Hey guys, just wanted to say that flashing an SD card with the pmbootstrap utility works perfectly. PinePhone will prioritize booting from your inserted SD card rather than the internal memory and then you can get past the password prompt.
pmbootstrap actually warns you about how the Phosh and Plasma Mobile environments require a password with numbers only. It's a bit unfortunate that the PostmarketOS installer on the PinePhone didn't warn about this while you are choosing your disk encryption password (to be fair they were crystal clear with the PIN number).
You can install pmbootstrap either with pip3 or from your distro's package manager (e.g. Arch had it in the AUR). Then:
Phone is working great now, running Plasma Mobile and it's beautiful.
Good luck everyone!
pmbootstrap actually warns you about how the Phosh and Plasma Mobile environments require a password with numbers only. It's a bit unfortunate that the PostmarketOS installer on the PinePhone didn't warn about this while you are choosing your disk encryption password (to be fair they were crystal clear with the PIN number).
You can install pmbootstrap either with pip3 or from your distro's package manager (e.g. Arch had it in the AUR). Then:
- Run "pmbootstrap init", select pine64 + pinephone, set your desktop environment, user account, etc.
- Run "pmbootstrap install --sdcard=/dev/sdx" ("sdx" replaced with the location of your SD card).
- After it's completed, run "pmbootstrap shutdown" to perform any necessary clean-up.
- Insert the SD card into your phone and boot into your new PostmarketOS.
Phone is working great now, running Plasma Mobile and it's beautiful.
Good luck everyone!