[UPDATE: TL;DR: The resolution is that the hardware is faulty (in fact, not just the modem, but the entire USB subsystem except charging), and that I just bought a new PinePhone which works.]

Since late December (so for the last 3 weeks or so), I have been struggling with a strange issue on my PinePhone (Beta Edition). The modem keeps going down for some reason, making it just "disappear" from the PinePhone's point of view. eg25-manager tries to restart it, and sometimes it succeeds, but often the restart also fails, or eg25-manager gets stuck waiting for a long time and does not even try a reset even though the modem device is not visible to ModemManager or anything else (I cannot even see the device node). Sometimes, the modem does not even come up on boot, and even rebooting several times does not necessarily fix it.

It did happen in the past (before December) that the modem had to be restarted, but that was around once a day, and the auto-restart (in eg25-manager and ModemManager) had been just working for weeks now. (And I believe that was a known issue, which is also why the auto-restart had been implemented.) But now, the modem often goes down every 5 minutes, and the auto-restart does not reliably work anymore either. (Sometimes it does, often it does not.)

The first thing I would have suspected would be the latest software updates. (I run Manjaro Plasma Mobile, the one that was preinstalled on the Beta Edition, but continuously upgraded from the stable repository using pamac-gtk. FYI, Discover is just broken for system updates on Manjaro, so I gave up on using that one long ago, but that is not the issue here.) But if that were the case (i.e., if it were a software regression), the issue would have hit more users, would it not? Yet, I have not seen any other report of this happening. Or does anybody else see the same thing?

The behavior looks a lot like a wrong contact on the USB connection, but the modem is soldered onto the mainboard, is it not? So how can it possibly make a loose contact?

The remaining suspect then was the battery, also considering that the PinePhone modem is connected directly to the battery on the PinePhone. So I bought a replacement battery (a Samsung EB-BJ700CBE, which is documented as fitting) from a local retailer today. And well, yes, the battery fits, and yes, the battery works in principle. But the modem issue is the same whether I use the replacement battery or the original PinePhone battery (that I have now put back in), it makes no visible difference.

So at this point, I am stuck. I am completely out of ideas.

I am pretty annoyed at this point because I was using the PinePhone as my daily driver just fine, but now this issue makes it extremely unreliable (since without the modem, it is really just a tablet!) and I have no idea how to resolve the issue.

Some Pinephone Users Mentioned Uaving Trouble w/Tor Browser fork.... And Since Some Pinephone Users Have Shown Interest In Security / Privacy...

Some May Enjoy Trying I2P on Pinephone / Pinetab / Pinebook (video features Netsurf lightweight browser):

https://youtu.be/JEaJs8A0P6E

For those unfamiliar, I2P is a "hidden" peer to peer (p2p) network, known as "The Invisible Internet Project" (unique p2p benefits like in "freenet").

Another common usage is torrents (Linux iso img etc)

One thing less mentioned is I2P not only benefits "privacy", but offers strong security enhancements (.i2p) not available for standard https internet .com addresses.

I2P enforces end-to-end encryption between you and the I2P network (as well as e2ee for all .i2p websites).

This prevents attackers from performing MiTM attacks on .i2p sites / servers (outproxy is another story: you rely on browser built in https for encryption for visiting standard internet (clearnet) websites using outproxy).

It's another option (in addition to Tor .onion H.S.) to streamline layering secure connections (e2ee) for various client / server applications (resistant to MiTM), while also protecting user / server identities in the process. Making for more difficult attack surfaces (limiting access to service you specify, and only accessible to those you share the .i2p address). 

Making this equally security, as much as it is privacy enhancement.

Using "Garlic routing" (similar to onion routing, but in contrast to Tor) each user becomes an I2P router / node on internal I2P network (note: this means if you try this, you do connect to other users, but only transport (encrypted data) inside the I2P internal network tunnels - as is case with other p2p networks).

You may like to try this as another option for adding end-to-end encryption to various client / server applications without encryption (for .i2p "eepsites"), without the trust required for https cert auth.

As a user / router, you don't connect to normal (.com) internet sites of users (acting only as internal p2p node, passing encrypted traffic internally, through "tunnels").

You can even use I2P to view standard internet websites (maintain https), and for this I suggest first trying I2P+ https://i2pplus.github.io/

What Do I Need?

Should work on any available Linux operating system for Pinephone (you need Java/jdk installed)

INSTALLATION:

Download I2P+ onto your Pine64 device: https://i2pplus.github.io/index.html#download

Next Run:

 

Some days ago I noticed I cannot play videos anymore using mpv as it have become choppy even with low resolution videos (Firefox isn't affected). Downgrading Mesa to 22.2 fixed the problem. https://alaa.ad24.cz/packages/m/mesa/mes...pkg.tar.xz


Edit: After another Manjaro update, KDE Plasma regressed to software rendering so I had to update Mesa to 22.3. The solution was to put "vd-lavc-dr=no" to ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf as described here: https://forum.manjaro.org/t/video-playba...k/130967/6

I cannot boot the PineTab from (happy) new (year) images with kernel version 6.1.

I tried:

 mobian

 postmarketos



On mobian I could install the 5.15 kernel.

I took this one: https://gitlab.com/mobian1/devices/sunxi...pe=archive



Maybe there are workarounds for the other operation systems too. Please let me/us know. Don't let the early PineTab die.



another thread for mobian: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=17772

Hello, gonna front-load this with an apology for my utter newbness, and probably a whole slew of subsequent dumb questions.

I have a thought and I would like to ask if this is something that is possible. I was thinking about how one could go about getting access to, or expanding, the GPIO resources for the Pinebook Pro. In my searching around for existing info, I found the following: 

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=4785

I'm not so enthusiastic about doing everything through the SD card slot like that, but I def appreciate that that user was able to really probe the system for that functionality like that. 

I had another thought: is it possible to create some kind of add-on board/card using the PCIe x4 connection, some kind of bridge chip, and possibly some kind of MCU or other supporting ICs, that one could install through the M.2 connection, and then create a port physically somewhere on the case (I'm actually thinking of somehow machining the aluminum bottom case somehow to do this but whole other can of worms)? A whole "GPIO board" mounted on that connection using that bus? 

Is that dumb? Crazy amount of work? I'm not even sure where to start, mostly just wanted a lot more GPIO/physical computing ability for this platform.

I have a Pinephone pro running mobian phosh. (Note this happened on other distros too) where i cant connect to my bluetooth devices but it can pair. What should i do to be able to connect to my devices? or am i screwed?

Hi everyone,

I've been reading sites and trying fixes for a while and I've been able to get Disney+ and Netflix running in chromium-docker on Manjaro. So far, I haven't figured out how to get Amazon Prime or Paramount+ working. Has anyone had any success with these? 

Thanks,
Tessa

I have a sealed PineTime, and today the screen stopped working properly, see the pictures below (quality isnt the best but it basically looks the same IRL).

Touch etc. still seems to work though, so i can go through the menus just fine. I run InfiniTime 1.11 and didn't bunk into something exceptionally hard with it nor do i swim/shower with it (except for the occasional hand washing where it might get splashed a bit). I already tried rebooting it which didn't help. Is there a way to fix this or should i just get a new PineTime?

The menu when swiping left:


The flashlight, activated:

I got a pinephone from someone turned it on and it has a pass code trying to flash it with a os but can't help please

I saw the Roshambo case on the Pine64 store. Trying to understand components and assembly.

I see that a power supply and board are required - RockPro64 is recommended. It says that the ssd "cartridge" is optional. I see that the board comes with 2 or 4GB RAM, but doesn't seem to have storage.
From the site - "There is also an optional eMMC module (up to 128GB) and microSD slot for booting." If the ssd is optional and the eMMC is optional, how is the R-Cade system installed/stored?

Other than the case, board, power supply, and a couple of controllers, is there anything else I would need?

Thanks