Install Mobian on PinePhone¶

Tow-Boot¶

Bevore installing Mobian Tow-Boot has to be installed on the PinePhone.

Download the Tow-Boot image from this GitHub Repo. Choose the latest and download the pine64-pinephoneA64-*.tar.xz tar archive.

Extract the tar archive and follow these instructions:

Flash the mmcboot.installer.img to a suitable SD card:

dd if=mmcboot.installer.img of=/dev/XXX bs=1M oflag=direct,sync status=progress

==Replace the XXX with the correct device. Select the right one or you can overwrite important data of your computer==

Put the SD card in the PinePhone and restart it. Connect it to a charger while booting.

Select “Install Tow-Boot to eMMC Boot”.

Romove SD card and restart.

Usually you can flash the installer image on the sd card but due to this issue it is not possible to use the latest mobian installer on the PinePhone

Instead you can use the installation method using JumpDrive.

Download the pine64-pinephone.img.xz from this source.

Unpack it with unxz pine64-pinephone.img.xz

Flash it to the SD card with

dd bs=64k if=<path-of-the-unpacked-image> of=/dev/<the-name-of-the-sd-card-device> status=progress

==Replace <the-name-of-the-sd-card-device>with the actual device name. Choose the right one or you will overwrite important data==

Put it in the PinePhone restart and follow the instructions on the screen. Plug the phone to your PC.

Download the mobian image from here. Use the mobian-sunxi-phosh-*.img.xz

Unpack it with unxz mobian-sunxi-phosh-*.img.xz

When flashing the Mobian image to the PinePhone using JumpDrive the device can be found out using

lsblk -o NAME,SIZE,VENDOR,MODEL

Flash to the device with VENDOR=JumpDriv and MODEL=e_eMMC

Flash with

dd bs=64k if=mobian-sunxi-posh-<insert-version-number-here>.img of=dev/<insert-the-e_eMMC-device-name-from-above> status=progress

==Be careful do not enter the wrong device or you can overwrite your computers storage or operating system==