Phone malfunctioning, cannot update

[rayculp]

Hi all,

I ordered a Pinephone 64 in September 2020 and was really excited when it arrived in November. I know the Manjaro OS and software is a work-in-progress, so I was expecting things to be a bit rough around the edges. That's completely ok.

But it has now become impossible to update the OS, even though updates are available. I'm constantly getting errors like "error: key "####################" could not be looked up remotely" and others.

I have Googled possible fixes for these errors and would be interested in trying them out, but the phone has now also started freezing up randomly, which makes it impossible to work at all. I'll be in the middle of executing some command in the terminal and the phone will simply stop responding. The only way to get it to work again is by resetting it (pressing the power button for 5 seconds). 

I have an MCSA certification, but I'm still a novice with Linux, and my Linux experience has been limited to Ubuntu up till now. Under these circumstances, I would say it's time to completely re-install the OS from scratch. However, I have been unable to find a step-by-step guide for installing the OS on the Pinephone specifically. 

I basically have two questions:

1. Is it ok for me to use this guide? https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=10403 It was written for the Pinebook Pro, but it seems to be the closest thing available. Or is there a better guide available for the Pinephone?
   
2. Manjaro does not seem to be an OS that was created specifically for phones. If I re-install the OS from scratch, will this delete custom settings in the Pinephone that were implemented at the factory and are necessary to make the phone work? If so, where do I find documentation to re-create those settings after installation?
   

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Ray

[kqlnut]

The Wiki is a good place to find specific instructions for the Pinephone and get going from there. The linked section explains how to flash an OS to the internal storage of the phone, so that is how you would replace your current installation. If you want to keep your current installation, you can also flash an OS to an SD card. For that you can just use Etcher as described in the thread you linked. No need to do anything beyond flashing it to the SD card and inserting that into your phone. Your phone will boot automatically to the OS on the card if there is one. (Edit: Link to the Wiki article with all the installation instructions. I believe the resizing part is done automatically by most distributions by now, but I'm not sure about that.)
Manjaro is indeed a general Linux distribution, but they, as all the other distros available for the Pinephone, have a dedicated ARM version (packaged with one of the 'desktop' environments for phones like Phosh) to make it work on devices like the pinephone which have a different processor architecture than most desktop PCs. So you cannot install the desktop version on your phone, but have to use the ARM image. The current Phosh image for Manjaro can be found here. An earlier version of that image (Beta 1) is exactly the one that had been installed to your Pinephone at the factory, so you won't lose anything compared to when you got your phone. You might want to back up your home directory though and possibly some stuff in /etc (like WiFi configuration) before flashing a new OS to keep your personal configuration and data. You can just transfer that stuff to the according directories in the new OS installation.

[rayculp]

Thank you very much for that information! I'll try out what you suggested. :-)

[hiimtye]

you can try something like
sudo pacman -S manjaro-keys

and then updating as per usual. ive been using pmOS since its the only sxmo offering atm so im not positive what the exact package name is but you can search for it by

pacman -Qs \\-key

[nightranger73]

you can try something like
sudo pacman -S manjaro-keys

it's manjaro- keyring but I would suggest archlinux-keyring too

so on the terminal just type

Code:

sudo pacman -S archlinux-keyring manjaro-keyring

[nbh]

Confirm the date and time are correct.  #Gorammit

[rayculp]

I finally re-installed Manjaro and it's working perfectly now. Thanks for all the advice! :-)