Moving to Tow-Boot: Towards Device-Independant Images

[user641]

https://blog.mobian.org/posts/2022/03/30...al-images/

So those are great news! I have just one question that was not there, can I flash tow-boot to my pine phone that has mobian installed? Or do I need to install mobian again on top of tow-boot?

[wibble]

Yes, you can install tow-boot in place of uboot on an existing mobian emmc install. I've just done it on mine which was installed via the installer image with encrypted rootfs. I just made sure mobian had a full upgrade and autoremove, which removed the old u-boot-sunxi package. I checked to see /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf was present since that's what tow-boot will read to see what to boot, then followed the tow-boot installation instructions:

https://tow-boot.org/devices/pine64-pinephoneA64.html

It now boots emmc mobian as before by default, and volume up boots onto the usb disk mode that's similar to JumpDrive as the instructions say it should. I haven't tried booting uSD cards yet, and I don't think tow-boot can do anything about the A64 using a bootloader on the uSD first if one is present.

[user641]

Yes, you can install tow-boot in place of uboot on an existing mobian emmc install. I've just done it on mine which was installed via the installer image with encrypted rootfs. I just made sure mobian had a full upgrade and autoremove, which removed the old u-boot-sunxi package. I checked to see /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf was present since that's what tow-boot will read to see what to boot, then followed the tow-boot installation instructions:

https://tow-boot.org/devices/pine64-pinephoneA64.html

It now boots emmc mobian as before by default, and volume up boots onto the usb disk mode that's similar to JumpDrive as the instructions say it should. I haven't tried booting uSD cards yet, and I don't think tow-boot can do anything about the A64 using a bootloader on the uSD first if one is present.

I have the mobian with fde too installed with the installer, I tried running full upgrade and autoremove, but there was not the u-boot-sunxi package to be purged. Howeven I proceed with the tow-boot instructions and everythings works fine. It looks like u-boot will be removed in the next days/weeks, I don't understand why it was already available to be removed with autoremove on your device.

[wibble]

There was a query about it appearing for autoremove a while back - search seems to be returning nothing at the moment or I would have linked to it. I hadn't done a full-update / autoremove in a while so had some catching up to do, but if you've been running it frequently u-boot-sunxi may have been removed already. It won't actually make any difference to tow-boot though, as you've found. If you've still got it and want to know what's still pulling it in you could install apt-rdepends to list reverse dependencies.

[user641]

There was a query about it appearing for autoremove a while back - search seems to be returning nothing at the moment or I would have linked to it. I hadn't done a full-update / autoremove in a while so had some catching up to do, but if you've been running it frequently u-boot-sunxi may have been removed already. It won't actually make any difference to tow-boot though, as you've found. If you've still got it and want to know what's still pulling it in you could install apt-rdepends to list reverse dependencies.

Just checked, it's not installed anymore...probably was removed lately. Howver reading again the post of mobian blog, they said it's possible to remove u-boot-*, but trying to do so also asks to remove a lot of mobian system packages, so I believe we just have to wait, and those u-boot packages not necessary anymore will arrive at autoremove, right?

[wibble]

u-boot-menu is still required according to the FAQ in the blog post, so if you tried removing u-boot-* that might explain why it wanted to remove others. Use apt-rdepends if you really want to find out what's keeping each one from being autoremoved.

[user641]

u-boot-menu is still required according to the FAQ in the blog post, so if you tried removing u-boot-* that might explain why it wanted to remove others. Use apt-rdepends if you really want to find out what's keeping each one from being autoremoved.

Thanks, I will try that!

[Zebulon Walton]

I think I'm going to give Tow-Boot a try and will do a full image backup of the eMMC first just in case something goes horribly wrong. It would also be nice to have a backup of just uboot using dd - what is uboot's offset and size on the eMMC?

[Zebulon Walton]

Just to followup, I installed Tow-Boot this morning and it worked out fine. The USB mass storage mode works well and that will make it a lot more convenient for image backups and to copy files back and forth between a PC and the Pinephone. (However, it only exposes the eMMC, not the SD card if you're using that for additional storage.)

A minor point is that the power-on LED is now red instead of green which is a little disconcerting since red makes my hindbrain automatically see "error condition" (Red Alert!). Not a big deal, just something to get used to.

[TRS-80]

A minor point is that the power-on LED is now red instead of green which is a little disconcerting since red makes my hindbrain automatically see "error condition" (Red Alert!). Not a big deal, just something to get used to.

Thanks for the report, you no doubt saved me some moments of anxiety.