Is there any distro that will run OBS Studio on the Pinebook Pro? If not, any alternative?

Hello everybody,

I have a few questions around ubuntu touch and I hope somebody can give me some answers:

1) I understand the desktop environment of ubuntu touch is called Lomiri. So, does Lomiri run on X11 or on Wayland? If on X11, when will it run on Wayland?
2) Why can we not run regular desktop apps like Libreoffice or Firefox on Lomiri? Is it planned to enable these apps and if yes, when will this probably be the case?

For question 2: I see that this is possible for PostmarketOS and Mobian, and I really really think that this is a must to be attractive to users in medium / long term.

I am curious about your answers!

Best,
Thomas

Has anyone considered making an alternative version of PinePhone with an e-ink screen?
In 2020, with phones like Hisense A5 released, it should be possible. And also much nicer to have this device run fully on OSS, instead of some manufacturer bloatware that all the present options are full of.

I think a simple black and white screen would be sufficient. Also screen latency would not be that much of an issue, as long as the basic phone functionalities are usable.
I believe it would be a perfect device for people who want to maintain the ability to call or text someone via the mobile network or the internet and do some occasional web browsing or navigation, while minimising the distraction and eye strain of their phone and also the amount of adversarial software they run on their device. Heck, it could even be a decent e-reader!

For people more familiar with PinePhone hardware, what would need to be done to make some e-ink screen compatible? How much change in hardware (and software) would it entail? In case this idea gains any traction, I would be very happy to participate on developing the software and testing it out (although I acknowledge this is quite premature and might be more appropriate to say among developers of some particular OS).

Anyway, I'm very interested in your stance on this.
(Apologies if this is a wrong section to post this, will be glad to move it into a more appropriate one.)

Hi All,

I am not much of a programmer, but I think I can finally contribute something to this great community.

From my point of view, the most eagerly anticipated feature of the Pinephone must be its future ability to boot into several operating systems without having to swap memory cards. Some users already reported that their phone cases started crack from repeatedly opening and closing them - which proves the point that the current design is not ideal.

Two months ago, the development of the "Pineloader" was announced, promising OS selection via a menu at startup, but it has not become available yet. This is why I decided to put my own effort into a solution (Did someone say I am allowed to tinker with my phone?).

The result is a script file called switchboot.sh which is available for download here:

http://www.99computing.co.uk/download/Pi...irlist.php

It assumes that you have Ubuntu Touch in your phone's internal memory and Mobian on an SD card (more operating systems may follow later).

All you need to do is copy this file into both OSs. For simplicity and easy access, I suggest

/home/phablet  in the "userdata" partition of Ubuntu (you can use the Jumpdrive mode by pressing Volume Up at boot time until the LED turns green, then connect to your pc) and

/home/mobian  in the "rootfs" partition of Mobian (use your PC card reader)

Now you can open the terminal app (recommended: open a fresh instance if you have been doing other things before) and type in

sudo bash switchboot.sh

Your phone will take about one minute to shut down and restart in the opposite OS. That's it, plain and simple.

If you want to restart your phone without switching, just do it the normal way.

What is the secret?

With some experimenting, I found out that Mobian will not start if it cannot find the file Image.gz in its boot partition. This does not even have to be deleted. I just renamed it so that Mobian wil not recognise it. When the phone fails to boot from the SD card, it reverts back to its internal memory. If you later want to use the SD card again, the file just needs to be renamed back. The the script simply does the renaming for me.

I have several plans how it can be improved and possibly made into an app. But please bear with me, I am on a learning curve.

In the meantime, please feel free to download the file, to comment here and tinker with it yourself. All I ask is share your findings so that we can work on it together.

Have fun!

I just received my Pine A64 LTS V1.2 board, 7" LCD TOUCH SCREEN PANEL, and playbox enclosure.





I flashed an sd card with Linux Armbian Focal:



https://dl.armbian.com/pine64so/Focal_current



If the LCD is connected via the DSI port, the boot freezes during UBoot:








If I disconnect the LCD from the DSI connector, we get past that part immediately:







and it eventually brings us to the login prompt.




I tried re-seating the LCD connector. What am I missing here?






Cheers!

Attached Files

  2020-07-15 pine64 boot 1.PNG (Size: 20.39 KB / Downloads: 653)
  2020-07-15 pine64 boot 2.PNG (Size: 32.8 KB / Downloads: 382)

Hello,

I plan to use a sopine with two wifi usb dongles and one camera on the CSI connector (ribbon).
Due to space constraints (I need to fit the system in a wall plug), I ordered a custom design baseboard.

The company designing it told us that the sopine does not allows using the two USB ports and the CSI port at the same time.
I looked for any information that would confirm this statement, but I found nothing on the Wiki documents.

Do you have any experience or document that would corroborate their claim?

I decided to increase the battery capacity of my PBP by adding an additional 2600mAh LiPo battery in parallel to the stock battery - images attached.

Sharing some tips for anyone else who may want to attempt the mod.

• Due to the narrowing of the PBP towards the trackpad, ensure that the battery you want to add will fit with the lower panel screwed on.
  
• The stock battery is comprised of two LiPo cells in parallel, a plastic frame with four screw holes, a dense foam filler (as there is some empty space between the LiPos and the plastic frame), taped together with large black adhesive sheets.
  
• The tape/adhesive sheet used to assemble the battery isn't TOO difficult to work with but the adhesive on the larger sheets may come off as you peel it back.
  
• There is a battery protection circuit that electronically resides between the LiPo cells and the battery connector that connects to the main board.
  
• The battery protection circuit has six pads - three for battery negative, and three for battery positive.
  
• The additional battery can be connected to available or occupied pads on the battery protection circuit as needed - you should only do so when the voltages of the batteries are nearly identical.
  
• For my mod, I removed a portion of the plastic frame and foam to make room for the additional cell so that the battery would be more compact overall.
  

Attached Files

  IMG_6570 - Copy.JPG (Size: 231.75 KB / Downloads: 938)
  IMG_6571 - Copy (Large).JPG (Size: 284.64 KB / Downloads: 887)
  IMG_6572 - Copy - Copy (Large).JPG (Size: 363.88 KB / Downloads: 898)

I get a new Pinebook Pro like a month ago run ok, then after did the first update, all seem ok, turn it off. The next day when I turn it on the orange light never turns green and a black screen there, won't do anything. What to do send it back and ask for my money or do Pine64 have any kind of customer technical support for these types of issues. I ask because I can't find anything to help me fix this issue. The only support to be found will be of course sales support. Please get back to me thank you!

After some experimentation in my own fork, then returning to regular Mobian, I've come up with some suggestions for how to improve Mobian which I don't think belongs on the bug tracker, at least not without some discussion first.

1. Replace Fractal with the flathub version of Nheko. This brings E2E support but it doesn't fit in the general theme of Phosh. The version from the repo segfaults and I've been unable to make my own builds work any better.

2. Copy over the udev rules from PostmarketOS to create EG25 symlinks in /dev/. I don't know if it's useful to anyone else but I feel more comfortable using the symlinks than trying to remember which ttyUSB[0-3] is which.

3. Periodic wakeup from deep sleep (perhaps we have an RTC we can trigger?) to refresh notifications from email and such. Even something like 30 minutes of sleep and a few seconds of activity with the display turned off before going back into deep sleep would help for me to keep track of my emails. Might not be frequent enough for instant messaging but I'll leave that up for discussion. Ideally this would be configurable.

4. GPSd. This is a big question, do we want it or not? Many desktop applications use it but they have questionable value on such a small screen anyway. Not sure if it breaks the new ModemManager style location access but the GPSd tools "gpsmon" and "cgps" have both helped be debug bad GPS reception.

5. Side arrow keys on either side of the space bar. I've already implemented this in my fork (where I also adapted the improved terminal keyboard to get the full screen width) but some people might find them annoying.

6. Have a preloaded whitelist for applications which should scale automatically. For instance, Maps is pretty useless without scaling turned on. When upstream Phoc/Phosh figures out how to solve this we can just remove the whitelist.

7. I've found that doing a renice of the "phoc", "phosh", "squeekboard" and "calls" processes I get what feels like a much more responsive system. I haven't found anything it interferes with yet but I also haven't had time to set it up to be automatically applied after boot.

8. Call recording. This was one of my pet peeves with Android, being designed specifically to prevent call recording. Mobian doesn't have those restrictions but since I had a huge pile of work to do dropped in my lap about 2 weeks ago I haven't had much time to figure out how the audio routing is done. Ideally I'd record the two sound streams going in and out of the modem directly as separate channels to a stereo file, which would make it easy to import the audio into Audacity if I'd ever need it. This might be better suited upstream in the calls app rather than in our local version, but I'd need to know how audio routing is implemented first.

9. Easy Anbox setup. I know this is a controversial issue but there needs to be a more streamlined setup process. I could throw together a quick script to do it semi-automatically but it's pretty useless if it doesn't result in more eyes on the Android app support. There are still a couple of Android apps which I need until we have suitable replacements, notably Slack and Signal with support for calls. Even with Anbox installed the Android apps have issues with audio. I don't know what to do about this, all I know is that I can't ignore the issue anymore.

10. VAAPI for hardware accelerated video decoding. I was working on this until 2 weeks ago and hit a brick wall when the Aarch64 GNU assembler refused to cooperate with me. The code doesn't look that hard to understand so I still want to take a shot at it but with a different approach; instead of porting to Aarch64 I could port it over to generic C code. The reasoning here is that i think it was made in assembler to begin with because it was supposed to run on very low end ARMv7 chips where every instruction counts. Our A53 cores a a lot beefier than that and while I'm not saying we can waste cycles, I think we can leave it up to the C compiler to optimize the code better than I can. Any help with this is very welcome.

Some of these are fairly straight forward changes while others are longer term projects. Please comment on these even if you disagree with me, feedback on things like these is important. I will open GitLab issues for the features people want and go back to the drawing board for the rest of them.

On build 81, but this problem has existed since I started using the phone on OTA 2.

In the USA. Using fresh AT&T prepaid account with 8GB of data. Have calls and text.

Phone recognizes cell data network, there's the little box with the L next to the signal strength indicator. However, when I try to use any apps requiring data, they fail to use the network. When I use Morph, it is immediately redirected to an attcompute.com address, and I get the message that "It looks like you want to use data but have none available."

I've checked my AT&T account online, and of course I have all 8 GB still available.

The APN is "phone" and I've tried changing it to another APN recommended by AT&T for Android and iPhones, which is NXTGENPHONE. That just eliminates the data connection entirely. I've checked my IMEI, and my account has the correct IMEI for my phone.

There's a disconnect going on between the phone and my AT&T account, but of course AT&T support provides no solutions. I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions.

(BTW, I have no problems with data on wifi).

Ideas, thoughts, suggestions?