Prerequisites

• Linux-PC
• SDcard-Reader
• Class-4 SD-card (Class-10 cards may not work)

Steps

1. Download the part2.tar.xz archive and the appropriate bootloader image.

2. open a terminal and gain root access, change into the directory where you saved the downloaded files.

   sudo bash

3. put the SD card into the card-reader and connect it to the PC

4. find out which drive letter was assigned to it (in my example it is sdg)

   dmesg

5. repartition the SD card to create 3 partitions, first partition must start after 10MB and must be at least 250MB large (you may increase the size for the first partition but larger than 512MB is really not neccessary), second partition must be at least 250MB large, assign the rest of the card space to the third partition. Assign partition type b to the third partition. (please consult the manual page how to operate the fdisk program).

   fdisk /dev/sdg

6. it should now look similar to this, in the example the first partition starts at sixth unit, one unit is approximately 2MB so there are 5*2MB = 10MB free space before the first partition starts.

   Disk /dev/sdg: 1977 MB, 1977614336 bytes

   61 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1021 cylinders

   Units = cylinders of 3782 * 512 = 1936384 bytes

   Device	Boot	Start	End	Blocks	Id	System
   /dev/sdg1		6	144	262144+	83	Linux
   /dev/sdg2		144	283	262144+	83	Linux
   /dev/sdg3		283	1013	1380864+	b	W95 FAT32

7. uncompress and copy the bootloader to the SD card (in my example for the Mini)

   xz -d bootloader-Mini.img.xz

   dd if=bootloader-Mini.img of=/dev/sdg bs=512 seek=1 skip=1

8. format the first and second partition with the ext4-filesystem

   mkfs.ext4 -L rootfs -O ^metadata_csum,^64bit /dev/sdg1

   tune2fs -o ^user_xattr,^acl /dev/sdg1

   mkfs.ext4 -L rescuefs -O ^metadata_csum,^64bit /dev/sdg2

   tune2fs -o ^user_xattr,^acl /dev/sdg2

9. format the third partition with vfat-filesystem

   mkdosfs -f 2 -F 32 -R 6 -h 0 -n KoboEReader -s 8 /dev/sdg3

10. create mount-points and mount the first and second partition to it

    mkdir /mnt/1  /mnt/2

    mount -o noatime /dev/sdg1 /mnt/1

    mount -o noatime /dev/sdg2 /mnt/2

11. expand the downloaded archive to the second partition

    xz -cd part2.tar.xz | tar -C /mnt/2 -xvf -

12. expand the root-filesystem to the first partition

    tar -xvzf /mnt/2/upgrade/fs.tgz -C /mnt/1

13. mount the third partition

    mount -o noatime /dev/sdg3 /mnt/1/mnt/onboard

14. expand the data filesystem to the third partition

    tar -xvzf /mnt/2/upgrade/db.tgz -C /mnt/1/mnt/onboard

15. un-mount everything

    umount /dev/sdg3

    umount /dev/sdg2

    umount /dev/sdg1

    sync

16. disconnect the USB card-reader, remove the card

17. insert the SD card into the Kobo, the Kobo need to be switched off before (all LEDs off, backlight off)

18. switch the Kobo on, LED should be lit blue, then green flashing, then off

19. you are ready to install E-Books or any other software to it now