Manjaro on Pinebook Pro

[wove]

I spent time this weekend setting up Manjaro on the Pinebook Pro. Manjaro does an exceptionally nice job of supporting all the oddities of the PBP's hardware, but overall I find it an annoying distro to use. Manjaro puts a lot of effort into branding. As a general rule I am not a fan of branding, and in Manjaro's case I find the branding to be more than a bit ugly to the point I think it interferes with usability.

The light grey on darker gery background is just hard for me to read. I find dark themes harder to use than light themes. Perhaps the biggest annoyance with Manjaro is they hard code their branding into the OS, which makes it hard to get rid of. I spent a good amount of time tossing theme engines, and unwanted themes. It takes a long time to get Manjaro back to being a KDE DE environment running on more vanilla arch.

With that said it ended up alright and is running pretty well. It does have an up to date KDE DE, and it is snappy on the hardware. I started out by trying to install Endeavour OS, but the Pinebook Pro has lost the ability to boot from an SD card, which is the starting point for an Endeavour install. I have no had the Pinebook Pro for two years and it has not aged very well.

What I would like to do is get /boot on the emmc drive, and /root on the nvme drive, which from what I read results in a system that is down right fast. Manjaro forums are not the friendliest and asking about the specifics of setting that configuration up, results in comments, that say "Oh it is easy." then sort of imply the inability to get it done is user inadequateness. Probably true, but a bit of hand holding would be very helpful.

I am enjoying the KDE DE and am inclined to leave it on the Pinebook Pro.

[tlmiller]

Sad to hear that it hasn't aged well. It was a neat little laptop that would have made a great "beater" laptop for a lot of people that need something to carry with them that's effective and can do basic work without being expensive or needing to be powerful enough to do VM's, compiling, etc.

[crosscourt]

Another KDE convert.

[wove]

On the Pinebook Pro /boot needs to be on emmc, however /root can be on the nvme drive. After the stock install everything is on the emmc only and the nvme drive is empty. I am trying to figure out how to move /root to the nvme drive.

The directions I have are:
Format NVME make one partition EXT4 format
Mount new partition to /mnt

I am lost there I do not know how to mount a partition to /mnt and would really appreciate a little help. thanks

The rest of the directions look to be straight forward terminal commands and I think I will be OK and if I fail, I will still have everything on the emmc drive. (It would be a safe bet that I will ass it up on a few tries.)

[tlmiller]

It's actually surprisingly easy

Code: Select all

mount -t ext4 -o rw,any other options you need /dev/your/drive/partition /target/mount/point

-t=type
-o=options
device 1 is the RAW hardware device, IE /dev/nvme0n1p1
device 2 is where you're mounting it, IE /mnt

After mounting you'd rsync w/ at least -av options / to /mnt while EXCLUDING /mnt (no need for recursive copies) from the rsync, then get the UUID (multiple ways to do it, I prefer lsblk -o +UUID), and then put that into your /etc/fstab as the / partition. If /boot isn't already in /etc/fstab then do the same for that. Modify anything (if needed) in your grub.cfg and reinstall grub, rebuild your initramfs (if needed, I'm afraid I know little about the "out of the box" support on Arm devices), and you should be able to boot into your system upon reboot. If everything works and you're happy about it and want to recover the space on the eMMC, then boot to a live session to do so and remove all information on the eMMC that isn't in /boot.

[chris]

I suggest:
rsync -avx --exclude=/boot / /mnt/
-a = archive mode
v = verbose
x = do not cross mount boundaries : i.e. exclude any mounted filesystems - /mnt, /dev, /sys, /proc
You do not want "pseudo" filesystems copied..
You also do not want /boot copied
/ is the "root" of the filesystem (from), /mnt/ is where you want to put it (to).

[wove]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I was able to move / to the nvme drive, however I was never able to get the system to use it as "/". Upon booting it insisted on using the old boot partition. I tried renaming it, and tried using parted to give it a new mount point, but the system just kept using the old "root". I found a configuration file, that listed the uuid for the root partition, and sure enough it was the uuid of the old root. So I edited the uuid to use the uuid of my new root partition. That marked the end of that after I saved the edit and reboot, it just hung.

I went back to the instructions on installing Endeavour. To install to the nvme you need to boot from the SD card, which my Pinebook Pro seems to have forgot how to do. I tore it down and found if I turned off the emmc, it would then boot from the SD card. I found if I turned off the SD card and started, then turned the SD card back on as soon as I got the first flicker on the screen, it would boot and the emmc would show up as a drive, using that method I was able to install Endeavor boot on the emmc and endeavour root on the nvme.

But that has limits as well. It comes up in the console and I can log in, but whenever I try and do anything I get "Error opening terminal: linux" and when I try and update the pacman-key I get /user/bin/pacman-key: line 620: parseopts: command not found.

FYI the rsync command used by endeavours is : "rsync -aAXq --exclude={"/dev/*","/proc/*","/sys/*","/tmp/*","/run/*","/mnt/*","/lost+found"} / /mnt"