for mobile work via terminal/ssh I am looking for a notebook with very long battery life (as long as possible, 20 hours, better more), so a very efficient device (like the pinebook (pro)) makes sense. But unfortunately, the battery capacity is very small (for laptop standards), so the battery lifetime is by far not as good as possible.
But I have a pinephone: the hardware is fast enough for all the applications needed, and it even has an integrated WAN modem :-)
Unfortunately, for the described use case, the battery is too small, the screen is too small, and there is no keyboard.
So there is an interesting idea:
Why not having a "laptop", that consists only of the following components:
– screen (e.g. 13" or 14") (full hd, non glare)
– very high quality keyboard(!)
– very high capacity battery (60-80 Wh)
– some USB ports, and a power connector
– a slot (on the left or right side) for inserting the pine phone
As soon as the phone is inserted, the screen and keyboard of the laptop is available/enabled to the pinephone, which is then powered/charged from the "laptop" battery... which could easily provide power for 20h, 30h, or even more (also depends on the screen).
Bonus: the top-side of the pinephone slot is "open", the pinephone touchscreen could stay enabled and optionally usable as a second screen (like a non-centered touchpad on the left or right side, but with color screen :-))
Such a "mobile dock" should be easy to realize... and can perfectly replace a laptop and powerbank for many usecases.
Perhaps this idea is not new.... but in case it is: I really hope you like it :-)
So, here it is.
Manjaro Phosh, 3G_RAM/32GB_STORAGE PinePhone board.
After discovering that my pinephone stopped charging, I tore it down to see the main diode on the usb-c board blew. Replaced it and started charging. But now I can not keep convergence active on any external display using, a NexDock lapdock(usb-c to usb-c alt mode), an Anker HDMI dock, or the official pinephone dock. The external display just flickers and will not stabilize. A quick connect, disconnect, repeat issue. I thought I may have fixed it by tearing it down and unplug, then reapply the ribbon cable on the usb-c board and main board.
External displays worked again, or so i thought. Cut to class today. screen kept flickering, so I switched out my SIM card to my backup android phone and tried to dock it again, it worked.
The thing that baffles me is this, any other peripheral works without fail, (ie flash drive, mouse, keyboard)
After trying this multiple times, using an external display will ONLY work without the SIM card inserted.
I switched off the WLAN DIP, SIM inserted, wont work. WLAN DIP switched on, no SIM, convergence works flawlessly.
Should I just get a new mainboard, as I am thinking the diode didn't blow soon enough before some extra voltage screwed up the main board.
There are other threads on modem firmware. However, this post is specifically targeting the use of the gnome-firmware application to update the modem firmware.
I recently installed the gnome-firmware package on mobian. As far as I know gnome-firmware is not installed by default on mobian. I wonder if it has been tested under mobian. When I opened it three devices were listed for possible updating, only the Qualcomm modem actually had an update available. The available release is designated 0.6.1, offered by Biktorgj. It is also designated as a Downgrade (maybe due to a different versioning system than Qualcomm).
I'd like to know if anyone has used gnome-firmware to install this update and if they found the process to be without issues. Did the update improve the functionality of the modem? What improvements were noticeable.
Has anyone been able to restore the original modem firmware using gnome-firmware?
I do a lot of work on Wireshark, but mainly on the dissector side (eg, 802.11 dissector stuff these days.)
I am thinking of exploring the possibility of using Wireshark on a phone form-factor device and the PinePhone Pro looks like it might be usable.
However, what sort of attachments would I need (keyboard, monitor, external NVMe storage) and is it possible to build with cmake and gcc etc on such a device.
I guess the flash storage is going to be much slower than NVMe ... maybe a cross development environment would be better. Ie, build on Ubuntu targeting ARM, and then install on the PinePhone Pro.
I have a PBP (2021 batch) and screwed up the original Manjaro KDE eMMC image with some combination of cups and display resolution mischief. I have been using Armbian successfully from a microSD card but want to fix my eMMC boot. The only image of Majaro that targets eMMC specifically is this one, but it's way out of date. I have since tried to update packages etc but am running into pretty difficult challenges getting things updated to a point where I could update the OS to a current version (namely I can't access the current mirror list). This is preventing me from using the manjaro-arm-installer package that would help update OS. Has anyone else run into this issue and solved it? Or is there another OS with a current eMMC version?
Audio volume and its indicator on the screen goes the opposite direction of the up or down buttons when they are pressed. Repeating the button press eventually fixes the problem temporarily until the desired volume is reached. Do you have this problem?
i have the software application running that states there are updates. but it just does not install any of them. when i click on "install" or "upgrade" or what that button shows, it shortly says "cancel" and thats it, nothing else happens.
i thought i could do that manually with a terminal like apk update, but i dont have any root password
so how can i install updates without all the time reinstalling the complete OS?
