I assume that we have Manjaro running on our PinePhone and we have connected it to a normal computer so we can use normal keyboard and normal screen. Also I assume that we have an SDHC card installed in the phone, and we want to install mobian onto this SDHC card.
In order to install mobian, we need to copy one of pre-built images to the SDHC card inside PinePhone.
time bmaptool copy https://mobian-image.img.gz /dev/mmcblk0
where mobian-image.img.gz should be replaced by the actual (long) address of the image. After that, if we are lucky, we can reboot from Manjaro into Mobian.
Mobian creators (used to) produce daily images, and not all of them are going to work. In case the image does not work, I pull the SDHC card out of the PinePhone, insert it into my desktop and run
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdX bs=8k seek=1 count=4
where /dev/sdX is the name of the SDHC card on the desktop.
Suppose we use a 16gb SDHC card. Before running bmaptool its partition table was
fdisk -l /dev/mmcblk0 Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 14.73 GiB, 15819866112 bytes, 30898176 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disklabel type: dos Disk identifier: 0x00000000 Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/mmcblk0p1 * 2048 30898175 30896128 14.7G c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
Then, after running bmaptool it was changed to
fdisk -l /dev/mmcblk0 Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 14.73 GiB, 15819866112 bytes, 30898176 sectors Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disklabel type: dos Disk identifier: 0x3b1d2aeb Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/mmcblk0p1 * 16384 1048575 1032192 504M 83 Linux /dev/mmcblk0p2 1048576 7421874 6373299 3G 83 Linux
We see that most part of the SDHC is now unused. I do not remember how did I fix this problem, probably I've just extended the second partition, please share your experience.
In 2021 I had problems with starting Mobian on a larger (256gb) SDHC card.
When booting into fresh-new Mobian, first I saw a message "resizing file system during initial boot".
Then I got thousands of messages like
[migrate_block: 56] Migrate node block XXXX -> YYYYY
for about 2 minutes.
After that:
Not enough spase to migrate blocks Try to do defragment: Skip [migrate_main: 199] Info: Done to migrate main area: main_blkaddr = 0x2200 -> 0x2d400 [migrate_ssa: ...] ... [migrate_nat: ...] ... [migrate_sit: ...] ... .... mounting /dev/mmcblk0p2 on /root failed: Structure needs cleaning
Then I receive several more alarming (at the level of panic) messages, and the system freezes.
Preparing SDHC card on desktop:
wget https://mobian-image.img.gz time ( zcat mobian-image.img.gz | dd bs=64k of=/dev/sdX status=progress )
After that the partition table is
fdisk -l /dev/sdX Disk /dev/sdX: 238.8 GiB, 256355860480 bytes, 500695040 sectors Disk model: Card Reader Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Disklabel type: dos Disk identifier: 0x72b2302e Device Boot Start End Sectors Size Id Type /dev/sdX1 * 16384 1048575 1032192 504M 83 Linux /dev/sdX2 1048576 7421874 6373299 3G 83 Linux
where (ext4-formatted) /dev/sdX1 contains
System.map-5.10-sunxi64 config-5.10-sunxi64 dtb-5.10-sunxi64 extlinux initrd.img-5.10-sunxi64 lost+found vmlinuz-5.10-sunxi64
and /dev/sdX2 is almost (96%) full.
As far as I remember, I followed this advice doing "resizepart 2 50%", "resizepart 2 90%". "resizepart 2 100%" in parted.
apt-get --no-install-recommends -y install aptitude aptitude install screen