Manjaro 20.06 Step-By-Step Installation Guide

[vdicarlo]

Rejoice!  Bless you Nathaniel!  After having a lot of fun for several days breaking the system that came with the PBP, trying to fix it, trying unsuccessfully to boot from an SD card with a fresh image of Manjaro, until I tried a different brand of SD card, and following the configuration instructions, I was flummoxed when the computer would only boot from the SD card. 

Your post saved me a from a lot more fun.  Of course I needed to copy the image on the SD card to the internal memory, but somehow I thought that would happen automatically.

[MtnSk8]

I should have probably been more clear to that, when making the initial microSD card image, you should be on a system that uses an intel or amd chip, because Balena Etcher does not work on aarch64 (arm).  Etcher will therefore not work on PBP.

I've found that 'etcher-git' from the AUR Repos installs and works on the PBP. It took 2 attempts to install via the Manjaro default package manager .


Cheers!

[thepeckhambassplayer]

Hi vdicarlo and Nathaniel

The change of SD card fixed the blank screen, many thanks for pointing this out. My 32Gb panasonic card failed but my unbranded 8Gb card worked fine.

Thanks for giving it some thought and passing on the solution.

Best regards

Alex

[RotatingNut]

First of all, thank you for this amazing install guide, I've been using the default Debian image for as long as I could, but having such a simple upgrade guide made it impossible to further postpone the eventual upgrade.

Now, I sadly encountered an issue:

I followed the guide step by step, creating the bootable SD card and dd-ing the image to the eMMC. Everything worked and I was able to boot into the fresh install. After some basic setup and some updating I turned off the Pinebook Pro, after which it won't boot again. When turning it on, it shows the expected orange and then green light, after which nothing happens (blackscreen, most likely not a dim screen). Maybe there is something simple that I have missed...

I'd like to thank you for your help in advance!

EDIT: Ok, I found a fix. This is an issue that probably pertains to old Pinebook Pros which had been originally preinstalled with Debian. A switch to Manjaro on eMMC with a single partition layout will cause issues. The fix is described here: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/arm-stable-u...s/133266/2

Make sure to apply this fix before attempting to shut off or restart the freshly set-up PBP!

[Tazdevl]

THANKS! Kinda abused your install steps to install Kali

[brianpbp]

Thank you for this! I got the Sway version of Manjaro on an SD using manjaro-arm-flasher and was able to boot from that, but got some inscrutable Qt error when trying to launch manjaro-arm-flasher after that. I blame Wayland. Anyway, currently struggling with manjaro-arm-installer (I decided to be adventurous and try to enable LUKS full disk encryption), but if that doesn't work I'll be going the dd route like you documented here.

I hope OpenBSD support for the Pinebook Pro continues to improve, because I would much rather be running that. The difficulty finding up to date documentation (and the fact that Manjaro migrated their web forum to some new platform so literally every Google result is a broken link) and dealing with general Linux nonsense is really frustrating!

[pineitup]

I posted a separate thread about this in the general forum but maybe it's very relevant also here:

I have recently installed a fresh copy of Manjaro using the manjaro-arm-flasher, but when I try to boot the machine it shows a red light on the left status indicator, then I have to wait for a few moments, hold the power button for a couple of seconds and then it gets started with running the OS and showing a green light.

Why is that and how can I fix that so it would start itself directly after the first time I push the start button?

Thanks!

[erock22]

I have been trying to dd the Armbian image using these same steps. dd runs and finishes with no errors when I try to install on the emmc from the sd card. But when I try to reboot with the sd card removed the stock image is still there. Any ideas of what is going wrong?

[wdt]

The only way I can imagine, if the of=/dev/mmcblkN is wrong,,N=1 OR 2
lsblk,, boot0 and boot1 are on emmc, example /dev/mmcblk2boot0,,,, mmcblk2 is emmc
Since I have a blanked emmc uboot area, I can say that some armbian uboots give boot failures,
with my 4 or 5 experiences worse than 50% overall. Some were Ok until updated, then no boot
One nightly gave no boot, a week later image OK, likely no s3 sleep will be possible

[nathanielwheeler]

I have made a minor edit to the guide. When using the `dd` command, it is handy to include the arguments `bs=4M status=progress`to speed the process (default is 512 bytes) and to have a status to look at instead of seeing nothing (which is the default).