Generic installation guide

A generic guide for installing most Linux distributions.

This document is a guide for installing generic Linux on your Xiaomi Mi Pad 5 with the latest mainline kernel.

We don’t take any responsibility for any damage done to your device. By following this guide, you agree to take full responsibility of your actions.

PLEASE READ SLOWLY AND CAREFULLY!! BE SURE TO UNDERSTAND THE ENTIRE GUIDE BEFORE STARTING!!

Don’t run all commands at once and don’t rerun the commands if you interrupt the process. You need to be familiar with command line interfaces beforehand and you must not commit any typo with any commands. You may permanently break your device!

If your distribution provider has a separate installation guide, follow their guides first, as our one may not suitable.

Get the images

You can get the system images from these sites:

Download them and continue...

Generic installation

Partition the UFS

This procedure will not erase your Android data files, since Android will automatically fixing the userdata partition.

To modify the partitions on the UFS, we'll need to download a 3rd-party recovery environment called "Orangefox Recovery" Link is here.

Once you've downloaded, open a terminal and type the following commands:

This will start booting recovery image. Once the screen is on, use the terminal to continue processing. We well use adb shell command to finish the rest of this guide. Enter this command in your terminal, it well help you to check the userdata partition's location:

In this example, the userdata partition is located in the 31st partition of the whole disk. It has the biggest size, compared with other partitions. So this is the key for requiring new space for our Ubuntu installation.

To resize the userdata partition, we'll need to use the parted command tools to do this. Now let's open adb shell again and start typing parted in the terminal.

Enter print command to list all partitions for /dev/block/sda .

If you are using newer recovery like TWRP or PBRP Recovery, you need to download parted and use adb command to copy it to internal storage. Run these commands to finish this:

Then you will see your current partition table with userdata being the last partition Below is an example of output:

Now let’s continue partitioning: Here the size of userdata can be decided by yourself.

Delete partition 31 and again make sure it is not deleted incorrectly.

126GB is the End value for the new userdata partition. Since the starting point for userdata is 10.9GB, the new size would be 126G - 10.9G = 115G.

Check the results:

Note the end of the last partition in the above list, 10.9GB, this number will be used as the start of the new userdata partition, followed by the end of the partition. Let say that we want to make an approx 40GB userdata partition using the following command:

Between userdata and 10.9GB are 3 spaces, one of them replace the partition type flag, it is important to use 3 spaces at this step.

Run print again to see the results.

Exit the parted tool finally.

Now userdata resizing is done. Restart your tablet to apply changes.

Here comes a fun thing:

Android stores your data inside the userdata partition. When you reset your Android device to its factory default settings, your data will be erased. This is because factory reset is equal to format the userdata partition using ext4 filesystem. However, if you delete the userdata partition and recreate it without formating, your data will be saved after a reboot. Probably because Android can fix this problem automatically.

If you added "ext4" behind the "userdata" text, your data will be erased when you reboot.

Install new system

Enter fastboot mode and repeat the previous steps.

We'll use the free space for our installation:

The output will look like this:

Exit the parted tool and reboot once again.

Now we need to check which slot Android is installed.

NOTE: The concept of "slot" probably unfamiliar for you, since it was included in Android 10 as a feature, which called "Dynamic Partitions". Dynamic partitions are a userspace partitioning system for Android. About its further infomations, located here.

You can check this information via fastboot . Command is listed below:

Force select Slot A as active slot:

Now, we are ready to flash the system image. But before we start, we need to disable Android Verified Boot (AVB) feature, otherwise it will prevent booting Linux.

AVB is implementation of verified boot process, current version (since Android 8 Oreo) is called AVB 2.0. Verified boot is a process of assuring the end user of the integrity of the software running on a device. It typically starts with a read-only portion of the device firmware which loads code and executes it only after cryptographically verifying that the code is authentic. It also helps in implementing rollback protection.

More information and technical details, located here.

Flash the vbmeta with vbmeta_disabled.img to disable this feature:

Erase Android DTBO partition, we do not need it, but if present will be loaded and will prevent our boot.

If you want to boot your system via UEFI, skip this.

Flash boot.img :

Flash rootfs image, please use the partition name you created, this process will take a while, grab another beer.

Finally, reboot and you are ready to rock!

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