I am itching to try and re-install the OS.
There used to be murmurings about Crimson OS.
How do I find more info on how to install it on my L5?
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Latest monthly report: PureOS Crimson Development Report: June 2025 and next one is expected in a few days - stay tuned.
So far Crimson is not yet even in alpha version, but it’s coming. If you want to test it, the monthly report has pointers and there’s some discussions in various crimson topic threads in the forum (but it’s not for general use!).
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For me, using dual boot from SD card for “trying” an OS has been very nice. I have an old install of Crimson (probably outdated now) on the SD card but a fully functional base Byzantium install on the main storage. So, when the Librem 5 is booting, I can hold Volume Down to test Crimson. This seems like a nice configuration.
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Great,
I’ll simply install the Byzantium
Cheers
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Are there any instructions on how to install Crimson on an SD card?
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Thank you.
On the off chance - I just reflashed the L5 with Bizantiyum.
on starting the device it requires to Enter disk encryption passphrase - but I have not set the LUKS to encrypt it.
Is there a default passphrase? I tried the 123456 - but it didn’t work
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123456 - remember to change that and pw if you use the installation permanently.
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ok I will reflash and try the 123456 again
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And to be clear, 123456 is LUKS password and user password. LUKS passphrase is different thing altogether.
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Thank you,
Yes the LUKS is for the encryption of the disk
The other passwords are for the users to log in
Thank you
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The tutorial from JR-Fi has some general warnings but I’m not seeing on that wiki a guide for what I personally did. I think I signed up to the wiki one time but never finished making my account, I should probably check that.
What worked for me was to use dd similar to how I would make a bootage flash drive for a PC. Rather than looking for tutorials specific to Librem 5, I tried treating it like a general computer and it seemed to just work. To that end, I had to fight a bit with the Purism downloader script because they tried to prepackage all this stuff for flashing the device and so every time I do this I end up going back to their script, reading the bash junk, finding in there the URL on the actual pureos server where we download the img from specific to our use case of what the flasher script would’ve wanted to flash, and I go and I download that librem5r4_whatever.img to a file on my computer.
Once I do that, it’s very, very straightforward. I put the SD card into my laptop or even just into the Librem 5 booted from its main install, either one, and open command line. Using the dd command with some standard values, I can use if the (input file) set to the .img that I downloaded, and of (the output file) set to the SD card’s device. You might think to yourself, “Why doesn’t Dlonk just give me a terminal command I can type to do this?” Some people feel like suggesting the use of dd like I did is bad because it’s a powerful command. It can do whatever you want, so it can also destroy your device’s operating system. But I use it carefully, so I don’t care, and it’s great to have it easy to solve problems.
I might do something like
sudo dd status=progress if=./librem5r4_noluks.img of=/dev/sdb
… IF it happens to be the case that /dev/sdb is my SD card. If it’s my main PC that I’m using to write to the SD card, then I would destroy the PC. So don’t do that. I often use lsblk to look at what disks are available and narrow down what I’m writing to.
The trick is… once you do that, and the command finishes, and you unmount the SD card… that’s all you need. It’s as simple as taking the image from PureOS, getting it in a file, then writing the file to the SD card.
After all, why shouldn’t it be that easy?
You can also do weird things like inverse the command to backup whatever is currently on your SD card to file… isn’t that nifty? Sometimes maybe it’s better to learn to use a command line tool instead of a one-way script for solving a problem.
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Great
I appreciate it
Thank you
In what way do you think a LUKS password differs from a LUKS passphrase?
The cryptsetup FAQ appears to use both terms interchangeably.
It seems to be used inconsistently here and there. That page uses “volume key” as a term (as in, “LUKS PASSPHRASE IS NOT THE VOLUME KEY”). For instance some Red Hat pages use passphrases and passwords separately (as in “Need to set multiple passphrases on an encrypted (LUKS) drive” and “Need to add an additional password to a LUKS device”). I’ve also seen “disk recovery key passphrase and disk password”.