LINux on MOBile

If you've been an avid reader of the recent monthly PINE64 Community Updates, you may have heard of Biktorgj's effort to come up with an open-source firmware for the PinePhone's Quectel EG25-G LTE modem. This is a guide on how to install it.

Thanks to Dylan van Assche, there's now an easier way to install this firmware – read my post detailing the process instead!

From release 0.3.0 onwards, the instructions below are outdated. You just need to get the required tools and run the flashall script.

I've been wanting to try the alternate, free-software modem firmware Biktorgj created for a while. I had a hard time doing this, as I did not bother to set 'minicom' up correctly at first. Why Minicom? Without having ADB set up (read Megi's website for how to do that¹), you need to use Minicom or atinout to send your phones Quectel EG25-G modem into fastboot mode in order to re-flash it.

While I went with Minicom originally (listen to the chapter "Custom PinePhone Firmware tryout progress" in PineTalk 009 for more), I had trouble following my own footsteps for my second PinePhone. Therefore, I wrote up on how to this with 'atinout' instead.

If you still want to do this with Minicom (which has the advantage of being packaged for a larger number of distributions²), check out the guide on bloggerbust.ca) and remember to use /dev/ttyUSB2 instead of /dev/ttyUSB0.

Warning and advice

Please only do this, when you know that you are playing with experimental software and understand the instructions to reinstall the official firmware. Also, I advise you to connect your phone to a charger and do this over SSH, which, depending on your distribution will need to set up. If you can figure out setting SSH properly, I trust you to generally be competent enough to follow these instructions.

Prerequisites

Downloading the firmware

Let's download the firmware now. Go to the release page in a browser on your PinePhone, and download the package.tar.gz file, or copy the URL into your ssh connection and download it with wget.

Either way, I recommend to put the file into a new, empty folder and extract it there.

Installing 'atinout'

Installing atinout is easy on the distributions that have it packaged in their repositories, which are postmarketOS, openSUSE, Fedora (34 and Rawhide). It's also in the AUR, check my instructions if you have not enabled it yet on your Arch or Manjaro install. On others, you will have to build it from source, rough steps for that are outlined on askubuntu. Or you just try running postmarketOS of a SD card to do this—it's excellent and I recommend you to try it :)

Installing 'fastboot'

The package to install fastboot is named 'android-tools' in many distributions, like Manjaro, postmarketOS and Arch, but this may differ in your distribution.

Switching to fastboot mode

With everything installed, it's time to put the modem into fastboot mode. But let's test first, whether we have the correct device:

echo 'AT' | sudo atinout - /dev/ttyUSB2 -

If the phone answers OK, we're good to go:

echo 'AT+QFASTBOOT' | sudo atinout - /dev/ttyUSB2 -

This command, depending on your shell and distribution may return something. Most likely, it is going to fail, when you try to run it again, which is likely good. To confirm that your modem entered fastboot mode, run:

fastboot devices

If you read "no permissions", which may well happen, depending on your distribution and the groups your user has been assigned, run it (and all the following fastboot commands) again with sudo:

sudo fastboot devices

Now you should be seeing something like this:

$ sudo fastboot devices
23edcc83        fastboot

You made it! Now let's install this firmware!

Installing the firmware

If you have cold feed, run fastboot reboot (likely with a sudo in front of it) and your modem should return to normal operation.

Now you can follow the further instructions on the release page of Biktorgj's project. I quoted the relevant part here for your convenience (again, remember to prepend sudo if necessary for your setup):

5. Once in fastboot mode, first flash the unlocked bootloader:

   fastboot flash aboot appsboot.mbn
   

   After that fastboot reboot ; fastboot oem stay

6. After flashing and rebooting to the bootloader the modem will say FAILED (remote: 'Waiting for orders!')

7. Now you can flash everything:

   fastboot flash boot boot-mdm9607.img
   

   If you get an error flashing the kernel, run fastboot flash:raw : fastboot flash:raw boot boot-mdm9607.img

   fastboot flash recovery recovery.img
   

   fastboot flash system rootfs-mdm9607.ubi
   

   fastboot flash recoveryfs recoveryfs.ubi
   

8. After you flashed everything, you can run fastboot reboot and wait for it to come back.

Enjoy!

BTW: I had to use fastboot flash:raw boot boot-mdm9607.img for the first step under '7.', whether you'll need to do the same depends on the version of 'fastboot' your distribution is offering.

Remember: If you run into problems, just restore the vendor firmware.