I learned the hard way that the Pinebook Pro cannot read from a 16GB Kingston Micro SDHC card. Unless, that is, you’re like me and decided to re-use an older SD card (perhaps that was once used in a Nintendo 3DS that your kids have since destroyed through sheer lack of respect for anything they own). This will take a while, but once it’s done you can put the SD card into your Pinebook Pro and power it on to boot into Arch Linux. Probably needs to run as root (using sudo for example). If you have the wrong device name in the second argument to this command you’ll lose everything on whatever storage device that is. You’ll probably want one that’s at least 8GB. The next step is to burn it to your SD card.
xz file extension), so you’ll need to decompress it first.
The image you downloaded from Github was probably compressed (has a. You want the root device name and not a specific partition if there are any. In my case it was mmcblk0 but it could be different for you. Insert the SD card and use lsblk to discover its device name. I used a different computer running Arch Linux for this step, but in theory you could do this on the Pinebook Pro itself using the default Manjaro installation (assuming you selected the correct locale and can actually operate it). There’s a pre-built flashable and bootable Arch Linux image for the Pinebook Pro available over on GitHub. What is the future like? How’s the whole global warming thing? Also you might want to think about looking for a more up-to-date guide. If the current date that you’re reading this is substantially later than that, then I’d first like to congratulate you and the rest of the Human race for actually surviving 2020. Make sure you read the whole thing first if you’re using this as a walkthrough, because I’m the type of guy who ends up configuring his computer with a language he can’t even speak so you know I made other errors along the way.Īlso, I’m writing this in June of 2020. This isn’t a review of the Pinebook Pro yet–though my initial impressions are very positive–it’s just a brief story of how I got Arch Linux installed and booting from the eMMC storage. The timeline was just accelerated a bit.) (I mean, I would have wiped it and installed Arch Linux eventually even if I hadn’t messed up the locale selection.
Instead of spending several minutes fishing around blind for language settings in the now-incomprehensible desktop environment into which I was thrust, I decided to wipe the entire thing and install Arch Linux instead. Unfortunately I selected es_US.UTF-8 as the locale by accident, and I can’t speak a lick of Spanish. I went through the initial setup process to create an account, which seemed pretty slick. I recently received my Pinebook Pro, which shipped with Manjaro pre-installed on the eMMC storage. Note: Here is the original article for historical purposes, but don’t actually follow this as a guide. See here for a more recent article describing how I set it up. Instead I’m using a minimal Manjaro install on the unstable branch with full-disk encryption, which is close enough to my previous Arch Linux setup for my purposes. Obsolescence Notice (June 2021): I’m no longer running Arch Linux proper on my Pinebook Pro, due to the disappearance of the pacman repos I relied on for Arch Linux compatibility. Comics Installing Arch Linux on the Pinebook Pro (posted in blog)