused me, is that it said the phone supporting SPI had the Rockchip RK3399S SoC. And when I went into the terminal on the phone and ran "lscpu", it said I had an ARM Cortex A-53 chip. 

so...now I am thoroughly confused.

Well, I finally learned, that the Rockchip RK3399S SoC combines four Cortex-A53 cores with two Cortex-A72 cores.

hmmm, I did not see the 72 in the lscpu command I ran - but, it does look like I have the SPI.

but, how do I know that Tow-Boot was installed on the SPI, versus the eMMC? Because if I have this wrong, I can't boot an OS as there would be no bootloader partition.

I think the SPI is mmcblk1 device. And /boot is on mmcblk1p1 partition of that device.

The Manjaro (previous installation) is definitely on the eMMC, which is on mmcblk2 device, which has two partitions on it, one of them being /root.

Pinephone Pro - Unboxing and Use Part II

I picked up the Pinephone Pro, which I had attached to a standard USB-C charger. It indeed was sitting at 100%. So it looks like the charging works okay.

The OS asked me for a pin code to unlock the screen. Yikes. I wasn't prompted to set up a pin code! 

I rebooted the phone to see if I could figure out what OS was on it from the boot messages. I figured out that the phone was running the Pinephone Manjaro OS. 

https://github.com/manjaro-pinephone/phosh/releases

Since the Manjaro OS has a default pincode, I attempted that pin code and got lucky - it wasn't changed, and it worked.  I (re) connected to WiFi, and noticed that the OS is prompting for my WiFi Password every single time and doesn't seem to remember it from before. Secure? Yes Annoying? Yes.

The form factor issue I ran into using the Firefox browser seemed to be more related to Firefox than the OS. The issue with Firefox is that the browser is sized past the phone form factor, and you need to scroll left and right which is a major hassle. The browser doesn't auto-size itself for the screen dimensions.

I played with the Terminal app, and noticed that the user when I launched the Terminal app was pico-xxxx (I don't remember what the suffix is). I tried to sudo to root, but didn't know what the password was for this user. 

Lastly, I played a video from YouTube, and the sound was very tinny. So the speaker on this phone is not high-end. I have not yet attempted to use a headphone on this device yet. 

Since the Linux-Mobile apps are so limited, many apps you typically run from a dedicated icon app/client on a mobile phone will need to be run from a browser.

I am not sure Manjaro is the "right" OS to use on this phone, or if the version of the OS running is current or stale. I ordered the Docking Hub and a Micro SD Card and when those arrive, maybe I will try flashing a new/different OS on this phone.

Pinephone Pro - Unboxing and First Use

I ordered a Linux Pinephone that just arrived.

In the United States, trying to get off of Google, Apple, and even Samsung is nigh onto impossible. Carriers make a ton of money off of selling and promoting phones, and have locked Linux phones out of their stores and off of their networks because they can't all collude and make money, either by selling the devices (carriers) or siphoning your data on their operating systems or defaulting the browser, etc.

There are probably numerous videos that show the unboxing of a Pinephone, so I will skip that and just make some general comments on my first experience.

When I unboxed the phone, there was no charger included. I bought this phone used on eBay, and while it came in the box, I wasn't sure if they come standard with a charger or not. The phone uses USB-C as a charger, though, and I had plenty of these. The phone had some weight to it. The screen seemed quality, but the back cover looked like a cheap piece of plastic and I could feel something pushing against the back cover (battery? dip or kill switches?). As I don't yet have a SIM for it, I have not yet opened the back.

The phone did not boot up at first. I wasn't sure of the button sequences, so I downloaded the Pinephone User Guide to get going. I decided that the phone probably needed to be charged, and plugged it into my USB-C charger, and immediately, I got a Linux boot sequence on the screen. Linux boot sequences are intimidating to just about anyone and most certainly to a user that is unfamiliar with Linux and not Linux-savvy.

When the boot sequence finished, the phone shut itself down again - presumably because it didn't have enough juice to boot and stay running. I left the phone on the charger, and returned to it 3-4 hours later.

When I came in and picked the phone up and powered it on, I got the boot sequence again and it booted up to the operating system. The OS was reasonably intuitive. I don't have a SIM in the phone yet, so I configured it for WiFi as a first step. Then I tried to set the clock, and I added my city but it is using UTC as the default. Next I went looking to see what apps were installed. It took me a few minutes to realize that the "Discover" app is the app for finding, updating and installing applications.  The first time I tried to run Discover, it crashed. When I re-launched it, it showed me some apps and I tried to update a couple of them, and got a repository error. I finally was able to update Firefox, though. Then I launched Firefox. 

Right away with Firefox, I had issues with screen real-estate and positioning. The browser didn't fit on the screen, and I didn't see a way to shrink it down to fit the screen properly. After closing the 2nd tab I had opened, I was able to use my finger to "grab" the browser, and pull it around, but clearly the browser window fit and lack of a gyroscope to re-orient the browser when the phone is turned sideways are going to make this browser a bit of a hassle - unless I can solve this.

I want to test out the sound quality. That's next.

Linux Phones Are Mature - But US Carriers Won't Allow Them

Today I looked into the status of some of the Linux phones, which are mature now.

Librem is one of the ones most people have heard about, but the price point on it is out of reach for anyone daring enough to jump in the pool and start swimming with a Linux phone.

Pinephone looks like it has a pretty darn nice Linux phone now, but after watching a few reviews, it is pretty clear that you need to go with the Pinephone Pro, and put a fast(er) Linux OS on it. 

The main issue with performance on these phones, has to do with the graphics rendering. If you are running the Gnome Desktop for example, the GUI is going to take up most of the cycles and resources that you want for your applications. I learned this on regular Linux running on desktop servers years ago, and got into the habit of installing a more lightweight KDE desktop to try and get some of my resources back under my control.

Today, I found a German phone that apparently is really gaining in popularity in Europe - especially Germany. It is called Volla Phone.  Super nice phone, and they have done some work selecting the hardware components and optimizing the Linux distro for you, so that you don't have to spend hours and hours tweaking, configuring, and putting different OS images on the phone to squeeze performance out of it.

Volla Phone - Linux Privacy Phone

 

Problem is - United States carriers don't allow these phones! They are not on the "Compatibility List". Now, I understand there might be an FCC cost to certifying devices on a cellular network (I have not verified this). The frequencies matter of course, but the SIM cards also matter. Volla Phone will, for instance, apparently work on T-Mobile, but only if you have an older SIM card. If you are on T-Mobile and have a new SIM card, then it won't work because of some fields that aren't exchanged (if I understand correctly).

Carriers that are in bed with Google and Apple, such as at&t and Verizon, they're going to do everything they can to prevent a Linux BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) phone hitting their network. They make too much $$$$$$$$$$$$ off of Apple and Android. T-Mobile, they're German of course, so maybe they have a little bit more of the European mindset. These are your three network rollouts across the United States, and all of your mom and pop cellular plays (i.e. Spectrum Mobile, Cricket, et al) are just MVNOs riding on that infrastructure. 

So if you have one of these Linux phones, you can use it in your home. On WiFi. But if you carry it outdoors, it's a brick apparently. Here we are in 2024, and that STILL seems to be the case.