Fedora on Pinephone

[pasifi808]

Hello everyone,

I posted this also on the Fedora forum, see here

I own a Pinephone 64 formerly with PostmarketOS and SXMO installed. I was happy when I read about Fedora Phosh 38 being available so I wanted to install it on my Pinephone. I downloaded the Fedora-Phosh-38-1.6.aarch64.raw.xz file from Fedora Phosh | The Fedora Project. Checksums did match, hence the file didn’t seem to be corrupted or anything. I connected and rebooted my Pinephone (which has TowBoot installed) and tried to write the downloaded file with Balena Etcher onto the eMMC. This left me with the message “Attention Something went wrong. If it is a compressed image, please check that the archive is not corrupted. The elevated process died unexpectedly”.

I then remembered that openSUSE also comes with a raw.xz image, so I checked out their install process, see HCLinePhone - openSUSE Wiki , and it seemed straight forward. I used

Code:

lsblk

to determine that the device was mounted under /dev/sdd. I then executed

Code:

xzcat Fedora-Phosh-38-1.6.aarch64.raw.xz | sudo dd bs=4M of=/dev/sdd iflag=fullblock oflag=direct status=progress; sync

and that led to the following result:

Code:

146800640 bytes (147 MB, 140 MiB) copied, 20 s, 7,2 MB/s
dd: error writing '/dev/sdd': Input/output error
36+0 records in
35+0 records out
146800640 bytes (147 MB, 140 MiB) copied, 22,0027 s, 6,7 MB/s

I guess I should have specified sdd1 (pmOS_boot) or sdd2 (pmOS_root). Now the phone does not start anymore and I guess I have to come up with a solution how to reinstall an OS to it. Although, during starting process, I get past the first stage (red LED, short vibration) to the second stage (yellow LED, two short vibrations) but not to the third (green LED, long vibration). The screen stays black and LED stays yellow. I should also add that Towboot still seems to work, as holding the Volume-Up-Button pressed during boot turns the LED blue in the second stage.

Any help is much appreciated.
Thanks and greetings
Pasi

[tophneal]

i wonder if this last step from the Fedora install page on the wiki might be the culprit:

Do not forget to resize the 2nd partition on the eMMC and the f2fs file system in that partition

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architect...ll_to_eMMC

[pasifi808]

i wonder if this last step from the Fedora install page on the wiki might be the culprit:

Do not forget to resize the 2nd partition on the eMMC and the f2fs file system in that partition

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architect...ll_to_eMMC

I didn't really get to that point. The flashin process failed and now I can't start it anymore =/

[tophneal]

i wonder if this last step from the Fedora install page on the wiki might be the culprit:

Do not forget to resize the 2nd partition on the eMMC and the f2fs file system in that partition

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architect...ll_to_eMMC

I didn't really get to that point. The flashin process failed and now I can't start it anymore =/

Have you tried writing jumpdrive to an SD, booting it, and connecting the phone to a computer so you can wipe the emmc and start over?

[pasifi808]

Have you tried writing jumpdrive to an SD, booting it, and connecting the phone to a computer so you can wipe the emmc and start over?

Not yet. I will give that a try in the next few days. But I'm a bit concerned now, as I have posted this issues on the Fedora community forum as well, see https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/f...e-64/81550 , and while somone recommended another installing method, someone else mentioned that Fedora 38 does not yet work on Pinephones and nneds some extra patches =/

Anyhow, thank you for your quick response so far

[Alho]

Have you tried writing jumpdrive to an SD, booting it, and connecting the phone to a computer so you can wipe the emmc and start over?

Not yet. I will give that a try in the next few days. But I'm a bit concerned now, as I have posted this issues on the Fedora community forum as well, see https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/f...e-64/81550 , and while somone recommended another installing method, someone else mentioned that Fedora 38 does not yet work on Pinephones and nneds some extra patches =/

Anyhow, thank you for your quick response so far

The official Fedora image does not work for Pinephones yet - and it has several other bugs, so it shouldn’t be used at all for now.

You shoud use the Fedora remixes we make for the Pinephones (there is Phosh and Plasma Mobile images ). You find them at:
ftp://pine.warpspeed.dk/nightly/pinephone

[Kevin Kofler]

FTP? Seriously? Why are those files not served over HTTPS like everywhere else in 2023?

[zetabeta]

FTP? Seriously? Why are those files not served over HTTPS like everywhere else in 2023?

what is the key reason why ftp is used, i can speculate.

ftp supports uploading by default. however, username and password are required and goes plain text. sftp could be used for uploading, but then why to use ftp for downloading. https requires cerificate, maybe fedora does not provide one, "let's encrypt" could provide a certificate.

maybe it's a complicated compromise.