some big letdowns right away and very slow progress

[bicameralmind]

I like the hardware so far, but ....

Here is my story with some issues behind me and some still ahead. The day after receiving and exploring the phone, preloaded with manjaro plasma, an update corrupted the OS already. And the battery would not charge over 85% and would tank to 33% in an hour after the first update on day of arrival. 

All we have right now besides android and apple phones are a 6 year old Windows machine, and an android tablet. My Chromebook 3 that I ran Galliumos on had physically worn out beyond repair, over a year ago, but that learning experience got me interested in Pine64 projects, and so I waited to buy.

I tried Belenaetcher to create a bootable sd on the Windows, and failed maybe ten times before success, and yet the phone would still not boot. I was trying with a plasma ISO. When I tried the .img download for Posh, it booted the phone, but it is so wonky as a live OS it is almost unusable. You know the lag. You know the cropped oversized browser that you can't pinch down. You know the no rotate to landscape issue, right?

I had Debian Linux OS distros for years and got used to those basic terminal commands. It is weird to type apt-get for an error message.

I found instructions all over the place for flashing to the eMMMC, but none anticipated key choices a noob has to make with little knowledge. More on that later.

While waiting for guidance, I started just playing with the software app, thinking I will try to customize the Posh before installing it. Well, after some deletions I managed to lose the software app. I hope I can use the terminal to restore it because it really went bye bye. It is great to browse and read reviews as I am still learning.

So, my current big issue with using the booted phone to download and flash an OS to eMMMC.... From noob wiki, I got the terminal command for dd, I know my x is 0, but this command returns no file or directory even if I can see the file in my download folder. Do I change the directory and the name of the actual image? I know this might be a very stupid question, yet in my experience what should be a variable is sometimes a routine function. There seems to be many steps here skipped or not detailed enough for me, about extraction too. If I select download/open the file with archive manager nothing at all happens. Here is the code in question.

dd if=new-pinephone-image.img of=/dev/mmcblkX

Please note my phone is the convergence version. I was hoping it might also preclude my need for another pc, but now I think it is required, at least keyboard and monitor. It would be nice to use the dongle alone for flashing. Cheers everybody and much OS joy for reading this. 

[wdt]

The dd command is right (if X is right), but,but,but
For images (or other large files), flash does not like writing (default) bs=512....(bytes)
Very slow (10x), probably write multiplication
_I_ always use bs=1M <- M not m, some dd's choke on 1m
-----
I assume you have decompressed image? If it is a xz or gz??
Or a pipline,,, xzcat xz_image | dd of=.... bs=1M status=progress
(zcat for gz images)
To see inside an image, you have to loop mount it (or write it to media)
mount requires an appropriate offset (In bytes, use fdisk to get sectors)
sudo mount -o loop,offset=..... some_image mount_point (must be uncompressed image)

[bicameralmind]

The dd command is right (if X is right), but,but,but
For images (or other large files), flash does not like writing (default) bs=512....(bytes)
Very slow (10x), probably write multiplication
_I_ always use bs=1M  <- M not m, some dd's choke on 1m
-----
I assume you have decompressed image? If it is a xz or gz??
Or a pipline,,, xzcat xz_image | dd of=....  bs=1M status=progress
(zcat for gz images)
To see inside an image, you have to loop mount it (or write it to media)
mount requires an appropriate offset (In bytes, use fdisk to get sectors)
sudo mount -o loop,offset=..... some_image mount_point (must be uncompressed image)

I get as far as this page https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/m...invocation and I bog down because still too much jargon on my level. Should I try the jumpdrive route on the old windows machine? I guess I could also plug a keyboard and monitor into the phone if the cropped display won't happen, really helping me to actually see what I am doing, but as I hear often now, "I think that is a software problem." haha. It is a live OS so of course it will look bad on a big monitor, right? 

So, no, you did not really help me yet except for TRYING--thank you! Just a bit more plain speaking, cheers.

[wdt]

I think what you are saying is you have only windows box????
If your computer has usb3 (for speed) and a decent usb3 stick,
a live usb is definitely worthwhile,, its been months since i have used win
I don't know the win commands,, try balena

[bicameralmind]

I think what you are saying is you have only windows box????
If your computer has usb3 (for speed) and a decent usb3 stick,
a live usb is definitely worthwhile,, its been months since i have used win
I don't know the win commands,,  try balena

I was able to flash a replacement Posh not Plasma manjaro distro onto the emmc but it was too dicey using an old windows 10 to do that all the time. Balenaetcher triggers too many errant windows interrupt requests for format and drive insertion. Buggy usb ports and adapters. My bad. Flashes work but report as failed. Syyu worked great. Instead of depending on scaling scripts right now, I am reading webpage text via the terminal, a really secure welcome change. I can play music but maybe not video, and the camera is so bad it is like putting objects on photographic paper and flashing a light to burn the contrast. That is ok for now. The soundcard is nice. I want to kill vibrate. Now I am ready to test the simm so this thread is now resolved. Thanks!