A set of debos recipes for building a debian-based image for mobile phones, initially targetting Pine64's PinePhone.
Prebuilt images are available here.
The default user is mobian with password 1234.
To build the image, you need to have debos and bmaptool. On a Debian-based
system, install these dependencies by typing the following command in a terminal:
sudo apt install debos bmap-tools xz-utils
If you want to build an image for a Qualcomm-based device, additional packages are required, which you can install with the following command:
sudo apt install android-sdk-libsparse-utils yq mkbootimg
Building with disk encryption support will also require the package cryptsetup to be installed
on your host.
Do note that we recommend using Debian 12 (Bookworm) as previous versions didn't
include the yq package.
Similarly, if you want to use F2FS for the root filesystem (which isn't such a
good idea, as it has been known to cause corruption in the past), you'll need to
install f2fs-tools as well.
The build system will cache and re-use it's output files. To create a fresh build
remove *.tar.gz, *.sqfs and *.img before starting the build.
If your system isn't debian-based (or if you choose to install debos without
using apt, which is a terrible idea), please make sure you also install the
following required packages:
debootstrapqemu-system-x86qemu-user-staticbinfmt-supportsquashfs-tools-ng(only required for generating installer images)
Then simply browse to the mobian-recipes folder and execute ./build.sh.
You can use ./build.sh -d to use the docker version of debos.
You can build a QEMU x86_64 image by adding the -t amd64 flag to build.sh
The resulting files are raw images. You can start qemu like so:
qemu-system-x86_64 -drive format=raw,file=<imagefile.img> -enable-kvm \
-cpu host -vga virtio -m 2048 -smp cores=4 \
-drive if=pflash,format=raw,readonly=on,file=/usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_CODE_4M.fd
UEFI firmware files are available in Debian thanks to the OVMF package. Comprehensive explanation about firmware files can be found at OVMF project's repository.
You may also want to convert the raw image to qcow2 format and resize it like this:
qemu-img convert -f raw -O qcow2 <raw_image.img> <qcow_image.qcow2>
qemu-img resize -f qcow2 <qcow_image.qcow2> +20G
It can be useful to be able to SSH into the QEMU image, in order to collect logs directly from the host system. This can be done lanching qemu like this:
qemu-system-x86_64 -drive format=raw,file=<imagefile.img> -enable-kvm \
-cpu host -vga virtio -m 2048 -smp cores=4 \
-drive if=pflash,format=raw,readonly=on,file=/usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_CODE_4M.fd \
-nic user,hostfwd=tcp::8888-:22
that forwards port 8888 on the host to port 22 on the guest system. Then, connection from the host system to the guest is as simple as
$ ssh mobian@localhost -p 8888
$ sftp -P 8888 mobian@localhost
Insert a MicroSD card into your computer, and type the following command:
sudo bmaptool copy <image> /dev/<sdcard>
or:
sudo dd if=<image> of=/dev/<sdcard> bs=1M
Note: Make sure to use your actual SD card device, such as mmcblk0 instead of
<sdcard>.
CAUTION: This will format the SD card and erase all its contents!!!
If you want to help with this project, please have a look at the roadmap and open issues.
In case you need more information, feel free to get in touch with the developers on #mobian:matrix.org.
This software is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License, version 3.