Deepin Desktop Installation (Fedora 32 Workstation) Tutorial
#1
Deepin Desktop Installation Guide

Hello! This guide is for people who like to use the Deepin desktop environment. Deepin runs great using the Fedora 32 Workstation images provided by the kind gentleman from this thread: Fedora 32 Images and it sits idle between 700M and 800M of ram. I will cover both SD card installation and emmc installation. Currently, this isn’t possible with the default Manjaro installation unless you jump through a whole bunch of hoops of compiling and chasing down dependencies. A user on this forum managed to do it but I was unable to replicate their success myself due to frustration and impatience. I will outline the steps needed to be as new user friendly as possible. You should be able to have it either on an SD card or on the emmc. If you want to install it onto an nvme ssd drive, I won’t be able to cover that here as I have yet to figure that out and try it. I use my ssd as a data/backup drive and not too keen on messing it up and losing my data.


*This guide comes with the usual disclaimer that I can’t be held responsible if you brick your pinebook pro, mess up your system, goes haywire, starts floating in midair, fills your bank account with large sums of money or ants found their way into your laptop and started nibbling on the internal wires. Just to name a few. You do so at your own risk.


What you will need:
Fedora 32 Workstation image
SD Card (preferably 32G or higher)
A USB flash drive or another external hard disk attached (optional)


Instructions:


1. Download the Fedora 32 Workstation image from here:


2. (Optional) Rename the file to something simple to avoid typo’s when working with the image. I just renamed mine Fedora-Workstation.img.xz


3. Open up a terminal and navigate to the directory where you downloaded the file.


4. Extract the compressed image and copy it to a usb drive or nvme ssd. This is needed to reverse the process if you wish to install it to the internal hard drive of your pinebook pro.


Code:
unxz –threads=6 Fedora-Workstation.img.xz


5. Run lsblk to get the information of your drives on your system. The sd card drive and the internal emmc drive will be named mmcblkX where X is the corresponding disk number assigned by the system.


Code:
lsblk
Output from terminal:
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
mmcblk2 179:0 0 58.2G 0 disk
├─mmcblk2p1 179:1 0 213.6M 0 part /boot
└─mmcblk2p2 179:2 0 58G 0 part /
mmcblk2boot0 179:32 0 4M 1 disk
mmcblk2boot1 179:64 0 4M 1 disk
nvme0n1 259:0 0 238.5G 0 disk
└─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 238.5G 0 part

This is my output on my system. My internal hard drive is mmcblk2 with 58.2G of space. When I insert an SD card this is my output:


NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
mmcblk2 179:0 0 58.2G 0 disk
├─mmcblk2p1 179:1 0 213.6M 0 part /boot
└─mmcblk2p2 179:2 0 58G 0 part /
mmcblk2boot0 179:32 0 4M 1 disk
mmcblk2boot1 179:64 0 4M 1 disk
mmcblk1 179:96 0 29.7G 0 disk
├─mmcblk1p1 179:97 0 213.6M 0 part /run/media/xxxx/BOOT_FEDORA
└─mmcblk1p2 179:98 0 29.5G 0 part /run/media/xxxx/ROOT_FEDORA
nvme0n1 259:0 0 238.5G 0 disk
└─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 238.5G 0 part


Now, mmcblk1 is there with 29.7G.


6. Insert your SD card and run lsblk to get the drive number. Substitute X with the corresponding sd drive number you get from running lsblk. In the above example, my sd card is mmcblk1. So, I will use that in the following command:


sudo dd if=NameOfYourFile.img of=/dev/mmcblkX oflag=sync status=progress bs=4M


Make sure you are targeting the sd card and not the internal emmc card!


7. When it’s done writing the image to the SD card. Reboot your laptop.


8. Fedora will boot up and you will go through a nice setup process with a gui. After setup is complete you’ll be greeted with the Gnome desktop environment. Now, we need to resize the partition that was created on the sd card. The image writes a 10G disk leaving 20G unused on the card.


9. Open up a terminal in Gnome and run the following where mmcblkX is the number of your sd card drive. The size will be reported around 10G. Run lsblk again to verify if you wish.


sudo cfdisk /dev/mmcblkX


10. Resize the last partition of the SD card. In the example from above, my sdcard drive is mmcblk1. You can see from looking at the output that there are two partitions on the sd card mmcblk1p1 and mmcblk1p2. So, I will select mmcblk1p2 using up and down arrow keys. At the bottom of the terminal screen there is a menu that you can navigate with your left and right arrow keys. Highlight ‘Resize’ and press the enter key. It will default to resizing the partition to fill out the rest of the SD card. Scroll to ‘Write’ hit the enter key then type yes and hit enter to confirm. Then quit cfdisk.


11. Now, to resize the drive on your sd card to use all the available space run the following command using the numbers assigned by the system where there is a bold X:


sudo resize2fs /dev/mmcblkXpX.


Congratulations! You now should have a working Fedora 32 Workstation! Now, comes the easy part! Deepin Desktop installation!



Deepin Installation


1. Update your system from terminal then reboot.


Code:
sudo dnf upgrade


2. To install deepin type


Code:
sudo dnf group install “Deepin Desktop”


3. Reboot again.


4. At the login screen select your account. In the lower right corner there should be a gear. Click on it and select Deepin from the menu. Input your password and enjoy Deepin on your Pinebook Pro.


Optional Post Installation Tasks


If you want a more complete Deepin experience, you can change the login screen to what is used by deepin. Type these 2 commands in the terminal.


Code:
sudo systemctl disable gdm

Code:
sudo systemctl enable lightdm



If you want pure Deepin and no longer wish to have gnome occupying space on your disk run:


Code:
sudo dnf group remove gnome-desktop


Installing to the internal emmc drive


At this point, if you followed everything currectly, your internal operating system should be intact and unaffected. If you want to install to emmc we just do the exact same process we did to the sd card with one minor change. Which I will note here to save space and reading time instead of regurgitating every step.


**************************
!!!IMPORTANT!!!
When installing to the emmc, do NOT leave any devices plugged into any of the usb slots when you reboot your pinebook pro to go through the first boot up process. I left my usb Logitech mouse dongle in 3 different times and it failed to boot and was kicked into a terminal recovery mode. You will have to redo the installation from the sd card if this happens. After the initial setup you are free to leave the usb devices plugged in.
**************************


6. Navigate to where you copied the .img file earlier in a terminal. Use the dd command with the following parameters when writing the img to the internal hard drive:


sudo dd if=NameOfYourFile.img of=/dev/mmcblkX oflag=sync status=progress bs=32M


All the other steps remain the same.



I hope that you find this tutorial easy to use and informative. I welcome all feedback and will try to answer any questions you may have to the best of my ability and will try to help you out as best I can if you are unsure or stuck on something from the guide.
#2
<Reserved for installation instructions of deepin bootsplash>
Work in Progress

I just now noticed that the power control center isn't properly working and doesn't show up in the control center. I will have to investigate that for a solution.
#3
(10-29-2020, 07:21 PM)Upokupo Wrote: <Reserved for installation instructions of deepin bootsplash>
Work in Progress

I just now noticed that the power control center isn't properly working and doesn't show up in the control center. I will have to investigate that for a solution.

Appreciate and thanks on the instruction. I needs to locate some time to try out :-)


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