Do I really need PINE64-Installer?

[mule.ear]

That's fine for booting from an SD card, but how can I burn image whatever.img.xz to the emmc. I just got my pinebook last week. The distro it came with (Ubuntu w/ Mate) is faulty - Java causes a segmentation fault and 'man' is broke - looks like there's a problem with troff, but I didn't dig deep enough to be sure. I could work around both issues, but stopped there. I'm not mad or anything, these things happen - but I want to be able to install whatever distro I want to the emmc.

I tried installing the Armbian image that the pine64-installer downloads. I burned that with dd to a USB stick, then dd from the stick mounted on my pinebook to /dev/mmcblk0p1, but no joy yet. I don't know what's in /dev/mmcblk0boot0 and 1 because I can't mount them.

Linux, as we all know, is about freedom. So, to build on @anaumov's question - how can I install my distro to the emmc?

Also - if you need beta testers for the images you're sending out on these Pinebooks - I'll be happy to volunteer.

Replying to my own post - parted does not show /dev/mmcblkboot0 as being part of /dev/mmcblk0 - so I dd the image to mmcblk0 and it boots to Armibian now. I was concerned that I'd be overwriting some system specific stuff, which is why I didn't dd to the root of the volume to begin with. There is also a shortcut on the default Desktop call Config - and inside that ncurses tool is <Install>. I haven't tried it but I bet that would work too.

This is a great product and I'm looking forward to playing (and probably working) with it.