How do I install the Pine64 Installer?

[leibide]

This is a silly question which nobody else found necessary to ask (I've looked), but anyway here goes:
How do install the Pine64 Installer utility?
Do I do this?: sudo apt-get install git
then:
git clone https://github.com/pine64dev/PINE64-Inst...0.0-beta.3?
Sorry for opening a new thread just for this. Feel free to move it elsewhere if there is a better place for it.

[tophneal]

What are you trying to install it on? The page you linked has released packages ready to download and install.

[leibide]

What are you trying to install it on? The page you linked has released packages ready to download and install.

I'm trying to install it on the default Debian Mate on the Pinebook Pro. I've already downloaded it to downloads and extracted it with xarchiver. Then I tried to open or install it using the graphical user interface. Should I just have done something like the following from the terminal? :
cd Downloads
sudo apt-get install Pine64Installer

[tophneal]

No, if you want to install it to the PBP, you'll need to download/clone the repo and build from source. There isn't an official arm64 release to install.

There is however an arm64 release of the software the PineInstaller is based on, Etcher.

[leibide]

No, if you want to install it to the PBP, you'll need to download/clone the repo and build from source. There isn't an official arm64 release to install.

There is however an arm64 release of the software the PineInstaller is based on, Etcher.

That explains why I couldn't install the Pine64 installer on the Pinebook Pro! I'll try it on an x86 computer in a few days just out of curiosity (Ubuntu 18.04.3).
In the meantime, I followed your advice and installed etcher. It was easy even for me to follow the instructions given on the github page (https://github.com/futurejones/balena-etcher-arm). Then I flashed the downloaded image to the sd card with it (zaius told me where to find the image to download - the wiki.pine page https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...48&page=11). I didn't even bother to format the card or check if it worked, or indeed check the image, because I wanted to see what would happen. I can now boot Manjaro from the SD card! I have a second PB Pro that I gave to my father. I'll flash Manjaro straight to the emmc from an external hard drive tomorrow because I'm very happy with Manjaro  Anyway, that's me sorted.

Thank you for taking the time to help.

Tell me, do you think it would be a good idea for someone like you to post instructions for noobs such as me on how to manually set up the Pine64 Installer on the PB Pro, which they could just copy and paste into the terminal without understanding, just in case anyone wanted to do that? I've noticed on the Manjaro thread here that some people had difficulty getting their SD to boot the new operating system after using Etcher. Or would this just needlessly create problems (messed up set ups, more threads like this one, etc.)? Actually, I think I've just answered my own question.

[tophneal]

Great! I'm glad you got something going. Etcher is a solid program, I've been using it without fail, for years. One thing I like about it, is it doesn't require any card formatting, it handles it for you.

That's not a bad idea, I can certainly see the appeal of having the PineInstaller available on the PBP. (Even if it hasn't been updated yet for the PBP, or maybe it has, I use Etcher or ApplePiBaker A LOT.) I can give it a try to build it. If I succeed, I'd be happy to write it up.

Just gave this a quick try, and it seems that the Etcher code this is based on is too outdated currently to build straight from the repo. I'm going to try using the MakeFile from Etcher, directly.

[leibide]

Oh wait!, I think I know what you mean by building the PineInstaller from source. You mean to build the application itself, and not just how it's installed. That's way out of my league. I sure wish I could contribute that much myself though.

[tophneal]

There’s enough modification to it that I opted instead to post an update request, citing arm interest, in the installers log thread. I don’t know how often @pineadmin is active, but hopefully they’ll see it. It’s due for an update to include PBP images anyway.

If we don’t notice any response after a while, I’ll bring it up in the mod forum.

[wdt]

On my x64 box gives an error, not exactly this, but almost
(etcher-electron:12910): Pango-ERROR **: 18:43:39.911: Harfbuzz version too old (1.4.2)
The only thing my package mgr shows is lib64harfbuzz0 2.6.4-1
The newer balenaEtcher versions work OK
I thought appimages were supposed to be self-contained?

[tophneal]

Hopefully that will be resolved if the maintainer at Pine updates it with the new Etcher source.