You might have already read my first round of ‘flashing 101’ when I successfully flashed Ubuntu Touch to and SD card making it possible to boot the Pinephone that way with Ubuntu Touch. That first blog is a bit more messy because I was learning so in fact, this post here might also help you with flashing to an SD card as it should be more clearly written. If I had more time I’d clean them both up but I don’t so yeah…
The next step in my learning is to figure out how to flash / copy ubuntu touch onto the pinephone’s EMMC (built in) memory. This should make it run faster. There wasn’t a step-by-step that I could find and so I guess I have to write it. Nice folks in the pinephone telegram group said that I would follow a similar method as flashing to the SD card (see my detailed step-by-step on that here so that hopefully is true. Let’s try…
1. Plug in your Pinephone
Unlike my other tutorial, you’ll need the device plugged into your production machine from where the image will be coming.
2. Get latest image
Choose the latest Pinephone image from this page. I choose stable usually but as of today ‘stable’ is a figment of our imagination 🙂 Save it somewhere memorable and probably smart to put it in a dedicated directory so you can run commands more simply and safely. I just realized there is a bmap file sitting with this image download on this page. This could be useful and relevant soon as you read on…
3. Get setup with BMAP
You can just follow my detailed blog if you’d like. If you don’t know what it is, then you probably want to do this.
4. Confirm the source of your ubuntu-touch-pinephone.img.xz file
The file you downloaded in step 2 above which you have on your computer. In my case it’s going to flash from my download directory in my dedicated ‘pinephone_flashing’ directory so mine looks like this:
~/Downloads/pinephone_flashing/ubuntu-touch-pinephone.img.xz
5. Put Pinephone into ‘Yumi Mode’
I didn’t know what else to call this so I named it ‘Yumi Mode’ since that’s the name of the UBports Robot Mascot… I tried to simply plug in the pinephone and do this work but it won’t recognize anything. Thankfully I had read some other tutorial about how to get into this mode. Here’s how
a) Assure device is powered off (you can push / hold power button for about 5 seconds)
b) Press / hold power and volume up buttons together for about 6 or 7 seconds.
If successful, you should start to see a trainload of partitions start to load in your file manager (Nautilus).
6. Identify the destination path to the EMMC
If you’ve done my other blog where you install Ubuntu Touch to the SD card this time we’ll do the same thing but point the destination to the EMMC memory.
- Hit the super key to the left of the space bar
- Type ‘disks’ to open the ‘Disks’ utility. You should now see two items related to UT in the left pane of the ‘Disks’ app:
‘Drive | JumpDriv e microSD’
and
‘Drive | JumpeDriv e eMMC’
- Click the ‘Drive | JumpeDriv e eMMC’ on the left pane
- Take the path from the ‘Device’ path. In my case it looks like this “Device dev/sdc” but yours can – and very possibly will be – slightly different in the last letter. You can actually just highlight it and copy it from there
path: /dev/sdc
This is a great way to visually identify and confirm which mount point is your eMMC which will help you quickly deal with unmounting stuff in the next section
7. Unmount the partitions on the eMMC drive
If the drive is ‘fully ejected’ by Ubuntu, you will probably get this error when you run the final flashing command:
bmaptool: ERROR: cannot open destination file ‘/dev/sdc’: [Errno 123] No medium found: ‘/dev/sdc’
A reboot of the device again and putting it into ‘Yumi Mode’ again might fix it for you if you are lucky – once this worked for me – but that was it. I do not believe this can be done reliably and thus you should proceed with the command line method. It’s really not that hard if you work together with the Disks utility.
The reason why the ‘eject’ button in File Manager (Nautilus) doesn’t work for this purpose is because ‘it uses udisks ctl which both unmounts and ejects the partition’. We only want unmount, not eject, you see. So, we must ‘terminally unmount’ these as follows:
First, run the mount command which will show you (truthfully) what drives are (actually) mounted on the system. For me these were all located at the very bottom of the terminal output list.
You can, however, in the Disks utility, click through each partition and see at the bottom ‘mounted’ or ‘not mounted` or ‘unkown’ and compare against the terminal output to gain further confidence that you are unmounting and flashing to the right place. The Pinephone image has a mixture of all of these, it seems, so probably better to just manually unmount everything with the terminal. It’s really easy once you identify the actually-mounted drives you just run:
sudo umount /dev/sdc2' sudo umount /dev/sdc4′
etc
etc
**Tip **: If while running the final flashing commands you get this error:
bmaptool: ERROR: the image file ‘/home/wt/Downloads/ubuntu-touch-pinephone.img.xz’ has size 826.3 MiB and it will not fit the block device ‘/dev/sdc3’ which has 1.0 KiB capacity
You are probably writing to a partition like I did instead of the actual device. You probably put in /dev/sdc3 instead of /dev/sdc as an example.
8. Run the flashing command
This assumes you have alread set up and read and understand my blog above.
Format:
sudo bmaptool copy --bmap ~/path/where/your/bmap/file/is/located /path/where/your/image/is/located /path/to/memory/device
My actual example:
sudo bmaptool copy --bmap ~/Downloads/pphone.bmap ~/Downloads/ubuntu-touch-pinephone.img.xz /dev/sdc
Worked for me! Hope it works for you too 🙂
