I've had my PBP since January 13, 2020.  I didn't use it much for months but since November or so it was my main machine, using it sitting in a recliner.  Which means it got opened and closed maybe 6-10 times a day.  A month or so ago I noticed a crack in the case over where the power adapter plugs in, which opens up a bit as I'm opening the lid.

Suddenly today I hear snapping noises on the right side when I try to close the lid.  So I stopped with it open maybe 45 degrees, logged in over ssh and wifi from another machine to shut it down and there it sits.

Last time I looked a few days ago at the parts page I could no longer buy just the plastic case piece that failed first, I'd have to buy one with a keyboard.  I don't know what failed that's preventing it from closing.  Ameridroid doesn't seem to have many parts in stock so they'll have to come from China (months).  I'll try to get another nvme USB adapter and rescue my nvme drive out of it.  Hinge problems like this in laptops go back 20 years or more, I haven't seen one in years so I thought all the manufacturers had learned how to prevent them.

Hello forum, this is my first post!

I would like to share my experience with the PinePhone. I ordered the Mobian CE with dock and received it on 1.3.21. I started using it the day after, so a week ago. Short background information about myself: I have never owned what is commonly called a Smartphone, my current phone is an old Nokia E71, and as far as Linux-phones are concerned: I had an Openmoko and unfortunately lost some money in the Neo900 project.

With all this in mind: the PinePhone is great so far! Apart from the announced CNY delivery delay it arrived very quickly too.

Positive points:
-The convergence dock is magic! It's so convenient to have normal wired network! I haven't even tried the other ports yet. I remember the fiddling with USB networking on the Openmoko, this just works.
-Calls/sms/wifi/mobile data/hotspot: just works.
-Disk encryption: just works.
-Youtube: it looks like I was lucky, but worked out of the box after initial upgrade.
-The buttons on the side do what I thought they would!

Things that aren't 100% great yet:
-In general the UI has some rough edges (phosh), but I never got stuck or had to abandon what I wanted to do so far
-Different sound/vibrating profiles don't seem to work correctly yet, and the phone doesn't seem to wake up upon an sms (no flashing LED) - I probably need to spend some more time figuring this out.
-Only US QWERTY keyboard, I'm missing french and german accents and umlauts (again, maybe I haven'd done enough research yet)
-Webapps created according to mobian wiki with firefox -ssb seem to not have network connection after waking up the phone. It starts working once I loaded a site with the normal firefox.
-I need to use the hydrogen webapp for matrix, as mirage cannot connect to my private server (this is of course unrelated to the pinephone)
-The camera app is still in its early stages (it works fine though)
-I cannot use Tidal, due to the widevine DRM not being available for arm64. This is possibly fixable with anbox, but I'm currently hesitant to install it. Maybe one day this will change?

The fact that my PC, my server and now my mobile phone all run Debian is fantastic, I find this extremely convenient. I would not recommend this to someone who doesn't want to ssh onto the PinePhone or who is afraid of restarting a systemd unit via the onboard terminal, but otherwise my expectations are exceeded by far!

Hello,

Despite some software fixes for the screen backlight flicker on PinePhone, the primary issue remains, meaning that the intensity of screen backlight changes somewhat erratically and very annoyingly when there's communication on the internal I2C bus, such as when the operating system talks to the LTE modem, or when the total power draw of the phone changes significantly, for example when scrolling the screen contents.

I've already researched the possible ways for fixing the flicker by doing some hardware modifications, and I've reached the point where I'd need to secure a development platform.  In other words, I'd need a development PinePhone, which would be used for trying out hardware modifications.  My goal would be to end up with hardware modifications and clear instructions that are as simple as possible, and easily doable by many PinePhone owners.

Understandingly, I do not want to try out those hardware modifications on my own PinePhone, because there's always a chance for the electronics to produce a puff of magic smoke.

Thus, I'm asking for a way to get a PCB 1.2b PinePhone, for the above-described development purposes.  Ideally, I would like to get an additional, separate PCBA 1.2b board, in case something bad happens to the original board.  Also, please, keep in mind that I cannot guarantee that the whole endeavour will actually result in the desired hardware fix, but I would do my best.

Finally, there are two questions:

1. Would the Pine64 team be willing to donate the required hardware?
2. If not, would the forum members be willing to pitch in?  I can accept PayPal payments.

Any help would be appreciated!

Hi guys,

I am not really sure whether this is a hardware or software issue:

Gnome-Maps (or Open Street Maps in the Browser) never gets the location right.

When I am at home, Maps shows some address in Frankfurt, Germany (200 km off); when I go out, the marker never moves on the map but only jumps to slightly closer places once in a while: to the middle of the Rhine (10 kms off), some address in Bonn (5 km off) or some adress in Cologne (35 kms off).

No matter where exactly I am, it is always that particular park in Cologne, that particular spot in the Rhine and so on.

Is there anything I can do?

Best, Anna

Hey all,

I wrote a kind of dumb script to turn your phone into a cyberpunk accessory. Since Kali and Mobian are both based off Debian all it really does is take a Mobian install and remove most of the packages, then add the Kali repositories to apt and install all the tools. When done it takes up about 30 GB (if more of the base OS can be removed, please let me know. I'm no expert on this. Also if packaging this into an image is an option, I'm all ears). It also adjusts the theme and background, and changes the default username from 'mobian' to 'h4x0r' (obviously). I'd also change my ssh port to '1337' but that's just

If you're pretty new to Linux but with aspirations to become a world-class (white-hat) hacker you can:


- install Mobian to an SD card, following the instructions here: https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php?id=install. Just a note, that if you install an encrypted version via the installer it will alter the UUID of the eMMC-LUKS-partition if you already have an encrypted version of Mobian on you eMMC. Instructions for restoring the original OS can be found here: https://gitlab.com/mobian1/issues/-/issues/235. I'm not sure how this bug affects other installs.


- open up a terminal (King's Cross) in Mobian and type:

Hey all

Does anyone else use lightdm-mobile-greeter with mobian?
https://raatty.club:3000/raatty/lightdm-mobile-greeter

I ran across this on the fedora pinephone distro. It’s awesome for convergence because it lets you choose between multiple sessions including phosh and any other session you’d like whilst otherwise being like a phone lock screen. I had to build it for Debian, it needed git flex bison make cargo glib2.0 libcairo2-dev libatk1.0-dev libpango1.0-dev libgdk-pixbuf2.0-dev liblightdm-gobject-dev libgdk3.0-cil-dev libgtk-3-dev libhandy-0.0-dev

I removed development packages after the build. So far it’s working really well, it would be awesome to get this into Debian (I sadly don’t have those skills)

Hello, I'm working on setting up a pinephone for the first time. When it boots up, the Mobian logo comes up briefly. Then the phone enters what looks like a Command centre with a keyboard at the bottom. 

No matter what I enter, I get this string momentarily before I'm back at the keyboard: begin: mounting root file system ... Begin: running scripts/local-top ...

These are the six icons I see when looking at the pinephone's contents on my mac: boot.scr, image.gz, initramfs.gz, sun50i-a64-pinephone-1.0.dtb, sun50i-a64-pinephone-1.1.dtb, sun501-a64-pinephone-1.2.dtb

The phone also only boots up when connected to a power source. 

Will I need to get an SD card and try to follow the instructions to flash a new OS onto the phone that way? Anyone else encountered this problem?

Ordering a battery from the Pinestore is sometimes expensive for the shipment and import taxes.
Looking for an alternative I've ordered the PATONA Battery EB-BJ700CBE 3000mAh on Amazon.
So far seems to last more than the original battery and reaches the 75% as maximum.

I'm waiting for order the pinephone being out of order about one month ago 

https://pine64.com/product-category/pine...46c16e2e66

It appears MIPS has become a member of RISC-V: https://tuxphones.com/mips-joins-risc-v-...-standard/

I would really recommend checking out MIPS, these processors can be found in the wild in lots of random low-power devices, including WiFi routers.

MIPS could become *very* interesting if they start adding ASEs (application specific extensions) to their 64 bit RISC processors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIPS_architecture

For example an MCU (great for getting Linux running), SIMD, virtualization, multi-threading and 3D graphics. As it becomes a member of RISC-V, in theory these features will be open, allowing for rock solid kernel development rather than some reverse engineering effort.