I personally think it makes more sense to boot off USB versus micro SD. Much faster that way. Kinda inconvenient to have a flash drive poking out the bottom of your phone, though, if you’re looking to take some OS for an extended spin.
If you have stuffed up the contents of the eMMC drive and need to reinstall from scratch, it would be a great convenience to have a flash drive poking out the bottom of the phone - for the duration of that exercise.
That was my only real concern i.e. backup and restore and reinstall. Other than that I don’t have a particular desire to boot from SD card, and if I can do those things by booting from external USB then I am happy.
Thanks for your reply.
It will be possible somehow to backup and restore the whole emmc system in an easy way from usb with clonezilla like (dunno if support arm) what i really care is to backup and restpre the whole system
is it just me or have i become spoiled by the miriad of bootable-live-images out there that i spin up from an external usb-SSD (the cheapo kind) ?
booting from usb-thumb-drives is an exercise in patience
This.
It will be possible somehow to backup and restore the whole emmc system
Not from the bootloader, but I’ve already done that with my device by booting Jumpdrive with uuu. It simply boots the Linux kernel from USB and then exports the eMMC and/or SD card via mass storage gadget with some simple scripts in initramfs.
It will be possible to have some noob friendly tool for doing it? a kind of image for usb that will do that automagically
“Image for usb”? No, I mean, booting from the kernel provided by PC via USB by using the flashing tool (but without actually flashing, just uploading to RAM).
I have a proof-of-concept fork of Jumpdrive: https://source.puri.sm/sebastian.krzyszkowiak/jumpdrive. All you need to do to build and boot it is:
make initramfs-purism-librem5.gz
uuu src/purism-librem5.txt
(you can boot the system with rootfs on an external USB drive and I did it once, but that’s not what I meant here :))
Still too complex for my very low knowledge, i hope in the future you could make this tool noob-proof
If you keep sensitive information on your L5, you could boot the phone from an external USB drive that has a low profile (just a few milimeters), while maintaining an Android operating system (something familiar to the person who does the search) in EMMC. If someone is about to search your phone, you would just pull out the USB drive and reboot the phone before they take it from you. Hide the USB drive in your pocket where no one would think to look for it. Then when you get your phone back, you re-insert the usb drive and boot in to it again.
or insert it into some body-cavity …
look … giving advice in PRIVATE is ONE thing … but this is a PUBLIC thread … might i remind you that we do NOT want to HELP criminal people have an EASIER time avoiding JUSTICE …
tools can be used for BOTH evil and useful things … we should damn well remember that …
There are a lot of people out there that will find a way if they want to break the law. They don’t need my help. On the other hand, the average guy has a right to privacy. There is nothing wrong with helping anyone who wants to maintain their privacy. If they break the law, it’s on them. In the meantime, most governments right now are abusing the hell out of people’s privacy rights. Maybe now, the cop that searches your L5 will know to search your pockets and find your USB drive too.
That’s the real issue with this being a public discussion.
so what was the point in the first place if we just give PUBLIC advice to BOTH parties ?
assuming that there ACTUALLY are TWO parties
First we need someone to do a port of an AOSP-derivative (like LineageOS or Replicant) to the Librem 5. Hint, hint, nudge, nudge!
I think the PinePhone would work better, since it looks like a normal phone, so it won’t arouse suspicion like the Librem 5, and there is now an AOSP-port (GloDroid) for the PinePhone. Plus, it can be easily booted from a microSD, which is easier to hide in body cavities than a USB Flash drive.
The Librem 5 is going to arouse suspicion, because it is so thick and has all those switches on the side, that are going to make a security officer look twice at it and get curious enough to look up the model on the internet.
yes it’s definately gonna leave lasting marks if it get’s shoved in some body-cavity …
I imagine it would be all based on whether or not there is a bios or other system menu that has a programable boot order .
My HDD on my laptop is last in line . Boot order goes.
USB
SD
DVD
HDD
So my system searches for bootable media on everything else before the HDD .
ok but having the HDD as last is not a good idea if you are NOT having anything boot-able in the first place.
my solution is to just enter the BIOS/UEFI/motherboard-firmware each time i insert a boot-able-medium and select from what EXACTLY i need …
this approach has the advantage that you can select what MODE you want to install something (UEFI or non-UEFI). that’s not an issue with the PurismOS though because it doesn’t have any UEFI option (only other not-so-free-software-based mentality distros have that as an option)
Why is that ? As I know its only downfall is a bit of latency .
depends. if you have a boat-load of devices that might end up being more significant …