Martyn's random musings

(Restored: Original date: January 8, 2022)

This is really just an expansion of Dorian's notes but with more of a step-by-step for those who want all the info in one place.

Step 1: adb access

First, enable developer mode utils:

• Click the applications icon in the top menu (four squares, one rotated)
• Click “Application Management”
• If you see a list of apps, continue, if not click “Application Message”
• If Settings is there, click it, if not, the 3 dot menu top right and Show system, then search for Settings and click it.
• Click “Open”
• Click “About tablet”
• Click “Build number” 8 times (the first few it won't say anything, after 8 it should tell you “You are now a developer”)
• Click the back arrow top left
• Click “System” –> Click “Advanced” –> Click Developer options
• Scroll down a lot until you get to “Default USB configuration”, click it and select “PTP”
• Click the back arrow top left
• Scroll back up and find USB debugging, click it and click ok
• Plug the tablet into your computer, and a dialog will appear asking if you wish to “Allow USB debugging”.
• Click allow, but first you probably don't want this popping up every time, so check the box “Always allow from this computer”

Congrats, now you can use ADB to connect to the Pinenote. If you don't have it, I recommend using : – Windows – 15 second adb installer – Linux – apt install adb and probably you'll want fastboot so apt install fastboot – Mac – brew install android-platform-tools

Step 2: magisk root

You will need a copy of your boot partition to continue. Either follow Dorian's readme and get your own or grab the one from his archive.

Then we use ADB to push the boot.img and the known-good magisk APK to the device :

adb push boot.img /sdcard/boot.img
adb install magisk_c85b2a0.apk

Magisk should appear in the application menu (four squares, one rotated), if it doesn't, you can get to it the same way you did for settings. Open the application.

• Click Install (to the right, under the cog)
• Click Select and Patch a File
• Click “Open” in the window that appears
• Click “Phone”
• Click “boot” (it has a ? icon)
• Click “Let's go –>”
• Note down the output file location

Back on your computer, pull the patched image :

adb pull /sdcard/Download/magisk_patched-23016_oYeer.img

Note: use the file location outputted in the previous step, because yours won't be called magisk_patched-23016_oYeer.img.

Now we need to get into either fastboot or rockusb mode on the tablet and flash the boot image. The easy way is to run adb reboot bootloader which puts the tablet into fastboot mode.

The e-ink screen will show the pine logo and no progress bar when this mode is enabled, and fastboot devices will show a device starting PNOTE

So push the patched image (remember to change the name):

fastboot flash boot magisk_patched-23016_oYeer.img

Once this has completed hold power for a while to turn off the device and then power it on again.

Reopen the Magisk app and after a while it should show a status of “installed”. You can check your root access with adb shell and running su which should pop up an allow/deny box.

Congratulations, your pinenote is rooted!

Bonus Content : ssh!

I suggest for ease of use (and lack of sucky terminal for adb) installing f-droid via the browser (google f-droid) and using f-droid to install termux. Then, you can ssh into the pinenote from a nice terminal.

• Get f-droid from https://f-droid.org
• upon downloading, android will ask you to allow unknown sources, go ahead and allow it in settings.
• open it and wait (usually quite a while) for apps to appear in the front page. If they don't, tap “Updates” and do a “pull-down” to refresh and then click “latest” again.
• search (bottom right) for termux. Sigh at the lack of appropriate sorting in the results, then select termux and click install.
• Again, you'll need to allow f-droid to install “unknown sources”, so do that dance.
• Open termux and wait until you get a prompt.
• First, install openssh and set a password, something strongish like IncorrectPonyCapacitorPaperclip perhaps.

NOTE: at time of writing, due to a certificate issue, you may have issues installing packages from termux. If you do, the solution is to run termux-change-repo and select any repo other than grimler.se.

To do this, run the following commands :

pkg install termux-auth openssh
passwd

Then, every boot (annoying I know) you just run ssh in termux and you can ssh to the device on port 8022. The username is somewhat random at install-time (thanks android) and can be retrieved with whoami. To get your ip, you can type ip a show wlan0 as you would under linux.

So a complete command to ssh in might look like :

ssh -p8022 u0_all8@192.168.1.102

and to scp files

scp -P8022 some_file u0_all8@192.168.1.102: