Brilliant walkthrough, thanks. pro is still unusable from a battery perspective, but now is fully useable when it has charge and is easy to flash OS variations to
Thank you for posting this. I just ordered my pinephone pro and am really looking forward to getting my hands on it. I've been rooting devices and running custom Android roms since cupcake on the HTC Magic. Looking forward to being part of a completely open source platform.
Looks great, and exciting. Presumably you are playing with some pre-release as (as far as I can tell) the 2021.10 release doesn't have PinePhone Pro support? Even more exciting - want to play with the SPI on my Pro!
There's no upstream support in u-boot since the u-boot upstream maintainers don't want to have a device tree that's not in linux, so first a lot of stuff need to happen to have mainline kernel drivers in linux working, then submit a device tree to linux and get that merged, then submit that to u-boot mainline and get that accepted and then it might support the most basic booting in u-boot upstream. This is a seperate u-boot distribution called tow-boot that has upstream u-boot with the device tree for the pinephone pro patched in and some extra nice things in the u-boot ux to make things consistent between devices.
Please forgive my ignorance but, to use Tow-Boot from an SD card, do I use a program like Etcher or Rufus to write the whole "pine64-pinephonePro-2021.10-004-pre" directory, directly to the SD card (after extracting it from the .tar, which itself is extracted from the .xz)? Or do I write the directories full contents to the SD, including "\binaries\", "\config\" & "\source\", as well as the .img-s? Or only write the "spi.installer.img" (or "shared.disk-image.img")? I tried to find a video on this, or even a web article, but none specifically talk about what to do with the contents of something like "pine64-pinephonePro-2021.10-004-pre.tar.xz". Most only talk about writing an .iso to an SD card.
how did you succsfully install your Tow-Boot. i was having the same problem and iuse etcher to wright to SD card the spi.image but when i put the SD back in my phone boot like the article says i never i never get the Tow-Boot screen .My phone just boots up as normal i have the Pine64 Phone Pro
The instructions on the wiki get a couple things wrong. Or, at least it is misleading. You want to let off the re button as soon as you feel the phone vibrate. If you hold it too long, it will go into its normal boot cycle. I wrote a lengthy step by step of how I got Tow-Boot installed a while back. Search for my post there (under the name Simon Belmont) for thorough details.
Is the installation of the pinephone pro the same as the pinephone? Pinephone has the SD card boot first so I can use jump drive to flash os to the emm
I'm new to Linux phones, I have a pinephone pro that I've tried a few different distros on, but I've tried them all from an ad card. Does this make it more safe to flash a distro to the emmc ?
Looks Great! Thanks for all the work. Excited to be able to flash other OS's to my explorer edition.
Brilliant walkthrough, thanks. pro is still unusable from a battery perspective, but now is fully useable when it has charge and is easy to flash OS variations to
Thank you for posting this. I just ordered my pinephone pro and am really looking forward to getting my hands on it. I've been rooting devices and running custom Android roms since cupcake on the HTC Magic. Looking forward to being part of a completely open source platform.
Looks great, and exciting. Presumably you are playing with some pre-release as (as far as I can tell) the 2021.10 release doesn't have PinePhone Pro support?
Even more exciting - want to play with the SPI on my Pro!
There's no upstream support in u-boot since the u-boot upstream maintainers don't want to have a device tree that's not in linux, so first a lot of stuff need to happen to have mainline kernel drivers in linux working, then submit a device tree to linux and get that merged, then submit that to u-boot mainline and get that accepted and then it might support the most basic booting in u-boot upstream.
This is a seperate u-boot distribution called tow-boot that has upstream u-boot with the device tree for the pinephone pro patched in and some extra nice things in the u-boot ux to make things consistent between devices.
@@MartijnBraam I have so much to learn...
Please forgive my ignorance but, to use Tow-Boot from an SD card, do I use a program like Etcher or Rufus to write the whole "pine64-pinephonePro-2021.10-004-pre" directory, directly to the SD card (after extracting it from the .tar, which itself is extracted from the .xz)? Or do I write the directories full contents to the SD, including "\binaries\", "\config\" & "\source\", as well as the .img-s? Or only write the "spi.installer.img" (or "shared.disk-image.img")? I tried to find a video on this, or even a web article, but none specifically talk about what to do with the contents of something like "pine64-pinephonePro-2021.10-004-pre.tar.xz". Most only talk about writing an .iso to an SD card.
You only write the spi.installer.img
@@MartijnBraam Thank you for that. After many attempts, I did successfully install Tow-Boot to my phone's SPI.
how did you succsfully install your Tow-Boot. i was having the same problem and iuse etcher to wright to SD card the spi.image but when i put the SD back in my phone boot like the article says i never i never get the Tow-Boot screen .My phone just boots up as normal i have the Pine64 Phone Pro
The instructions on the wiki get a couple things wrong. Or, at least it is misleading. You want to let off the re button as soon as you feel the phone vibrate. If you hold it too long, it will go into its normal boot cycle. I wrote a lengthy step by step of how I got Tow-Boot installed a while back. Search for my post there (under the name Simon Belmont) for thorough details.
Sorry. I should have mentioned that I made that post on the Pine64 forums. Good luck.
Is the installation of the pinephone pro the same as the pinephone? Pinephone has the SD card boot first so I can use jump drive to flash os to the emm
Have u ever tried Capyloon on pinephone pro? I just found about this today but i can't find single video about it.
Where is the image in releases, or do we have to compile it ourselves?
Is there a benefit to using towboot instead of the default one?
There's no default one
which one does it use before?
The first thing was my u-boot build with the device tree added which got rejected from u-boot upstream because there was no linux support upstream
I'm new to Linux phones, I have a pinephone pro that I've tried a few different distros on, but I've tried them all from an ad card. Does this make it more safe to flash a distro to the emmc ?
Impressive ui
No infinite-waffels this time? ;-)