About

I don't think of you nor myself as a dummy, but sometimes it's just been too long and you really wish you had a small post to knock the rust off of an old workflow.

"Wait – Manjaro? PinePhone?" - Prerequisites.

I won't be discussing what a Linux distro is, or Manjaro itself, nor bikeshedding on what distro you should put on your PinePhone.

This blog'll be a bit higher-speed than usual.

Manjaro

Where does the PinePhone Manjaro live?

It's really hard to tell what's the official, but coming from the PinePhone Manjaro Edition blog post, I would say that it lives here:

Odd link. Who dat?

Anyway, that repo is tragically out of date in the cyber-future of 2022. Let me show you where it really lives: here, for example here, and for right now literally right here.

Line noise to read, but CTRL+F for -pinephone- or -pinephonepro- depending on your case and grab the one ending in `xz`.

Grab the `.sha1` only if you're feeling (`sha1sum -c blablah.sha1`) fancy, and the pkgs.txt is just for human eyeballs and interest, it seems. Skip.

How do I make it go?

To be slow and boring, read the wiki.

For fast action:

  1. Stick a micro SD card in to your laptop where you have the .xz (bigger is better, faster is best)
  2. Check `fdisk -l | grep '^Disk \/'` for your microSD card
  3. Prepare for imminent destruction of all data on the disk
  4. `xzcat Manjaro-ARM-plasma-mobile-dev-pinephone-20220515.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/YOUR_SDCARD_PLZ bs=1M`

If it's a gzip, you can swap for `zcat`, but these are usually xz for Manjaro.

That's about it.

Sync & Eject

Let's be extra nice to the brand new formatted card. 

$ sudo sync
$ sudo eject /dev/YOUR_SDCARD_PLZ

The sync may take a while and – heck – I believe it's fully redundant to the call to eject, but isn't it nice to be extra safe?

Plug it in

Pop that back cover (be careful of the screen) and slip out the battery. In goes the new SD Card.

Cover back on – oh, what am I saying! You know what to do: POWER ON!

The first device selected is the SD Card so there's no more steps. My device showed the logo within about 15s of power on, then took quite about 5+ minutes to set up the whole shenanigan.

The user experience needs a bit of work there, as the spinning logo did freeze up and it went to a black-screen for about 2m before finally being ready.

Enjoy!