I was very impressed with my new Pinebook Pro for the entire day it ran after delivery, but the backlighting on the screen flickered and died, rendering my PBP unusable. (I can still barely see the Manjaro "M" logo on the splash screen during boot but, after that, I can't make out anything.

I have an RMA to return it for the Freemont CA service center, but I didn't encrypt my Manjaro installation so I'd like to to erase or re-flash the eMMC before returning it. I have some passwords saved in Firefox that I'd rather not ship off with the PBP. From what I recall about migrating Firefox passwords, they are stored in the clear, and with no whole drive encryption, my user password is insufficient protection.

Some may say I'm paranoid but there is an entire industry in India and the PRC that salvages disk drives from computer "recycling" bone yards to harvest personal data and passwords from them.

I have a Pinephone and dock but no Pinebook Pro dock. SSH connections are refused, because I never set it up on Manjaro.

Maybe forum members with greater knowledge of PBP than I can save me some time with suggestions or other ideas.

1. Boot via SD card to Jumpdrive. (Is there a Jumpdrive that runs on PBP?)
2. Image an OS with SSH enabled by default to an SD card and boot it. (Any suggested images?)
3. Try my Pinephone convergence dock for HDMI video out to my monitor. I know the dock is not designed for PBP, but perhaps the video out will work and I don't have a PBP USB-C video adapter.

I haven't looked into the serial port connection but it's probably a pretty big hassle to get setup.

Thanks!
-Cal

I have been owning a pinephone now for almost a year, but it still is something that lies around most of the time, while for any real world use, I regularly catch myself falling back to my android (LineageOS) device. I wonder how much is can be blamed on the current state of the software and how much on the quite modest hardware, the pinephone is equipped with. For instance: When I tap the geary icon, it takes around 30 seconds (estimated) for the window to show up and several minutes for it to finish checking the various IMAP accounts. K-9 on Android comples the same tasks in seconds, but also Geary on the desktop is much much faster. I suspect that on the Librem5 it also will be faster than on the Pinephone.

But maybe I simply haven't found the right setup yet to get an enjoyable experience out of the pinephone, so I thought I should do a mini survey among those who do use it as a real phone:

So these would be my questions, any answers and comment would be hugely appreciated:

1. Do you use the Pinephone as your daily driver?
   
2. If yes: What distribution do you use?
   
3. Which desktop environment/interface do you use?
   
4. Does the interface offer the basic functionality you need or is something missing?
   
5. Have you been able to add the missing functionality through third party applications or customisations?
   
6. Which customisations did you apply to make the pinephone meet your expectations towards a daily driver?
   

Hello everyone,

I wanted to install another distro to my Pinebook and wiped the EMMC, created a new partition and wrote the rootfs on it. After that I took a short break and when I came back, rebooted, totally forgetting, that I did not write the new uboot files.
When I tried to boot, it did not turn on, not even the LED. So I disabled the EMMC module with the hardware switch and booted to a manjaro image on the SD-card. I tried to enable it again after I booted to the SD-card and tried the commands on the wiki to detect the change (https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Pinebo...nformation).

Instead of working it gave me an error: "bash: echo: write error: No such device"

How can I get my Pinebook Pro to recognize my EMMC module again?

Thank you in advance.

I have been trying different distros on my Pinephone, and I love the layout and speed of Ubuntu Touch. However, whenever I turn the screen off, it will not wake up again (the screen flickers and then goes permanently black), and I have to hold the power-button for 10 seconds and boot it back up again. I haven't had any such problem on the other distros, so it clearly seems software-related.

This problem occurred on the latest 5/6 stable version downloaded from here: https://ci.ubports.com/job/rootfs/job/ro...stemimage/

Is this a known issue? Is there a workaround? 

Thanks!

Howdy,
I've been using my pinephone as a daily driver for a couple of weeks to figure out what works well and what doesn't. The vast majority of this has been call in conference calls for work. Figured I'd share my experience for what I have been able to workaround and what I have not been able to workaround.

General setup:
1. Beta edition pinephone with mobian running on it. Latest stable patches.
2. Encrypted boot drive
3. Wired headset
4. mic kill switch: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N2T5MQ7?psc...ct_details (I had to cut a tab off, but otherwise it fits perfectly on the top of the phone. Doubt it fits with a protective case though)
4. T-Mobile via tracfone as cell provider
5. 256G SD card mounted as /home

Fallback plan in event of failure: landline (I have avoided owning a cell phone for years, so not having one work isn't a bit deal)

Things that worked very well:
1. Installation of mobian. Before the pinephone arrived I had tried a oneplus phone putting lineageos on it. Which was a royal PITA(estimated 12 hours of work to get it working). The mobian install was just a dd image onto the sd card, stick it in the phone, boot it, and follow the instructions. It was as painless as a normal linux install, though with considerably fewer questions asked of me.
2. All the linux bits worked out of the box. I was happy to be able to connect to wireless, setup ssh, and start running ansible and backing it up via rsync with no issues.
3. SMS has not given me any issues. Though as I never had it before, I hardly ever use it. So perhaps not a great tester for this.
4. Once I found the terminal (King's Cross didn't sound or look like what I normally see for a terminal), it worked better than I expected. Though I still prefer a keryboard
5. basic allow established/related and deny all other inbound on firewall worked perfectly. Nothing seemed to break. (via iptables and ip6tables)

Thus far issues I've had and have worked around:
1. Issue: mute doesn't work
    fix: bought a wired headset and a hardware cutoff for the mic
2. Issue: The thing falls asleep during a call. (I think this may be related to the non worked around issue #3)
    fix: I wrote a quick and dirty application that inhibits sleep and idle.
    currently testing: sguard, but I's not sure it will handle the modem disappearing issue below.  sguard link (https://src.jayvii.de/Hobby/PinePhoneScr...ain/sguard)
3. issue: The screen will lock during a call, and then you can't log back without ending the call due to the call window being over the lock screen.
    fix: I wrote a quick and dirty application that inhibits sleep and idle.
4. issue: megapixels would only save some .dng file that I couldn't read with the installed reader.
    fix: looks like a known issue, I dropped the latest .postprocess.sh from the megapixels git page and that fixed it. Interestingly though when I tried overwriting the existing one (thinking the next package update will fix this issue anyway) it didn't fix the issue.
5. issue: The default browser has trouble loading a variety of pages.
    fix: firefox-esr fixes this, but it doesn't have (that I can tell) a quick and easy way to add a site to the programs list. I need to create them by hand (which it a painful without copy and paste on the phone itself).

Issues I have not found a workaround for:
1. Sometimes when booting it gets stuck on startup scripts. Haven't been able to figure out why. Seems to happen ~50% of the time. I just reset it and usually it works the second time.
2. Sometimes the phone when it wakes from sleep will not see it's cell modem. Usually a reboot fixes this, but due to the above issue it can be rather aggravating.
3. Sometimes it loses it's access to the cell modem during a call for a split second. Which causes gnome-calls to consider the call ended. Interestingly though the actual call proceeds normally without issue.
4. Some sites send me to a "install our app" page, but of course, this phone can't run it. Issue being the site won't let me use it on the phone without the app. I think I can make a site work by finding the setting to disable mobile pages, but I would only want that for specific sites, not all of them.
5. (likely just me being an idiot) Couldn't figure out how to make my sd card encrypted, and mount it on the phone. gnome-disks was happy to make an encrypted volume for it on my laptop using luks, but I couldn't mount it on the phone (usually I let the os installers handle this, but that wasn't an option here)
6. Alarms don't work if the phone is asleep at the time it's suppose to go off.

If anyone's interested in the inhibit script here it is:

Hello,

I ordered a Rockpro64 and a Pinecil more than a month ago. The shipment status had been "International item has left originating country and is en route to Canada" for a month until earlier today I checked again and figured out that it's rejected by security check and still circulating in China.

I will be on vacation in another country in a month and I would like to change the shipping destination if possible or get a refund as I thought 2 months for shipping should be enough. Apparently now it's too late.

I also filed a ticket but no response yet.

Also, are there any workarounds to get it going?

I have installed Navit, but it seems to be generally unhappy and hangs for several minutes before going to the menu screen. I'm guessing that it's looking for GPS data and not finding any.

Anyone know how to get the GPS information from the GPS in the PinePhone? I've tried a few programs to get the location but they all seem to go by IP address so they all basically just say the town I am in and are off by a few miles so I was hoping to get the actual information from the GPS itself but I don't know how to do that. I also tried 'whereami' and for some reason that doesn't work. I install it and it says I have the most up to date version then when I try to run `whereami` it says the package isn't installed.

I found the amount of post-processing time when taking Megapixels photos to be a bit annoying so decided to move that to batch processing which can be run manually when convenient.

This is a real quick-and-dirty kludge. I'm not familiar with the image processing tools being used by the original postprocess.sh, so I stripped that down and sussed out the filename handling as best I could. If there are grievous errors please let me know, but this seems to work.

When taking photos the .dng files are copied directly to ~/Pictures and not further processed. The batch processing is done directly in ~/Pictures by manually running a script when desired. Intermediate .tiff files are deleted but original .dng files are kept in case something goes horribly wrong. If the corresponding .jpg file already exists that .dng file is skipped. (It is assumed that dcraw, imagemagick, and exiftools are installed. The original code determining what programs are installed is stripped out for simplicity.)

The following custom postprocess.sh is placed in ~/.config/megapixels:

Hi,

I'm just beginning to play with my new Pinebook Pro.  Arrived May 2021.

The only issue I'm unhappy with is that the touchpad seems to lag on initial movement.  i.e. you move your finger then the arrow moves some time later.  It's making button pressing and resizing windows very awkward.  I currently have a mouse plugged in and this works fine.  However I would like the touchpad working for 'sofa surfing'.

I've already read a lot of previous post about the issue from 2019 and 2020.  I've tried re-flashing the keyboard driver and tried some of the previous reported  'fixes'.  There may be some slight observable improvement but it's marginal.  The main issue is initial finger movement and a lag in the pointer.  Has anyone got one of the newer pinebook pros and is experiencing the same issue?

I'm running the Manjaro install that came with the laptop.  I've also tried the Debian release booted from sd card and this exhibited the same issue.

I think it maybe a driver or power management issue rather than hardware since the hardware seems to function fine other than this initial lag.

Is there a solution to this problem?  Other than that the laptop is brilliant!

Neil