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.
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:
Code:
#!/bin/bash
gnome-session-inhibit --inhibit 'idle:suspend' zenity --info --text "Inhibiting sleep. Press ok when ready to stop this"
Just make a .desktop file for it and give it an icon and you're good.
My Thoughts on the Phone
Despite the issues, I like the phone a lot. I'm fairly new to smartphones as I've never been able to trust them from a privacy standpoint until now. Plus, I love having devices that I can understand and work well with my existing computers (being a linux phone). Some of the issues I have mentioned don't appear to be in the issues list for mobian, but I figure I'll throw this at you all before I submit anything to ensure I'm not missing something obvious.
I really appreciate the community around this, and thank all involved in making this a reality!
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 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:
Code:
#!/bin/sh
# The post-processing script gets called after taking a burst of
# pictures into a temporary directory. The first argument is the
# directory containing the raw files in the burst. The contents
# are 1.dng, 2.dng.... up to the number of photos in the burst.
#
# The second argument is the filename for the final photo without
# the extension, like "/home/user/Pictures/IMG202104031234"
#
# The post-processing script is responsible for cleaning up
# temporary directory for the burst.
if [ "$#" -ne 2 ]; then
echo "Usage: $0 [burst-dir] [target-name]"
exit 2
fi
# Move the first frame of the burst into ~/Pictures as the raw photo
mv "$BURST_DIR/1.dng" "$TARGET_NAME.dng"
# Clean up the temp dir containing the burst
rm -rf "$BURST_DIR"
exit 0
The following is saved to ~/bin/pp (the short name makes it easy to type via on-screen keyboard):
Code:
#!/bin/bash
# The post-processing script processes and converts the .dng files
# in ~/Pictures to .jpg files.
# Define processing function
process() {
CONVERT="/usr/bin/convert"
DCRAW=/usr/lib/libraw/dcraw_emu
EXIFTOOL=/usr/bin/exiftool
TIFF_EXT="dng.tiff"
# -fbdd 1 Raw denoising with FBDD
set -- -fbdd 1
# +M use embedded color matrix
# -H 4 Recover highlights by rebuilding them
# -o 1 Output in sRGB colorspace
# -q 3 Debayer with AHD algorithm
# -T Output TIFF
echo "Enhancing raw image, convert to tiff..."
$DCRAW +M -H 4 -o 1 -q 3 -T "$TARGET_NAME.dng" "$TARGET_NAME.dng"
echo "Converting to jpg..."
$CONVERT "$TARGET_NAME.$TIFF_EXT" -sharpen 0x1.0 "$TARGET_NAME.jpg"
echo "Copying exif data to jpg..."
# Copy the exif data over from the tiff to the jpeg
# since imagemagick is stupid
$EXIFTOOL -tagsFromfile "$TARGET_NAME.$TIFF_EXT" \
-software="Megapixels" \
-overwrite_original "$TARGET_NAME.jpg" >/dev/null
$EXIFTOOL -tagsFromFile @ "-ModifyDate>DateTimeOriginal" \
-overwrite_original "$TARGET_NAME.jpg" >/dev/null
# We get an error in the loop if there are no .dng files, so check first.
if [ ! -f ~/Pictures/*.dng ]; then
echo "No .dng files found, aborting."
exit 0
fi
# Loop through dng files and call process() function
pushd ~/Pictures >/dev/null
for file in *.dng
do
TARGET_NAME=`echo $file | cut -d . -f 1`
if [ ! -f $TARGET_NAME.jpg ]; then
echo '----------------------------------------'
echo Processing $file...
process
echo '----------------------------------------'
fi
done
popd >/dev/null
So basically you just take your photos and the .dng files are quickly deposited in ~/Photos. Then when you want to process them and convert to jpg you just run "pp" from the terminal. (An icon on the screen could be set up for this if desired.) When satisfied that the jpg files are OK you can delete the original dng files to save space if desired.
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!
Just got my pinecil and it looks good. Did a quick test with lead free solder and it worked fine.
The only barrel 5.5 mm power supply I had in the house was 12 volts. (no USB C in the house either) With my temperature set up to 360 C it barely maintained it that hot. I put a watt meter on the AC electric side if the cord and it showed a maximum of 19 watts, even though the 12 vDC converter can deliver 3 amps. . . 36 watts.
I see in the wiki in the QC discussion, it says 12v will only deliver 18 watts. I assumed that was a QC limitation. Is the 18 watts at 12 volts always a limitation? (I’ll go read some datasheets)
I have been wearing my Pinetime basically nonstop since I got it. I took it off just now and there is a burn mark on my arm where I was wearing it. Has anyone else experienced this, and should I be worried?
I'm confident this is not any form of allergic reaction to the materials of the device as this burn is exclusively under the sensors on the backside of the pinetime. I think the sensors somehow burnt me, but the device itself never got hot to the touch.
I've started playing music in my headphones without realizing it's also blaring from the speakers in public enough times now to try to fix this.
If headphones are in on boot, sound will come out of both them and the speakers unless you remove them and put them back. How to make only play from headphones if they are in on boot?
