Write image to eMMC - Pinebook 11.6"

[irongarment]

Ok. This has probably been done to death, but I'm trying to get my head around writing a bootable image to the eMMC.

As far as I can tell there are two steps.

1 Download an image and write it to an SD card, and boot the Pinebook from it.
2 After booting, download another image (same or different- but basically the one you want on the eMMC) then use dd to write to of=/dev/mmcblk1

Then power off, remove SD card, power on. The Pinebook should boot from the image that was written in step 2. Is that basically it?

I just got the 1080p image from here:
https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinebook_So...Neon_Image

I flashed it to my SD card using dd, and it boots. I've "set it up" but I realise that that has only affected the SD card image. My guess is I have to dd the image again (as I said) and then reboot and set it up (again).

Thanks.

[irongarment]

Actually I might try Manjaro KDE. It seems a little more recent. I'm guessing the process is the same.

[irongarment]

Not sure. Now that I have the original KDE Neon working I might just update that. Anyone know if there will be a later version than August 2020? Manjaro KDE is December 2021 (w00t!).

[jezek]

I'm using Manjaro Sway on my pinebook 11 and I'm satisfied with it.

... Then power off, remove SD card, power on. The Pinebook should boot from the image that was written in step 2. Is that basically it?

Yes, that's how I always do it.

[irongarment]

Success!

I went with KDE Neon. The image is from August 2020, but it should be fine for what I want.

I didn't have a big enough SD card to boot the image and download another copy of the image to write to eMMC, but I did have a USB stick with sufficient space.

So, I downloaded the KDE Neon image to a Raspberry Pi and copied it to the USB stick. I then used dd to write the same image to an SD card. Next, I booted the Pinebook from the SD card and inserted the USB stick. Then, I used dd to write the image from the USB stick to the Pinebook eMMC. That was successful, so I shut down the Pinebook, removed the SD card and USB stick, then booted it up.

I then ran the installer from the icon at top left, which set up the image for me.

The last step it did was resize the partition so that I used all of the 16Gb eMMC. I think this step failed when I originally bought the Pinebook, meaning I only had access to about 5Gb of the eMMC. This quickly filled up, and I got into great difficulty booting and trying to do anything. I shouldn't have that problem now.

Finally, I logged in as me and ran "Discover" to install any updates. Now I'm going to reboot and hope everything still works.

I still like the Pinebook (original 11.6" 1080p). It's a bit slow, but it's functional, and the screen is very nice. I plan to use it as a bCNC controller for my DIY CNC machine.

Thank you all for reading.