Libre Computer eMMC Flash Tool (LEFT) for Rapid OS Deployment

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Libre Computer eMMC Flash Tool, LEFT, is a method of creating a MicroSD or USB flash key that will deploy an operating system to the eMMC. LEFT is packaged as a disk image that is located on our distro server. It can work as a standalone image or as part of Libre Computer Flash Tool, LFT.

Windows Instructions

  1. Download the 32MB uncompressed or 12MB compressed LEFT image. If you download the compressed version, you need to use an xz decompression tool to get the uncompressed image before the next step.
  2. Flash the image file to a MicroSD card or USB key, left-uefi.img, using BalenaEtcher or other flashing tool. If you are on a board without an UEFI bootloader like ALL-H3-CC Tritium, AML-S905X-CC Le Potato, or ROC-RK3328-CC Renegade, you will need to download the LEFT image specific to that board, which is the same image but with the bootloader for the board flashe. Those boards can only boot via MicroSD and will not read the bootloader from USB.
  3. Open Disk Management, diskmgmt.msc, and create a new simple volume in the unallocated space and give it the next drive letter. The volume can be FAT32, exFAT, or NTFS.
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  4. Download the image you want to flash to the new simple volume. You can either rename it to flash.img or create a text file called flash.ini and add the following IMAGE_FILE=FILENAME and replace FILENAME with the full file name of the image.
  5. If you would like to expand the last partition, add IMAGE_EXPAND=1 to the text file flash.ini. Please note that only certain filesystems, such as fat, ext, btrfs, ntfs support expanding.
  6. Eject the MicroSD card or USB key by right clicking on the volume/drive letter and clicking Eject. Do not pull it out without ejecting first as the data may not be fully written and become corrupted!
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Linux Instructions
Libre Computer eMMC Flash Tool is fully integrated into Libre Computer Flash Tool. You have the option of creating a deployment key from the operating systems from our servers directly, or creating a deployment key from a local image file (your custom image).

Create Official Image Deployment Key

git clone --single-branch --depth=1 https://github.com/libre-computer-project/libretech-flash-tool.git
cd libretech-flash-tool
sudo ./lft.sh distro-flash-left debian 12 base arm64 sdb

Create Custom Image Deployment Key

git clone --single-branch --depth=1 https://github.com/libre-computer-project/libretech-flash-tool.git
cd libretech-flash-tool
sudo ./lft.sh left-flash sdb IMAGE_FILE
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