Putting all in a thread what has taken me like a week to gather from various other threads, lots of frustrating trial and error, and stupid mistakes on my part.

In my opinion, the OG Pinephone is not daily-driver ready unless you're ready to have all your friends laugh at you like you just drove up in a clown car. So please don't buy one just because you could get Verizon MMS on it. But that's my opinion, I'll save that for the end. First, the facts as I've seen them.

1. I had a micro-sim put in it at my local Verizon store (it was a Verizon reseller, not a Verizon-owned store, because it's closer and I'm lazy). I did not tell them it was a pinephone; I just made up some story that I got it from a friend. They probably wondered if it was stolen. They put the sim card in and the bars showed up at the top after a minute. Point being, you can get a micro-sim put in at the store. (I'm on Verizon proper, not a MVNO/reseller/whatever they're called.)
   
2. The MMS settings for Verizon are very wonky, because they're different depending on what you want to do.
   For MMS: 
   

•      In Chats (chatty), select "Preferences", then "SMS and MMS Settings"
  
•           MMSC is http://mms.vtext.com/servlets/mms
  
•           APN is vzwapp (note that every other reference will tell you vzwinternet - that doesn't work for MMS on Pinephone)
  
•      In Chats (chatty), select "Preferences" then "Purple Settings"
  
•           "Enable purple accounts" is on (I think this is needed, can't even be sure anymore)
  
•      Under regular Settings, select "Mobile Network"
  
•           Make sure that Mobile Data is on; Data Roaming might be needed too
  
•      Under "Advanced", choose "Access Point Names"
  
•           Choose the one that has vzwapp (note this matches the APN that you set in Chats)
  
• You can use https://interpage.net/cgi-bin/freepage to send yourself up to 5 test MMS messages in a week.
  
  

• Yes for $200 it's a sweet POC, and a huge tip of the cap to all who have been involved. I actually bought this over a year ago and put it away for a while. The progress has been amazing.
  
• Remember, this is a reference implementation for developers to work on, with intentionally inexpensive components to get it out in the wild. The people that can do something with it have done a lot. It still has components that are relatively ancient.
  
• The phone works but you sound like you're in a fish tank. I used the speaker phone once, and my colleague on the other end immediately said "holy crap, what is that noise?" The alarm in his voice was palpable. Headset is the only hands free option, and even then you still sound like you're in a fish tank.
  
• The camera is potato quality. It works, but you will never actually take a photo and show it to anyone unless you're an expert in tweaking digital settings for photos, and you want to spend hours doing so.
  
• Browsing ranges from impressive, to super aggravating. Switching between apps is slow and wonky. The processor gets overwhelmed with various tasks, or switching tasks. I've found it fairly common to have to restart, just while browsing with a few apps open.
  
• You have to use flatpak to get a bunch of apps, or privacyshark, or Waydroid, or do without.
  
• There's lots of other stuff like that.
  

I have been using the Mobian Phosh partition for a while now. I count three reinstallations of it. But it has not faltered since the spring.

The latest news is that I installed the pinephonepro_support and pinephone_tweaks packages instead of the pinephonepro_tweaks package. The audio playback is not chancy now.

The installation gladly accepts a Bluetooth mouse, so a screen magnification of 100% is usable instead of 200%.

I was able to fix the missing keyboard symbols for the Linux consoles, but not for the Wayland windows.

The Web app still has a memory leak. My modified Megapixels  works, but it has lost its auto exposure capability. And the rear camera does not recover from suspension. The Camera app  works, as does the Voice Recorder.The Mpv app plays even vob video files when they are opened in the Files app.

In order to recover from the unmaintained Manjaro Plasma distribution for the Pinephone Pro, I attempted to convert the Manjaro distribution to use the DanctNIX Arch repositories. But, although I found a cookbook list of steps to convert from Manjaro, the cookbook did not specify correctly how to renew the Arch keys. And I am not sure if the DanctNIX repository is included.

So I did not persist, and then gave Rhino Linux a tryout.

The keyboard symbols became a priority for me, so I tried to fix the issue on the Mobian Phosh partition. I could only manage to fix the missing symbols on the Linux console screens.

Next, I installed a btrfs image of DanctNIX SXMO for the Pinephone Pro. The main partition needed extension using gparted on a USB connection, and the btrfs format had to be explicitly extended. The complete re-installation of the Arch keys was needed. The required Zathura package was not preinstalled, and Megapixels and Surf do not work. The btrfs snapshots are not preconfigured. A bluetooth mouse will not install, but it is kind of an alien idea to SXMO.

But the keyboard symbols work!

Hi all!

When reading this (thanks Peter):
https://linmob.net/weekly-update-39-2023/
My attention was caught to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvI6Qp5qXN8

And that triggers an idea that has been in my mind for a long time.
Why we do not have simple way to record videos with PP because first video recording scripts have been available for a long time?

Well now we have (no video preview because PP will choke to that but it is really fast and enjoyable to use - even child can use it)
https://gitlab.com/Alaraajavamma/pinepho...-recording

I put some thing together with ducktape and glue but biggest work for that repo is done by luigi311 and in general, really many other than me xD.

But now it works.

TLDR: Run this command in terminal:
git clone https://gitlab.com/Alaraajavamma/pinepho...-recording && cd pinephone-gui-for-video-recording && sudo chmod +x install.sh && ./install.sh
And start recording videos with your PP.

Issues etc. are welcome - I have tested this with pmos Phosh but it should work with most distros.

So I just flashed pmos with phosh via tow-boot and it seems tow-boot does not load pmos.

part I can be found here but is closed for comments:

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...t=ethernet

So I comment it here.

I was watching the YouTube video of Martijn Braam about the PinePhone with an USB-C dock. I was wondering If cable wired ethernet works at all with it, since he does not show it.

https://youtu.be/yBeza4UNOm8

I am happy to know from you that it works fine with manjaro.

In case of doubt, use manjaro for a wired ethernet connection. And if you need another distro, choose a multi-boot Pinephone. This seems to be the reality of the Pinehone.

I bought a Pinephone with Ubuntu Touch on it. But the keyboard did not work with. Then I had to flash postmarkedOS on it to get the keyboard working.

LibreOffice, Abiword and Gnumeric are in the postmarketOS store now, but are they in the stores of the other Pinephone distros? If no, choose a multi-boot Pinehone.

It is also possible to flash an OS on the external SD card of the Pinephone and change SD cards to change the distro.

This is the simplest way for multi-boot for Pinephone beginners as far as I know.

I ordered on Monday last week. It is Friday the next week and I still haven't received an email confirming a shipment, has anyone had theirs yet? I know that they ship on a biweekly basis and I'm being impatient but I live in a student accomodation and I need tracking to know when to collect my parcel. The shipping was damn expensive I was hoping for a quicker turnaround but my timing was unlucky I guess

For folks booting Star64 with U-Boot TFTP:

U-Boot might show frequent TFTP Timeouts. This article talks about our fix for the TFTP Timeouts:

(1) First we throttled our TFTP Server to send packets slower. (Which made it worse)

(2) Next we reduced the TFTP Timeout Duration in our server. (Nope doesn’t work)

(3) But when we send every TFTP Data Packet twice, the problem mysteriously disappears!

(4) Apache NuttX RTOS now boots over the network in 20 seconds. (Previously 4 minutes)

(5) We verified this with 2 TFTP Servers: Linux and macOS

Details here: Strange Workaround for TFTP Timeout in U-Boot Bootloader (Star64 JH7110 RISC-V SBC)

   

Here's a quick review where the Linux distros for the Star64 seem to stand:

1. Fishwaldo's 2.1 Minimal Pinix distro
https://pine64.my-ho.st:8443/

Works for text-only use, but can't install X-Windows because his server no longer has those packages.

2. Fishwaldo's 2.1 Weston Pinix distro
https://pine64.my-ho.st:8443/

Automatic login as user "weston", no logout option, no menus. Sudo not working to add packages. 
However X-Windows is accelerated and fast, Firefox works and is fast (but can't play Youtube videos).

3. Fishwaldo's 2.1 Plasma Pinix distro
https://pine64.my-ho.st:8443/

It is very slow and therefore unusable.

4. Frankenstein distro (based on StarFive's Debian and Fishwaldo's 1.2 distro).
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u7qiCJv...sp=sharing

Works, but no Firefox.
Subsequent attempts to create a new Frankenstein distro based on newer Fishwaldo kernel & newer StarFive distro have failed.

I have installed postmarkedOS to the external SD card of my Pinephone, since I had troubles writing with Abiword to the external SD card. So I installed the whole OS with Abiword there.

Then I have sticked the SD card with a reader into a Windows PC, which could not read the SD card. I did not find an easy solution to solve which was convincing for me personally.

So I installed Ubuntu on an external drive on my PC. There I could see and open the files on my SD card with postmarkedOS on it, and also write to it with Abiword.

But when I put the SD card back to my Pinephone, the SD card does not boot anymore.

Why does my Pinephone not boot anymore from this SD card?