Librem 5 Dogwood vs. PinePhone PMOS CE

[kieran]

@tracy

What were the effectived dates of SDHC

@tracy

wikipedia says they came out in 2012.

You are reading that wrong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SD_card#SDHC

So 2006 or later, but not too much later.

That doesn’t make it easy to answer your underlying question though. Just because an industry consortium announced an upgraded standard doesn’t mean that it is instantly available in host controllers, never mind about in any specific computer.

The right approach would probably be some cryptic command that interrogates the controller device to find out what standard it supports, but I couldn’t find any such command.

You may find something in syslog when you boot up e.g. I see

mmc0: new high speed SDHC card at address xxxx

where xxxx is some meaningless hex number.

[tracy]

No, no, no. I meant that’s when the Dell R720 came out, not the SD chips. Although 6 years between SDHC and my Dell seems plenty of time.

[Photon]

@kieran

What path would that be?

ls -l /dev/mmcblk0 yields…

brw-rw---- 1 root disk 179, 0 Dec 31 1969 /dev/mmcblk0

However, if I try to change directory to that path, I get a “not a directory” error. Same thing if I try to make a directory there.

Probably a newly formatted ext4 file system has no directories that are writable to normal users. So you would need to, for example, as root, create a top level directory /photon and give it ownership by the relevant normal user. But what is the normal user in this environment? echo $USER

That makes sense, but PP pmOS English and Terminal keyboards both lack “$”!

@Quarnero

Let it be practical (no steps explanation):
$ sudo umount /dev/mmcblk0p1

Result is “umount: /dev/mmcblk0p1: not mounted.”

[kieran]

@Photon

lack “$”

OK, we’ll need to solve that first.

What about

printenv USER

@Photon

if I try to change directory to that path, I get a “not a directory” error

OK, you are getting confused between

• the path to the block device (the underlying device) - in this case /dev/mmcblk0 - or the path to a partition on that device e.g. I assume /dev/mmcblk0p1
• the path where that device is mounted - which can be just about any empty directory on the root file system
• a path on the file system that is on the SD card

In order to create a top level directory on the SD card for yourself, you have to mount the SD card. For the moment, you need root access to do that.

So let’s say that /sdcard is a directory on the root file system that does not exist.

sudo mkdir /sdcard
sudo chmod o+rx /sdcard
sudo mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /sdcard
sudo mkdir /sdcard/photon
sudo chown user:user /sdcard/photon

where user in the last command is replaced by the as yet unfortunately unknown user.

After all of the above are successfully done, you should be able to save stuff onto /sdcard/photon as the normal (non-root) user.

[amosbatto]

@Photon, you need to configure your /etc/fstab file (or whatever is the equivalent in Alpine/postmarketOS) to correctly automount the microSD so your user can actually use it. Here is how to do it in Ubuntu Touch, so you should ask on PinePhone’s Postmarket forum for equivalent instructions. You shouldn’t be asking here on this forum, because we are going to give you bad advice for postmarketOS.

Mobian has a lot better configuration from what I have read, so it probably handles automounting microSD cards correctly.

[tracy]

@Photon

brw-rw---- 1 root disk 179, 0 Dec 31 1969 /dev/mmcblk0

However, if I try to change directory to that path, I get a “not a directory” error. Same thing if I try to make a directory there.

Forgive my old SystemV unix thought pattern, but yeah, it starts with a “b”, which is not a directory. Which tells me it it holds either an entire O/S or what is little used by entire disks these days: data. Either way, something has to mount it.

(Let me spin down that disk pack first, before it has a head crash.)

[Quarnero]

@amosbatto

Mobian has a lot better configuration from what I have read, so it probably handles automounting microSD cards correctly.

Sometimes (more then often) I don’t think up front on every step and when I saw your post I already knew that forgot to suggest (after formatting the SDdrive to ext4) to @Photon (as last step) to reboot his PinePhone:

$ sudo mke2fs -t ext4 -L Photon /dev/mmcblk0p1 (in unmounted state)
$ sudo reboot

in order to expect that postmarketOS (not familiar with) will auto-mount the SDcard and afterwards he can create needed folder(s) for current user of this Linux smartphone.

@Photon

Result is “umount: /dev/mmcblk0p1: not mounted.”

Correct, we already arranged this in our previous step and I just don’t want to make things worse as they are. Just reminding that at my post 26 (here) we already umounted /dev/mmcblk0p1. As well, we cannot jump to create new Folder if not having SDcard mounted (partially my fault because all was written on the fly / without even having intention to write same sort of guide).

It is very late now for myself and therefore I suggest following (if reboot doesn’t work for postmarketOS, cannot believe / hoping to test this out myself):

$ cd /mnt - corrected by @kieran
$ sudo mkdir SDp1
$ sudo mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt/SDp1
$ cd SDp1 (/mnt/SDp1) – corrected by @kieran
$ sudo mkdir SD-Folder

etc., or rather proceed with above post as @kieran is already helping out / providing relevant and reliable guidance.

When I sit down again might review/rewrite (if I indeed went wrong somewhere) my proposal but I ask you kindly @Photon to provide for us at least the following output:

$ sudo fdisk -l, while I expect that eMMC output is /dev/mmcblk2.

@Photon, thanks up front!

EDIT: If SDcard auto-mounted (after format and reboot) you’ll find it here:

@Quarnero

$ cd /media/$USER

[kieran]

@Quarnero

sudo cd /mnt

No can do.

Not only is the command rejected, and hence does nothing, if it did do something, it wouldn’t do what you want.

[Quarnero]

$ cd /mnt, thanks and sorry for typing unnecessary word.

Actually, I use $ sudo … only once to switch to # on my PinePhone but I don’t want to suggest any commands without sudo publicly (therefore switching my mind). You never know where this might end up if such environment (without sudo) used wrongly.

[kieran]

You have two occurrences of sudo cd however.

[Quarnero]

Thanks @kieran, correction/change made for @Photon in my post above, so he can follow this clearly!

[Quarnero]

@amosbatto

Mobian has a lot better configuration from what I have read

I believe I’ve finally got your point. This photo is from Librem5 Dogwood and this way much closer to current Mobian. @agx is author of this:

[Photon]

Thank you everyone for all the good advice. I will probably work through most of the steps above this weekend. After that, I’ll probably just flash the SD with a Mobian or PureOS image – because the USB (A & C) to microSD I bought from Amazon just came in and my old Mint laptop auto-mounts the 64GB card (exFAT)! I never would have thought of the adapter going bad.

[Quarnero]

Just in case you’d like to install (take a shortcut) something like Mobian directly to eMMC here is link to.

[Photon]

If I like it running on the SD card, then next step is a real install to eMMC!

[j_s]

@Photon

Thank you everyone for all the good advice. I will probably work through most of the steps above this weekend. After that, I’ll probably just flash the SD with a Mobian or PureOS image – because the USB (A & C) to microSD I bought from Amazon just came in and my old Mint laptop auto-mounts the 64GB card (exFAT)! I never would have thought of the adapter going bad.

Have you tried the PinePhone multi-distro demo image on SD card?

https://xnux.eu/p-boot-demo/

You can boot 13 different PinePhone OS/UI combinations from it, including PureOS.

[Photon]

No, but I just started the torrent download.

Thanks for the tip!

[Photon]

After dealing with the abysmally-slow download speed (my ISP), the write to SD and boot was easy. p-boot is pretty cool.

Ubuntu Touch was better than I expected. GUI was tolerable, there was lots of software installed and a nice store. SMS worked, but calls would not connect (possibly the lame low Sprint signal on my receiving phone). No audio, speakers or headphones. I couldn’t find the settings to tweak, so who knows. Same audio issues with KDE, & Maemo.

Mobian did do phone calls, but I couldn’t get the headphone jack to work. PureOS seemed snappier than the others and I even found the sound setting to make the headphone work (it will probably work in Mobian, too).

Arch hung at the terminal login – never got to to the GUI. I didn’t try pmOS (since it came installed on the phone) and haven’t tried Sailfish yet.

Bottom line, p-boot let me check out all those OS’s easily, so it ROCKS. Now I know that the PinePhone will make a good platform to evaluate PureOS until my Evergreen arrives. I’m sure I’ll find some bugs/annoyances when I dig deeper than my superficial look today, but that’s OK.

[amosbatto]

@Photon, I think this is a perfect summary of the PINE64 model and its relative advantages and disadvantages.

[Photon]

How gracious of you, @amosbatto. I don’t know about perfect… I just feel like a kid in a candy store playing with this and I can’t help sharing. It probably will be the same when I get my Evergreen, except that everyone will be sharing!

I did try the Sailfish OS on the p-boot image today. I found it to be quite rich and charming, even though most stuff didn’t work for me – probably due to my fumbling around a very different GUI. I shouldn’t have been surprised by the unfamiliar, though almost intuitive, interface – it is self-described as:

An independent, partner friendly operating system that fosters innovation. It’s unlike what you’re used to.

Wikipedia says:

Sailfish OS is a Linux-based operating system based on open source projects such as Mer and including a closed source UI.

It was attractive, and I’d be tempted to put some time into learning it… except for that closed UI.