Sometime last year I purchased a 3GB PinePhone beta edition with the convergence package. Since then I haven't used it very much but I have been trying to use the phone with the dock recently on a fresh install of the latest stable image of Manjaro with Plasma Mobile. All my packages are up to date and the phone has not been giving me Mali driver crashes like it used to.

However when trying to use the PinePhone with the dock I am noticing a strange problem when attempting to use an external monitor using the HDMI port. Both USB ports work fine with the wireless keyboard and mouse that I have attached, and the ethernet cable and charging port work fine as well. When I plug the entire dock into the PinePhone it detects all of these devices attached to the dock and is able to interface with all of them properly except the external display. So I get power, my keyboard/mouse, and an ethernet connection.

The strange part about this is that the PinePhone is able to determine that it is connected to an external display - the display mode changes to desktop and you are able to see the output options on the touch screen (duplicate display, etc.) However the external display does not detect a signal coming from the PinePhone - most of the time. Occasionally I will see the desktop flicker on my external monitor. Even stranger is that if I hold the dock at a particular angle above the phone itself the image stays, but as soon as I let go and place the dock back down it loses the signal again.

I have tried the Convergence dock on two separate external displays, with two different HDMI cables, and even used a different external USB-C dock with the PinePhone, and the Convergence dock with a different computer to determine what exactly the issue here is. I've come to the conclusion that the issue is probably the PinePhone's USB-C port itself, since the Convergence dock works fine with HDMI output on other devices, the displays themselves are working fine, the common link between all of the problems is the actual PinePhone. The only source of doubt is that the other devices hooked up to the dock will still work even if the HDMI output does not.

I don't know how to fix this issue if my PinePhone has a faulty USB port. I am well outside the warranty period and have no experience with fixing hardware. If anybody has any idea where to start looking in order to fix this I'd appreciate any suggestions.

Hi,
in https://gnulinux.ch/postmarketos-v22-06-veroeffentlicht
wrote Lioh Möller about the possibility of updating the firmware of the modem Quectel EG25-G.
I followed the instructions. There were no error messages. It now has the latest firmware version.
However, the modem does not work under postmarketOS. Only in Manjaro Phosh Beta 24 does it work if I toggle the "Mobile Data" switch on and off and on again under "Network".
The modem also does not work with Manjaro-ARM-plasma-mobile-dev-pinephone-20220613.
It's like an own goal.

Disconnects very fast. Bluetooth mouse a bit slower. Bluetooth keyboard and mouse are important for LibreOffice. We think it should be possible to edit files with the PinePhone keyboard, since LibreOffice can be controlled by keyboard shortcuts. But LibreOffice was designed to be used with a mouse and has dropdown menues. Therefore a stable connection to a Bluetooth mouse is very essential for LibreOffice on the PinePhone.

«Miracast is an open standard, Chromecast is not» personal communication fredldotme Ubports forum.

Unfortunately, we did not manage yet to get a working HDMI out with an usb-c to HDMI adapter on the PinePhone. Therefore, we promote  Miracast adapters:

«Miracast is a standard for wireless connections from sending devices to display receivers, introduced in 2012 by the Wi-Fi Alliance. It can roughly be described as "HDMI over Wi-Fi", replacing the cable from the device to the display. The Wi-Fi Alliance launched the Miracast certification program at the end of 2012».

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracast

Hello,

I bought a rockpro64 2.1 with a 32gb emmc module.

I read different wiki pages and ended up installing U-Boot on the spi.

But even if U-Boot works and I could finish the Debian install on emmc (which I did before installing U-Boot), everytime I boot it seems like it doesn't detect anymore emmc. It's says:

Card did not respond to voltage select! : -110

Ok then I thought it's a wrong version of U-Boot so I installed towboot.

But I get the same error.

Any idea what I am doing wrong there?

Thanks

I'm attempting to install nixos, which requires towboot.  Normal method to install towboot is to dd to an SD card and boot, but that doesn't work for me, or other folks. 

Workaround is to copy towboot to /dev/mtd0 with nandwrite.  I installed nandwrite, but /dev/mtd0 is not visible in my /dev folder. 

I pretty much have the default debian that came with the PBP.  How can I enable /dev/mtd0?  Is there another way to get towboot installed?

We installed Pcmanfm file manager on PostmarkedOS. Why is the external SD card not listed by the filemanager on the PinePhone?

Hello!

What I would like to achieve is having a fanless server and smart TV all in one. I would like to host my personal website, torrent daemon, Nextcloud and Ampache for music. Additionally I would like to connect it to my 4K TV where I would then watch 4K movies and listen to music on my stereo system.

I know that RP64 is capable of being a server but what is the story with 4K videos? An additional challenge would be crash resistance of the graphical part. What do you think of my plan?

After we spent almost three week everyday some time until we managed to install LibreOffice on the PinePhone:

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=16614

and we spent one more week everyday some time until we where able to have a remote desktop to our PinePhone:

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=16775

and did about a day of google search about HDMI adapters, we are facing the following problems:

- the PinePhone keyboard works, but not the special characters
- we have often to pull out the battery since the phone stucks
- the Bluetooth mouse repeateatly dissconnects

- connected via VNC to a Windows PC
- mouse works, keyboards unreliable

- then we looked once more at Martijn Braams setup, where everything seems to work which does not work on our setup:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBeza4UNOm8

and ask ourself, how he managed this:

- When will the PinePhone USB-C dock Martijn  used be available again?

https://pine64.com/product/pinephone-usb-c-docking-bar/

- Which was exaclaty the distro, in which Martijns  USB-C dock worked? Which day, which, month, which year?  (several reported, the  USB-C dock does not work with the PinePhone).

- Martijn said in his youtube video, even the Ethernet cable adapter worked, which is great.

- We suppose what looks so easy was the result of many hours of hard work. We do not want to reinvent the wheel and want the exact setup Martijn used.

- Martijn was able to use an external keyboard with trackpad, eventually also the result of a long evaluation process. Maybe it is worth to find out which is the exact keyboard model:

- The keyboard is a lenovo thinkpad usb keyboard with trackpad,  Martijn mentioned it in his youtube video

- Everything seems to work perfectly in Martijns Youtube video, from keyboard to trackpad, to Ethernet to HDMI monitor to LibreOffice etc. Almost nothing seems to work in our setup.

Therefore we would be happy to know as many details as possible about  Martijns setup and how to build it up yourselves.

How can this be solved.