UPDATED (June 2021): 17-distro multi-boot image for Pinephone (incl. 3GiB variant)

[fdriodIOS]

Thanks to everyone who has produced this and everything else for the Pinephone.

I flashed the image with Balena but Balena said the image was not an OS image. My pinephone boots in the landscape mode but when I get to user account, I cannot get passed it using the power or volume knobs.

Is there any way to change the layout so I can see all of the inputs at once?

[epiii2]

I flashed the image with Balena but Balena said the image was not an OS image.

Odd, I recently used Balena Etcher (on Mac OS) to write the image to a card and it gave me no trouble. Did you extract the compressed image with zstd first?  Does the checksum match?

[Peter Gamma]

I recently used Balena Etcher (on Windows) to write the image to a card and it gave me no trouble. I did extract the compressed image with zstd or another tool.

[Eugo]

Let me know if there are any major issues. For the next release I'll hopefully get to adding some menu option for booting into a multi-boot management UI, that will allow for modifications (like resetting the distros to original state, or kernel updates, or modifying the boot menu and removing the unwanted distros, or migrating to eMMC, and things like that).

It would be an interesting way to install a distro to pinephone. Load up SD card with multi-boot image, try the distros, and then just select the one you like and it would be installed to eMMC (either in the original form with u-boot and distro kernel, or using p-boot and my kernel and without losing any changes).

Or you could just drop the distros you don't like from SD card by deleting them from the menu and continue using multi-boot image as is.

If distros use home directory to store user settings/data, it may even be possible to share a single home directory (btrfs subvolume) across all the distros. So theoretically it would not matter which posh based distro you'd boot, it would contain the same settings and data. Would be nice to not have to re-do the wifi configuration for each distro, etc. In reality it may not work that well, because I guess some distros store settings in /etc, but it might be interesting to try.

First, thanks for what you did so far, or else I wouldn't be here - I'd die of how much my friends would mock me for having a phone which doesn't quite work, as the original Manjaro Plasma I got had serious issues, like losing modem frequently. Now it boots to a command prompt without a keyboard, so I can't even log in to it, my eMMC is practically unusable.

However, the distros work fine, at least Mobian did until it commited suicide by update. I'm now using Manjaro Phosh, with which I'm rather satisfied, except one remaining issue - ring doesn't wake the phone up, nor does SMS nor anything except that silly little wakeup app.

I came to this thread looking for a way to flash my working distro to eMMC, and so found this message of yours. Lovely ideas, exactly the things I'd like to do . Seeing how your attention has shifted to other Pine hardware, I guess this was just another neat idea that stayed on the back burner forever. But doesn't hurt to check, so... did you do anything about this? Well, since my version, which is of 17-aug-2022.