Because of the ::gestures at everything:: state of the world, and the amount of joy my MNT Pocket Reform has brought me, I decided to splurge and order an MNT Reform DIY kit from Crowd Supply. I did this for a few reasons, one of which is I wanted the immediate gratification because they had it in stock. So this also means I’m running with the stock i.M8XM card, not the plus that’s in the Pocket Reform, I believe.
It arrived today, and I proceeded to assemble it. Everything seems to be working great! It boots off the SD card, I’ve been able to get the wifi working, I can (manually) run sway. Everything is coming up Milhouse!
Here’s where I’m at:
If I boot with the SD card, it boots. The image on it appears to be circa 2023, and the console-setup.service fails to come up – console-setup complains: /usr/bin/setupcon: 999: cannot open /tmp/tmpkbd.j2462m: No such file – so I’m just running the console and I don’t have the “setup wizard” doing stuff.
If I run reform-check, I get a list of packages that aren’t installed, but more importantly that /dev/mmcblk0p2 doesn’t exist – Your eMMC still contians a sysimage before v3. It says I can run reform-flash-rescue but to only do it if I want to do a factory reset, and warns it’ll overwrite my /boot partition. It also complains that there is unexpected content in /etc/default/flash-kernel
2.5 apt update && apt full-upgrade show something on the order of 700 packages to upgrade.
lsblk is showing me an mmcblk0 with no partitions (I assume this is the eMMC on the cpu module), nvmen1 (my currently blank nvme drive), mmcblk1 with two partitions, one on /boot and one on / (I assume the SD card image) and then two 4M partitions called mmcblk0boot0 and mmcblk0boot1 – I’ve no idea what these are.
My guess here is that I am booting only off the SD card, and that the eMMC is empty and needs reflashing.
If that’s right, I think either using reform-flash-rescue or these directions would be the right thing, right?
I assume I could also download and put the current image on an SD card (either the one I got with the system, or another one) and use it instead of trying to upgrade/improve/work with what’s on this one.
Anyway – overall, this has been fun and rewarding already. Any bread crumbs to getting this fully set up would be gratefully accepted!
Answering my own questions here – after some more digging around on the forums, I found this thread:
And that gave me the confidence and context to try the most obvious thing – I dug out a microSD card, an adapter, and downloaded the current i.m8xmq image, wrote it to the card, and booted it.
Lo and behold, it came up with the setup wizard. I configured it, then ran the reform-flash-rescue on it, which now allows me to successfully boot without an SD card, off the eMMC, where I once again ran through the setup wizard.
Next step is to deploy an image onto the NVME drive, but that’ll probably have to wait till tomorrow.
Anyway – it’s all working as I expected, and obvious in hindsight, the image is similar/the same to what’s already on the pocket, so I can set this up pretty much the same as I have that set up.
In fact, the rootfs is bit-by-bit identical between all platforms. The only two things that differ, depending on the platform are:
the /boot/dtb-$(uname -r) symlink target
u-boot itself
Ouch… that unit has spent some time on the shelf.
Remember that the only thing that is thoroughly tested are upgrades from one stable release to the next. Upgrades skipping a stable release might work but are not tested. Upgrades within unstable get tested by unstable users but the larger the delta is, the less likely it is that somebody tested exactly your upgrade scenario. I think it was the right thing to do to just download a new image.
Do you by any chance still have the contents of the original SD-card from crowdsupply with the image from 2 years ago? That would be interesting to have because gitlab CI does not store snapshots forever.
Yes, and /var/log/apt/history.log has the information about which packages got added and upgraded when you installed parted. Together I can use this information to re-create a system image from the past in its vanilla stage using snapshot.debian.org.
Any bread crumbs to getting this fully set up would be gratefully accepted!
