When booting up with Plasma Mobile, the screen brightness is set to minimum.

Looking at the action menu at the top, I can find two icons which look like any other ions of suns indicating brightness. In this case there is no slider, and pressing on the icons does nothing.

Any ideas?


Thanks

Hello again Everyone,
I've been using my new Pine Phone since the weekend and I have been very pleased with it. That being said, a longer lasting battery would be nice. I have no doubts that the community will continue optimizing software for minimal power consumption. In the meantime, are there any aftermarket batteries available in the J7 form factor with greater capacity?

I'm hoping something like that exists and Pine64 was just trying to keep prices down with the included battery. I remember there was this YouTube video where he finds batteries compatible with his iPhone 7 but with greater storage from Chinese street vendors and the J7 is a fairly common type itself.
https://youtu.be/faLaueR-Pgk

It'd be worth it for people like myself who use their Pine Phones as daily drivers to pay for a premium battery

So far though all I've found is this Reddit thread where they say they found a "replacement" and one of the replies mentions a "fat" battery which will work at the cost of the Pine Phone's back casing not fitting overtop.
https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/...nd_tested/

Alternatively has anyone modeled a 3D printable larger back casing that can house a fat battery?

Has anyone used "preload" on the pinephone? (link: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Preload)
With preload the startup time of programs should be reduced, in exchange for a little bit more ram-usage. And I can imagine that it costs a little bit of battery.
I have tried it (on mobian) for a day and it seems to work. I have not done any measurements, but will compare with my 2nd pinephone soon. 

I'm curious whether other people have tried "preload", or maybe can benefit from it.

I'm hoping for possibly more technical explanations from people involved or those that just know.

The apps I'm looking forward to in the future are Cawbird (Twitter client) Giara (a Reddit client) and Komikku (a comic reading client). Looking at these apps, they seem to use the same UI framework which looks great, but actually using these apps is less than pleasant. Scrolling is jittery, and that assumes the app is responsive enough to let you scroll.

Is it just a less-than-stellar web toolkit that both these apps are using? I just recently discovered GTKeddit, which runs like a champ in comparison. It Has GTK in the name so I think it uses the same UI framework at least. Does anyone have any ideas?

So I got my Pinephone last Friday and I would like it to be my daily driver. The problem with that is that the modem doesn't want to connect to my carrier (Freedom Mobile, in Canada) when I'm at home or work. Somewhere on my commute though, the stars align and I receive any and all texts and missed call notifications that have built up over time.

I've been poking the modem with AT+ commands to try to figure out what's going on. To be clear, this is the behavior I've been observing sitting on my home workstation, ssh'd in.


My atinout session goes as follows. If you want to follow along I'm using the manual here.

Quote:AT+QCFG="band",0,2000001048,0

Quote:AT+COPS=?

+COPS: (1,"Freedom","Freedom","302490",7),(1,"TELUS","TELUS","302220",7),(1,"Bell","Bell","302610",7),(1,"Rogers Wireless","ROGERS","302720",7),,(0-4),(0-2)

Quote:AT+QNWINFO

+QNWINFO: "FDD LTE","302490","LTE BAND 4",2225

Quote:+QNWINFO: "FDD LTE","302490","LTE BAND 13",5205

Quote:+QNWINFO: No Service

Quote:AT+QSPN

ERROR

Quote:AT+CREG?

+CREG: 1,2

Quote:AT+COPS=1,0,"Freedom"

+CME ERROR: 30

I put this into the general discussion section because it seems to be a problem with my hardware, not just Linux.

My Pinebook Pro seems to have a strange issue that I couldn't google. This post is pretty much a better version of my older post with more details about the problem. I could not solve the problem since creating that post, and I finally found some time to look more into it and ask more questions on this forum.
So my problem is that when I shake my laptop, close the bottom lid, or sometimes don't do anything remotely destructive at all, the eMMC gets disconnected from the board in a very weird way. Reinserting the eMMC does solve the problem, but not permanently. What's really strange about the way it gets disconnected is that the U-boot partition still gets recognized by the firmware, and it can even start booting up a kernel, but then the initramfs fails to locate the root partition and the booting process stops. The eMMC can also get disconnected while the system is running, which causes a lot of I/O errors and a complete breakdown of the running system (basically what happens when you unmount root). The only distros that I've tried are Manjaro ARM (XFCE) and elementary OS. Should I try other distros? Is it a problem with my eMMC? Maybe the main board? Should I hold the eMMC harder in place? Am I doing something wrong? Please help me.

That's basically it. I tried putting postmarket/phosh on an SD card, and it just kept booting directly into manjaro. I got a new SD card in case the old one was faulty. Same thing. Tried again with jumpdrive. Then suddenly the phone won't even power on at all. No LED, no vibration, nothing. Trying to find the next step to at least unbrick this thing.

Seriously to ANYTHING

I thought maybe because my main ppc is a homebrew linux pc that MAYBE the BT wasnt solid, so I tried 3 win10 laptops and my android phone.

I can pickup the TV set across the yard at my neighbors, nada from the PT.

I bought the dev kit and never had time to work w/ it so to support the cause I bought the sealed version as well

and well THATS not working out so well.

I have no issue thinking im doing something wrong, but I started because the date/time out of the box is wrong and w/ nothing in the box suggesting a fix google found:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFk_K53U_Oc&t=98s

which probably works great, just not w/ mine?

should i just determine ive lost another $30 and toss it?

ANy and all ideas greatfully appreciated

Thanks

j

Here's how we compress Sensor Data with CBOR... And transmit over LoRaWAN on PineCone BL602 and PineDio Stack BL604

Encode Sensor Data with CBOR on BL602

As already mentioned elsewhere thanks to Daniel Thompson's excellent pinebook-pro-debian-installer as intermediate stepping stone i was able to get a full Debian/unstable running, including Debian kernels 5.10 and latest 5.14.0-2 (as of today). 

The system has been installed on a 512GB Sabrent Rock Nano NVME drive and in a second step also on the internal eMMC storage. The latter is mainly used to host the /boot partition components needed to start up the system on the NVME drive. With the exception of the /boot partition, both systems have the root partition, swap and everything else running on a LUKS encrypted LVM. This works well enough for me to use as a daily driver on the road.

In addtion to all the above described i also created a full minimal Debian/unstable system with almost the same features on an 8GB SD card. The installation is fairly basic but with lots of excellent CLI utilities that might be handy as a rescue system to fix broken installations. So if you are an experienced Linux user accustomed to mainly work on the command line, then this might be the right tool for you.

The folder /root/mrfixit_u-boot/ contains Mr.Fixit's u-boot update files which might be useful to restore a broken u-boot with sdcard boot capabilities on the eMMC. It has LVM and cryptsetup installed to be able to externally manage encrypted LVM volumes. The system is using 50% of the supplied RAM as zram based swap.

The default GUI is using Window Maker and is largely based on components formerly provided by the now dormant Window Maker Live project (by yours truly). Don't be surprised about the two terminal windows running a screen session when you login. Here is a first visual impression of what to expect: i.imgur.com/59s2a1e.png.

For people preferring a more traditional desktop there is the option to switch to XFCE4 instead, which provides it's components also in the Window Maker desktop.

The graphical login manager is wmlive-gdm, a fork of the old GTK2 based gdm version 2.20.11, which was the last release still providing usable XDMCP capabilities. The XDMCP capabilities are the main reason why i still favour it over lighdm. Since the gdm is probably subject to bitrot,  for security reasons it might not be advisable to use it outside of closed local networks. 

In case you'd like to switch login managers, lightdm is also installed on the system and can be activated instead of wmlive-gdm by using the following commands:

# dpkg-reconfigure lightdm
# systemctl enable lightm

As the very name of the xz compressed SD card image already suggests, the login can be done with user id 'rock' and password 'changeme'. You might want to change the password to something more to your liking. The root password is currently locked, so please use sudo to switch to root for any sysadmin related tasks.

You will require an SD card of at least 8GB capacity for this image. To put it on an SD card, first unpack it with unxz and then use dd to actually write it:

# dd if=pbp-debian-sid_arm64-sdcard_uid:rock_pw:changeme.img of=/dev/mmcblkx bs=1M status=progress

Or simply do a:

# xzcat pbp-debian-sid_arm64-sdcard_uid:rock_pw:changeme.img.xz > /dev/mmcblkx

Please replace the trailing 'x' of the device name with the proper digit representing the actual SD card device after verifying its name with lsblk.

It might be possible to write it the same way to the internal eMMC, but you'd surely need to restore u-boot afterwards.
I haven't tried this myself so please be aware that you are on your own should you try this.

And last no least, here is the download link: 1fichier.com/?spb5mf92cspc0clhdvlf
Here is the MD5 checksum of the image: affde27f458890bff1f258b531e5ea6b  pbp-debian-sid_arm64-sdcard_uid:rock_pw:changeme.img.xz

EDIT: As chance had it, i found a few glitches in the above linked download and thus produced a refreshed image with a few changes:

* The secondary 5.10 kernel has been removed, leaving only the 5.14 kernel.
* Added btrfs related packages and fixed some minor menu issues of the Window Maker desktop.
* On the plus side, this xz compressed SD card image is now 50MB smaller than the first one.

New download link: 1fichier.com/?1xbzqoe5h0f48ux0bgmp
MD5 checksum of the new image: d2a1e88a559ae156551b54b903ef9302 pbp-debian-sid_arm64-sdcard_uid_rock_pw_changeme.img.xz

If you already downloaded the first SD card image, don't waste your precious bandwith to replace it with the new one.

Please don't expect a perfect system and be prepared to deal with the unexpected.

This is free software, so you are entitled to use and reuse it as such.

Hope it helps!