Fedora Phosh 38 on Pinephone 64

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1

Hello everyone,
I searched the forum but could not come up with any solution to my problem. If I used the wrong search terms, I apologize and would be grateful for any hint towards an ongoing discussion.

I own a Pinephone 64 currently 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 leaves 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”. Has anybody running Fedora Phosh 38 on a Pinephone? I’m a little cautious using dd for writing =/ Can somebody give me some instructions?

Any help is much appreciated.

Thanks and greetings
Pasi

2

Update: As openSUSE also comes with a raw.xz image, I checked out their install process, see HCL:PinePhone - openSUSE Wiki , and it seemed straight forward. I used lsblk to determine that the device was mounted under /dev/sdd. I then executed

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:

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.

3

The file you used is a compressed image.
It could be written to the sd card using arm-image-installer which uncompresses the image and properly partitions the card as it is written.
The command arm-image-installer --help gives you a lot of info as to how to use that tool.

The command you used also may work, but the sd card must be at least as large or greater than the size of the uncompressed image or the dd command may fail as you have seen.

4

Currently the phosh image needs extra patches in order to run on pinephones, including a downstream kernel.

The mobility SIG has a copr with in progress items here Packages for @mobility/pinephones