PostmarketOS General Tips

General tips for postmarketOS, not a proper HOWTO, just some random notes for things that are not 100% obvious in the official docs or fall outside their scope.

Installation

Each device installation requires a mix of device specific instructions and generic instructions. The general idea is:

• flash the bootloader (via fastboot or heimdall for Samsung devices)
• flash rootfs (on SD card or internal storage)

ssh

• username is user password is 147147
• home is as expected in /home/user
• start ssh with sudo service sshd start
• auto start sshd service on boot sudo rc-update add sshd

Packages

• the package manager works like sudo apk add nginx
• more info: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Terminal_cheat_sheet

Firewall

• by default there is a firewall with very restrictive options see https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Firewall
• turn it off temporarily with sudo rc-service nftables status

Macos specific crap

• there is no unxz, install it with brew install xz
• there is no fastboot, install it with brew install --cask android-platform-tools
• there is no sha256sum the right command is shasum -a 256
• there is no lsblk the right command is diskutil list
• dd needs to have permissions to work (System Preference, Security, Disk access, add Terminal by searching it in Application folder)
• to keep the USB device listed with diskutil you can't unmount it via Finder, instead
  • corrupt the key from linux so that it stays attached in the device tree
  • or manually unmount the partition(s) with umount /dev/diskxsx to keep /dev/diskx accessible
• heimdall can't be installed with brew use this binary instead instead https://bitbucket.org/benjamin_dobell/heimdall/downloads/?tab=downloads