Hey all,
I’ve really been enjoying Silverblue on my main machine, and I’m kind of feeling keen to install it on all of my machines. I have a pinebook pro which is an arm laptop much lighter and thinner and better for taking around than my main machine.
Anyone here have one of these and have been able to find a way to install silverblue on it?
It’s an Arm laptop but it seems all the software releases need to be specifically built for it.
Sashin
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I haven’t user Silverblue on an Arm device, but I did see there’s a version of Silverblue for Aarch64, which should probably work on the Pinebook Pro.
However, it seems like it doesn’t currently boot on the Pinebook Pro, according to this post from 10 days ago:
In the comments of that reddit post, they mention that there is a third-party installer script for Fedora on the Pinebook Pro @ GitHub - bengtfredh/pinebook-pro-fedora-installer: Unofficial Fedora installer for Pinebook Pro —
but it isn’t Silverblue.
Perhaps someone can get Silverblue working on the Pinebook Pro based on that? It seems all the pieces are available, at least.
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The Pinebook Pro is definitely something we are interested in. Peter Robinson is working on it; I’m not sure of the latest status.
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This would be amazing! I’d love it if there was a way I could keep up to date with how it was going.
Hmm… I wonder
There is no reason why this script should not work with other editions of Fedora. Just give url as maramater when script run. Script is tested with Fedora Workstation and Minimal.
You may want to subscribe to the Fedora ARM mailing list — there are sometimes updates there.
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I just tried to install Fedora Silverblue aarch64 on the pinebook pro. Here is my experience with it.
Couldn’t auto boot from USB nor MicroSD card. I finally dropped to grub command line and after some hunting found a way to boot the grub configuration file on the ISO image (since it is an ISO and I wanted to install to emmc).
This went more or less smooth, but then anaconda said it couldn’t update something relating to booting. So… guess I can’t boot. Finish the install, try to boot, and as promised it won’t (chuckles to self).
I try the same grub command line boot from grub config and still nothing. Just blank screen.
So, I give up, and am going back to workstation for now…
I got it to work! You need to first install Tow-Boot to the Pinebook spi flash (Getting Started | Tow-Boot). I had some issues with this process and found solutions here (doc: Document neutering other platform firmware installs · Issue #47 · Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot · GitHub) and here (No option to flash firmware to SPI on Pinebook Pro · Issue #55 · Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot · GitHub). Once I had Tow-Boot installed I was able to boot from an sd card with the Silverblue installer image and install to the emmc. The installation was super slow and at the end there was an error message related to efi or grub not being configured properly, but when I rebooted Tow-Boot automatically booted to the Silverblue grub menu so it must not have been that big of a problem.
Huh, I got an error too but then couldn’t ever boot it. Wonder if I need to update uboot on my spi?
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I would recommend replacing uboot with tow-boot, it seems to be more flexible.
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I get that a lot but I’d prefer to stay closer to upstream 
but I suppose I could at least give it a try.
WiFi doesn’t work out of the box and you can’t just install the third-party driver via rpm-ostree because rpm-ostree doesn’t work out of the box either (because two rpm repos that come installed by default don’t support ARM).
Wrote a quick how-to on getting WiFi working:
Speakers still don’t work.
Also, not sure if this is a Fedora Silverblue thing or a Pinebook Pro thing but HDMI out via USB-C also doesn’t work (not via direct USB-C connection or via HDMI connection via USB dongle).