Pinephone Community Edition doesn't boot from SD-Card Only Red LED

[steven]

Hi Together,
I got my first Pinephone 4 days ago with a shipping time of 1 day from Hong Kong to North Carolina, USA WOW.
I like this device and as normal I am trying a few distros.


Well whatever distro I try, as soon as I put a SD Card in the phone doesn't boot and just the red LED is on.

Anybody can help me or has the same issue?

Steven

[bcnaz]

How are you flashing your SD cards ?
I have had about 98% success rate using Balena Etcher for flashing my SD cards.

[Potts]

I second this. Ive used the flasher image to overwrite the EMMC on the device. Ive only gotten arch and manjaro to work this way. Other OS's like PureOS do not boot and only display a red light.

[Word5]

Here is the program that I have used: https://www.balena.io/etcher/

I have gotten Mobian, UBTouch and Arch flashed and booting up this way on a microSD UBTouch only boots once on my phone and I haven't gotten Manjaro to boot yet either.  The links can be found in their forum under Pinephone Software.

[bcnaz]

I had no problem getting Manjaro going in the same fashion as Mobian,   it does have a very polished desktop,
 it reminded me a bit of an Android desktop,   it even comes with Anbox pre-installed.
but very little actual function, at least in  "Out of the Box"  form, maybe if you can work some magic under the hood.

I have found that I sometimes I need to zero wipe the sd card before a fresh flash will work,  not always, but if you do everything right and it does not work,
       sometimes that will fix the problem.
Maybe some OSes are harder to write over ?

[steven]

Here is the program that I have used: https://www.balena.io/etcher/

I have gotten Mobian, UBTouch and Arch flashed and booting up this way on a microSD UBTouch only boots once on my phone and I haven't gotten Manjaro to boot yet either.  The links can be found in their forum under Pinephone Software.

Do you also have the 3GB/32GB Community Edition? Right now it looks to me that all distros doesn't work on that model. I used a few different ways to flash the sd card but nothing works. Has anybody a working Ubuntu Touch on the 3GB/32GB running? If yes what image did you used?
Thanks
Steven

[steven]

Here is the program that I have used: https://www.balena.io/etcher/

I have gotten Mobian, UBTouch and Arch flashed and booting up this way on a microSD UBTouch only boots once on my phone and I haven't gotten Manjaro to boot yet either.  The links can be found in their forum under Pinephone Software.

Do you also have the 3GB/32GB Community Edition? Right now it looks to me that all distros doesn't work on that model. I used a few different ways to flash the sd card but nothing works. Has anybody a working Ubuntu Touch on the 3GB/32GB running? If yes what image did you used?
Thanks
Steven

I just tried etcher, same results. I think its because of the new model. Anybody has an idea?

[Danct12]

Existing OSes still needs to be patched by the maintainers for the new 3GB model.

Some of 3GB ready OSes are Arch, Mobian (latest nightly), postmarketOS and more to come in the future.

[bcnaz]

*    
      I just flashed Mobian September 04 nightly release to a sd card and it is running fine on my brand new PMOS Convergence Pkg phone (3gb ram)

  I use Balena Etcher exclusively,  I have used it since my first original Pinebook Pro last year.

There are some minor differences in the Etcher releases,  I had to dig a bit to find a release for this old Dell laptop, I am running Linux Mint Debian Edition.

The standard Ubuntu download of Etcher did install, but it did not work.

[robthebold]

September 6 build (#78) boots on 3GB phones