hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4093.txt

Episode: 4093
Title: HPR4093: Installing postmarketOS on a PINE64 PinePhone
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4093/hpr4093.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 19:31:58

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4,093 for Wednesday the 10th of April 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Installing Post Market Oss on a Pine Pine Phone.
It is hosted by Claudio Miranda and is about eight minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is Claudio discusses how to install Post Market Oss on the Pine Pine Phone.
Hello Hacker Public Radio, this is Claudio Miranda and today I wanted to discuss with you on how I installed the latest version of Post Market Oss on the EMMC storage of my original Pine Phone from Pine64.
Now, let me say this from the start.
While these instructions might work with the Pine Phone Pro, my instructions are only for the original Pine Phone.
The Post Market Oss website and wiki have information on how to install it on a Pine Phone Pro, which I will not cover.
But if you have a Pine Phone Pro and have recently performed an installation of PMOS, which is short for Post Market Oss and that's how I'll be describing it going forward, please be sure to record an HPR episode as a follow-up to this one.
And if anyone has performed a PMOS installation on other supported hardware, please record a show as well.
Sometime in the future, I may be installing PMOS on a third generation Kindle Fire HD, which is currently supported.
So I'll be sure to also record an HPR episode once I've done it and if no one has provided an episode on it.
That said, let's begin.
I'll be going through the process in the exact order you should follow so that the installation is somewhat seamless.
Somewhat.
First off, you'll want to go to the PMOS website and download the PMOS image you desire. All the links, of course, will be in the show notes.
You'll have a choice of downloading the latest stable image or edge.
Understand that edge is a development branch so there be dragons.
If you still want to run edge, go ahead, but you'll have to do so at your own risk.
Otherwise, stick with the stable branch. You can always upgrade to edge if you like living dangerously.
Once you select the release branch you want, you can choose which spin of PMOS that you want to download.
By spin, I mean the interface that comes with the image, similar to what you'd get with certain Linux distributions like Fedora.
Choices range from the original fosh image to some others that run GNOME mobile, Plasma mobile, and sway for the SXMO or SXMO image.
Information on the default user and password is also provided on the downloads page, so be sure to create a new user with a better password once your installation has completed.
Now that you have your preferred PMOS image, you'll want to head over to the PMOS wiki page for the pine phone.
And that link is also in the show notes.
On that page, you'll find information on the phone and on ways to install PMOS on it.
While you can just flash a microSD card with your preferred image and run it that way, I'm going to cover on how to install it on the internal EMMC of the pine phone using jump drive.
I find the experience much faster on the EMMC compared to the microSD card.
You'll also find instructions on how to set it up without encryption using jump drive or using PM bootstrap or with full disk encryption which only works with PM bootstrap.
Since I use jump drive, I'll only cover doing it that way without FDE as PM bootstrap requires building your own image and is beyond the scope of this exercise.
To use jump drive, you'll need to go to the GitHub page for jump drive and download the image for the pine phone.
Currently, there are two images there.
One labeled pine64-pinephone.img.xz, which is the one to use.
And another named pine64-pinephone-charging.img.xz, which is a test image for issues when the pine phone isn't sufficiently charged.
I've included a link in the show notes regarding the latter image, which should give more information on how it differs from the former image if you decide to use that one.
Again, use the latter image at your own risk.
Once you have the jump drive image for the pine phone, you can flash that to your microSD card as per the instructions on the PMOS wiki page for jump drive for the pine phone.
Now, a couple of things to mention.
The PMOS website used to have an on-device installer image known as on-dev that you could flash the microSD card and install PMOS easily to the EMMC.
But that method is no longer supported as there were serious regressions with the recent stable releases, especially with version 23.12 as of this episode.
They are working on a new version of their on-device installer called on-dev2 to be used in future installer images once it's finished.
So until then, I recommend using the jump drive method.
Also, keep in mind that the instructions seem to assume that you're doing this from a computer running Linux, which is how I did it.
I used Fedora, but you can probably use the Linux distro of your choice.
You might be able to perform the installation from a BSD base computer, but certain commands will differ, and you may have to build jump drive from source unless it's in the package repose.
And now I'm not about to cover that in this episode as well, either.
If you'd like to record a show on how to do it from a BSD base computer, it would surely make him fall in hat very happy and me as well.
Anyway, once you have jump drive installed on your microSD card, you can insert it into the pine phone and boot it up from it.
This will bring you to a screen telling you to plug in your pine phone via USB to your Linux computer.
Jump drive will make the EMMC available to you on your host computer running Linux.
And you can check it by running LSBLK on a terminal emulator to see all of the block devices accessible to your OS.
Make sure you follow the instructions to the letter and have backups made just in case.
The hint for me to know which block device to flash with PMOS was to check the size of the block device.
And since I have the 32GB pine phone, I made sure to select the block device that had obviously 32GB.
Since the microSD card with jump drive shows up under LSBLK as well, I had to make sure I didn't flash that one.
But since the storage space on those partitions do not add up to that of my pine phones EMMC, it was easy to exclude.
The PMOS wiki page for using jump drive to flash the EMMC gives you some supplemental commands to add to LSBLK through the dash O switch so that it's much easier to know which one is the EMMC of the pine phone.
Once you're absolutely sure which is the correct block device on your pine phone, follow the commands given on the wiki page to uncompress your downloaded PMOS image and flash it to the pine phones EMMC using the DD utility.
This may take some time depending on how fast the USB port on your computer is.
But once it's done, you can remove the USB cable, power off the phone and remove the microSD card from the slot of the pine phone before turning on the pine phone to boot into your fresh install of PMOS.
If everything went well, you should be presented with a boot splash screen followed by the interface that you're choosing.
Depending on which one you selected, you may have to log in with the default username and password which is available as I said on the PMOS downloads page.
However, if you experience any problems, be sure to follow the links given and try again or be sure to leave a comment on the HPR website for this episode.
Thank you all for listening and have fun with PMOS on your pine phone. Bye bye.
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