Cameron Manicone

After the better part of a year being unable to use this device, I am pleased to announce my first successful boot into Armbian.
 
   
 
 
I accomplished this by installing tow-boot to the SPI.
 
If you check their instructions for the PineBook Pro, it says to install some 'installer' version first to an SD card, and then boot that, and use it to install to the SPI chip (or other media).  I did not want to do that for a few reasons:
I don't understand why all the faffing about with an indirect installation method via SD card? I don't seem to be able to boot via SD card anyway. I am really not interested in removing all those $#%^# screws from the back case again, just so I can flip a switch, then put them all back (twice, maybe more).[0] So what I did was dig around a little more until I found this issue from last year where people were saying just to do the following, essentially:
 
dd if=Tow-boot.spi.bin of=/dev/mtd0  
So I downloaded latest release of tow-boot, which comes as an xz compressed tar archive.  After opening that up the usual way with:
 
tar -xf pine64-pinebookPro-2021.10-005.tar.xz  
Under the binaries folder I found the Tow-Boot.spi.bin file.  I copied that over to PBP and then executed the above mentioned 'dd' command (via sudo).
 
I powered off and then back on, I knew it was successful because I saw the Tow Boot logo.  So I powered off and then inserted SD card I had prepared a while back with Armbian on it.
 
And yet it still booted into Manjaro on the eMMC.  So once Manjaro finished booting, I powered back down, then back on, this time pressing <ESC> to bring up tow-boot's boot menu.  After selecting 'SD card' I was able to boot into Armbian image on the SD card, which did the normal expansion and first run setup (entering passwords, locale, etc.).
 
Now this is interesting, because I had tried to boot this very same SD card before, without any luck.  Even turning the (previously mentioned) 'eMMC switch' to both positions[0], I could never get it to work.  So maybe there is something to the 'switch is broken on the new batch' theory?
 
Anyway, I guess that's it, as I finally have Armbian running on here.  It's a minimal/CLI image, so I still have my work cut out for me getting this all set up, but hopefully I can just install my preferred desktop packages and we will see how it goes.  But that's another project for another day.
 
[0] Which involves removing quite a number of tiny little screws and removal of the entire back cover.  And then putting them all back.  In the meantime you can't really use the keyboard or anything, so you pretty much have to do the whole %&#@%# process every time.  After doing this a few times, it starts turning into a hassle.