Having difficulty installing PostmarketOS on Pinephone Convergence Beta edition

[spazz]

Hi again all.
Just wanted to share that I had success with installing postmarketOS using JumpDrive, on two separate pinephones.

My convergence Beta edition which I purchased new (I guess this is a standard pinephone),
and a standard pinephone I purchased used. 

My next steps are to: 
- Upgrade the Pinephone's firmware (not sure if I should have done this prior to installing postmarket) 
- learn to fully encrypt the storage (would be nice if there was an option for this at install, but suspect this can be done with the other pmbootstrap method, which doesn't work on my current distro). 
- Learn how to use the sxmo window manager. It's very unique and interesting. Definitely different. 
- Hope the pinephone doesn't drop calls every 5 minutes like it used to! 

I am unsure why I failed with jumpdrive the first time, and succeeded this time, as reading back, I think I did exactly the same thing in terms of the jumpdrive steps.
Maybe not.
If I did the same thing, it should have worked.
Or maybe I did the same thing up to a point, and then missed a step.

I followed Mike's video for confidence and assurance on what I was doing.
(the second one, which Kevin pointed me to).
It was great to "SEE" exactly what he was doing, which is often lacking in reading documents.
It was excellent (apart from the microphone level being a bit low, and needing to ramp up the volume, but I think you fixed this in later videos). 

Thanks again Mike!

Maybe I just stuffed up something the first time, or missed an obvious step, 
and nobody else will have this kind of problem.

Just in case anybody else comes across some kind of similar problem,
or otherwise gets a bit confused like I did, and needs a bit of extra confidence with what they are doing,  here is a summary of what I did:

(although I'm basically redundantly repeating instructions from Michael's video and postmarketOS jumpdrive documentation).


    Get appropriate jumpdrive image from the github 

    https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Jumpdrive
   
    Michael did this with
   

Code:

    $ wget https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Jumpdrive/releases/###URLpathToAppropriateJumpDriveImage###
   

   
    But I'm lazy, and I just clicked the appropriate link, and that downloaded it.
   
    Then:
   
   

Code:

    unxz JUMPDRIVEIMAGE.img.xz
   

   
    Connect SD Card to computer.
    Use
    sudo lsblk to identify the SD card.
    We will name it sdX for this example.
    Then
   
   

Code:

    sudo dd if=JUMPDRIVEIMAGE.img of=sdX status=progress
   

Let run and finish.
Then
- Remove SD Card from computer, 
- Remove battery from pinephone
- insert SD Card into pinephone,
- Connect Pinephone to computer (I did not bother to reinsert battery),
- turn on pinephone.

You SHOULD now see JumpDrive splashscreen on pinephone.

On computer, navigate to path of postmarketos / distro image.

Then run this to identify the pinephone's internal memory location (eMMC),
identified as sdX, which we will flash our distro to.
   
   

Code:

        $ lsblk -o name,size,model,vendor |grep JumpDriv
        sdX        29.1G e_eMMC                    JumpDri
   

Can also be done simply with
    sudo lsblk 
to identify the pinephone eMMC card,
but the first method gives more certainty so you don't flash the wrong thing!   

You can then either:
       
   

Code:

    unxz DISTROIMAGE.img.xz
   
    #unzips the distro image, in this case postmarketOS
   

   
With pinephone connected to computer,
and booted to Jumpdrive flashscreen,
we can now flash our distro image.

   

Code:

    sudo dd if=DISTROIMAGE.img of=/dev/sdX status=progress bs=1M oflag=direct iflag=fullblock
   

   
Where sdX is our pinephone eMMC drive we identified earlier.

Let run and allow it to finish.
DO NOT INTERRUPT IT or you MIGHT risk bricking your phone's memory.
(I'm not sure, but I wouldn't risk it).

Maybe get your hands off the keyboard and away from the terminal while this runs,
to avoid potential sadness.
Go away and get a cup of tea.

Once finished:
  "Remove the USB cable and power off the phone. Remove the JumpDrive SD card if you used one. Power on the phone to boot into postmarketOS."

Honestly, I'm not sure the purpose of the portion of the above command which says
   

Code:

    oflag=direct iflag=fullblock
   

It might be redundant. I roughly guess iflag (input-flag) ensures a full 1M block size is used for each block (for some purpose), and output-flag makes the image flash directly where we already specified it to go? (um, where else would it go?)

That comes from the postmarketOS jumpdrive documentation, and those people are a lot smarter than I am, so worth keeping it in the command, I think.


OR

use the instructions on the original postmarketOS jumpdrive URL.
The section about "Flashing to eMMC"

I used these instructions, just because it was there.
It's basically the same.

The only difference with this is it pipes the output of unzipping the DISTROIMAGE.img through dd, as input to dd to flash to the pinephone.
I learned something.

       
    https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/JumpDrive#Flashing_to_eMMC
   

   
    Flashing to eMMC
    Locate the block device exposed to the host computer via JumpDrive:

       

Code:

        $ lsblk -o name,size,model,vendor |grep JumpDriv
        sdX        29.1G e_eMMC                    JumpDri
       

    In the example above, the /dev/sdX is the eMMC device on your phone.

    Again, make sure you know what you are doing, and verify you picked the right path - overwriting the wrong partition or changing the partition layout on Android by accident may cause data loss or render your device unbootable! If you want to proceed:

       

Code:

        $ xzcat DISTROIMAGE.img.xz | sudo dd of=/dev/DRIVE status=progress bs=1M oflag=direct iflag=fullblock
        4277141504 bytes (4.3 GB, 4.0 GiB) copied, 194 s, 22.0 MB/s
        4093+0 records in
        4093+0 records out
        4291821568 bytes (4.3 GB, 4.0 GiB) copied, 200.427 s, 21.4 MB/s
       

    Remove the USB cable and power off the phone. Remove the JumpDrive SD card if you used one. Power on the phone to boot into postmarketOS.

Thanks again Mike and Kevin for your help.
Sorry for chewing up space and time on the forums perhaps unnecessarily.