MNT Reform 2 - Use Sculpt OS on SD-card

August 2 2021 by Stefan Kalkowski

There is a new, updated Sculpt OS version available for the MNT Reform 2. It features a fully functional, and more performant SD-card driver. It enables you to persistently install Sculpt OS and additional depot packages on your MNT Reform 2. Moreover, the new driver support enables you to exchange the SD-card dynamically at runtime.

Download and boot Sculpt OS

If you want to test out this still unofficial release of the Sculpt OS for the MNT Reform 2, you can download a pre-built SD-card image from here:

You can copy the image on a fresh SD-card by using dd. Assuming your SD-card is named /dev/mmcblk0 when connected to your Linux host machine, then do:

 sudo dd if=sculpt-mnt-reform2-21.07.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 conv=fsync

Building a Sculpt image from scratch

Alternatively, you can build the Sculpt image on your own. Therefore, you need to checkout the latest master branch of the Genode repository, as well as the Genode i.MX 8MQ repository:

 git clone https://github.com/genodelabs/genode.git genode
 cd genode
 git checkout fce525f122db34718ce1710ba7b0233da520ac9b -b mnt_reform2_sculpt
 git clone https://github.com/skalk/genode-imx.git repos/imx
 cd repos/imx
 git checkout bf251edc9743cac2e9585b09d1798d327e4539c1 -b mnt_reform2_sculpt

For all further necessary steps, please follow the instructions of the first blog post about Sculpt OS on MNT Reform 2.

Use the SD-card as installation target

After booting Sculpt OS on the MNT Reform 2, you can now select the first (and only) partition of the SD-card in the storage menu. The dialog that opens allows you to expand this small partition, which first only contains the boot image.

After the resizing of partition and file-system got effective, you can click to "use" the partition as target device of the Genode depot. Then you need to connect the MNT Reform 2 to an ethernet, and select "Wired" in the network dialog in the right-top corner.

Finally, choose the "+" sign above the storage dialog, "Depot". and "Selection". From the selection that opens, you can choose the "skalk" repository as depot package source.

Now, you will be able to install all Genode depot packages, which you might already know from the PC variant of Sculpt OS.

Have fun!

Edit (2021-09-29): updated to repository renaming of genode-imx.git