08-24-2022, 02:57 PM
+1 to @snorwood
The basic process I followed was to have two thumb drives that contained nothing, a copy of the distro I wanted to install, and a copy of Tow-Boot.
First, download the most recent Tow-Boot for PineBook Pro and dd it over to one of your thumb drives following the instructions here: https://tow-boot.org/devices/pine64-pinebookPro.html . Then shut down and reboot, ensuring that you can boot using Tow-Boot (it'll show you it's little logo once you start booting).
Once Tow-Boot is safely in place, download your desired distro and write the image to one thumb drive, and copy the .img file over to the other. The concept is that you'll boot off of the one and use it as a live distro to dd the other copy of the image onto the eMMC. Technically, you'd PROBABLY be safe dd'ing the live image that you'll boot off of, but I didn't want to chance it. It ended out working very well for me: I overwrote the default Manjaro Plasma distro with Manjaro XFCE. I really think that Manjaro Plasma was just a bit too heavy for the hardware. At the very least, it seems much happier with Manjaro XFCE.
The basic process I followed was to have two thumb drives that contained nothing, a copy of the distro I wanted to install, and a copy of Tow-Boot.
First, download the most recent Tow-Boot for PineBook Pro and dd it over to one of your thumb drives following the instructions here: https://tow-boot.org/devices/pine64-pinebookPro.html . Then shut down and reboot, ensuring that you can boot using Tow-Boot (it'll show you it's little logo once you start booting).
Once Tow-Boot is safely in place, download your desired distro and write the image to one thumb drive, and copy the .img file over to the other. The concept is that you'll boot off of the one and use it as a live distro to dd the other copy of the image onto the eMMC. Technically, you'd PROBABLY be safe dd'ing the live image that you'll boot off of, but I didn't want to chance it. It ended out working very well for me: I overwrote the default Manjaro Plasma distro with Manjaro XFCE. I really think that Manjaro Plasma was just a bit too heavy for the hardware. At the very least, it seems much happier with Manjaro XFCE.