I wasn’t ready to do much with my Librem 5 when it arrived so I let my son fiddle with it first. Now the encryption key he thought he used doesn’t work. No loss - I’d want to factory reset anyway. Based on what I’m reading my 2 options are either install the flash utility on my computer or burn PureOS to a USB drive - of which I’ll choose the latter if so. Is that it? Anything complicated I need to know?
To be more specific:
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Install using your existing OS (if it’s the latest Ubuntu or Debian version, or a standard distribution built on those latest versions, including PureOS), or
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Burn a PureOS image to USB, and use that instead. (Or one of the aforementioned OS distros.)
(An older Ubuntu/Debian/fork version could work also, but you might have to build uuu first. With the latest versions, uuu is already in the repos.)
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Thanks! My desktop is NixOS - I have Fedora and Debian available. But it doesn’t matter - I already downloaded PureOS and burned to USB so that’s the route I’ll take. So how do I get the phone to boot from the USB? Is there a special key combination? I’ve looked and can’t find that answer anywhere.
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The USB goes in the computer, then you boot into it.
See if this helps: Time to flash is now - but how? - #16 by amarok
P.S. The luks variant download was failing recently, but it should be fixed now. See: Unable to Flash to LUKS Byzantium Image - #2 by Moon3
You might have to add --stable. See: Unable to Flash to LUKS Byzantium Image - #21 by FranklyFlawless
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My Librem 5 can boot from an SD card, but can it also boot from a USB drive? I have never done that. My understanding is that PureOS for the little mobile aarch64 chip is different than PureOS for x86_64 desktops – because everything is recompiled for the different binary format. We get used to the idea that a bootable USB works in every x86_64 machine we stick it in because of the common architecture across all CPUs, but my understanding is that through no fault of Purism the aarch64 hardware isn’t common across CPUs in the same way. So a Librem 5 can only boot a system compiled for a Librem 5, specifically.
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OK - I see. I was totally misreading what I saw on other pages and thought there was some way to install direct from USB drive - which seemed weird. On the right track now - thanks again.
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I do not think so at the moment.
This might be relevant, although I certainly am not qualified to say: Multi-boot for other OS in Librem 5 - #9 by dos
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Probably not. There may be no direct way to choose between the µSD card (which shows up as USB) and a USB drive that is connected to the USB-C port (and via a hub there may even be more than one USB drive connected to said port). I would guess that the functional gap would be small but I likewise am not qualified to say for sure.
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