I've come across a few posts about there being possible corruption of the firmware on the Pinephone modems. Are the only affected ones the one from the Braveheart Editions or does it occur on the UBports editions as well? Im not sure whats the deal with my UBports edition phone. It was not working when using UBports and even when it was updated I still had no cellular working. Then I tried Mobian and still it was not working. I ran the hardware test from a Postmarket OS image and it shows the modem status as ok.

Factorytest v0.49.0
Status: OK
Registration: not registered
IMEI: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX   (it shows but Im not posting it)
Firmware: EG25GGBR07A08M2G
Network: FDD LTE, 311480, LTE BAND 13
Signal: -81dBm

Sim Status
Status: Connected
IMSI: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Call Status
Status: Ready for call
Technology: ...
Number: ...

Im not sure what to make of it, with Mobian and UBports not working with my sim. I have thought if the results from the modem are faulty results.

(Edit 1) My cellular service is from T-mobile and I used a T-mobile sim card.
Edit 2:  Sim card size is micro

Update:
https://www.t-mobile.com/support/coverag...le-network  a link to T-mobile network bands.

https://www.quectel.com/UploadFile/Produ...n_V1.1.pdf   The Quectel modem pdf

Does anyone know if it might have something to do with the Network bands T-mobile uses in the Los Angeles Area?

Update: I installed and used LTE Discovery on a working android phone and it shows in my area that it connects mostly to band 2 and sometimes 66. Band 66 is not supported by the EG-25G modem.

Anyone know how to keep the modem to refuse or stop trying to connect to band 66?

Hi, all. To resolve another issue, I need to load up a rescue boot loader onto an SD card and look at my Pienbook. And I have to pray that it will boot to it without my manual intervention because right now the screen is refusing to light up. 

The boot loaders I've. seen are installers for other Linux distros, and I'm supposed to run something on the Pinebook to generate them. That is not an option. I have a Mac, and I have an old Linux Intel machine. I need to download either an image and put it on an SD card, or generate it and put it in, but it can't be on the Pinebook at the moment. What are the options?

If that boot loader is also an installer for a Debian/Ubuntu/etc distort, that would be a bonus, as I think I'm about to bid farewell to Manjaro. Thanks!

I'm sure I'm not the only one who wishes they can write their own OS

I've written code for an Arduino to communicate with a qualcomm chip/modem to receive and send SMS using AT commands. 
I wanted to try a from scratch for the raspberry pi but it seems like I'll get poor video performance because there's no documentation for using their GPU/video

I was wondering if there's a lot of linux that's required to get the phone running and if not would it be possible to write our own OS or embeded like as people may do for the Arduino?

Hey there. I hope I can get a bit of inspiration for further problem shooting for my seemingly dead pbp. LEDs turn red then green(solid) as expected but screen doesn’t turn on at all. All worked perfectly until I wanted to test Manjaro i3 from SD card. I have Manjaro KDE  on eMmc installed already. Ok booted Manjaro i3 from SD card all worked fine. I updated this distro installed a few things from repository and built Vivaldi browser from AUR using Parmac. Then when rebooting I got the issue above. I thought there was something wrong with SD card and ejected and re booted only to see same issue with my installed system - nothing boots. I tried to charge in full then let it go completely flat in case of some endless sleep cycle ( this took about 20 hours). Any suggestions why the screen is just completely black? I know very little about things like gpu etc. so don’t know if any faulty hardware is preventing something to start screen? I’m really at a loss - I haven’t touched the hardware inside I have only flashed a card. SD card 32 gb and worked fine when I had Debian and Manjaro KDE on card. Any ideas??

Hello, dear members,

my name is Costa, I'm living near the Northern Sea, and I've been longing for a mobile phone like the pine 64 for ages.
Would you be so kind as to answer me some questions:

First of all, I assume there are differences concerning the frequences used for phone calls, right?
Does, for example, mean the term 2G mean the same in the US as in Europe?

In other words, could I fail in unpacking the phone, putting in my ALDIDALK SIM-card and phoning a good friend?

As I'm wearing glass-bricks due to my myopy, maybe I didn't look at the right places?

Thanks in advance for your answer.

Best wishes,

Costa

Hi all, i've recently, thanks to a guide posted on OMGUbuntu, changed my Firefox renderer over to the new Rust based, GPU bound one and it has literally been night and day in terms of performance. I'd highly recommend you do the same. 

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/07/fire...nder-linux

Yesterday I installed the new Firefox like described in the wiki (https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php?id=webapps). Later in the evening I noticed that an upgrade seemed to be ready. I took the upgrade via the software app only to be greeted with the same upgrade notice after a reboot.



I've since uninstalled Firefox and removed the sid repo and also the priority pinning. 



Trying to upgrade from terminal shows this:



root@mobian:/var/lib/dpkg# apt upgrade

Reading package lists... Done

Building dependency tree     

Reading state information... Done

Calculating upgrade... Done

The following packages will be DOWNGRADED:

  gir1.2-handy-1 libgtherm-0.0-0 libhandy-1-0

0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 3 downgraded, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

Need to get 0 B/172 kB of archives.

After this operation, 0 B of additional disk space will be used.

Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

(Reading database ... 78804 files and directories currently installed.)

Preparing to unpack .../libhandy-1-0_0.84.0-1_arm64.deb ...

Unpacking libhandy-1-0:arm64 (0.84.0-1) over (0.84.0-1) ...

Preparing to unpack .../gir1.2-handy-1_0.84.0-1_arm64.deb ...

Unpacking gir1.2-handy-1:arm64 (0.84.0-1) over (0.84.0-1) ...

Preparing to unpack .../libgtherm-0.0-0_0.0.2-1_arm64.deb ...

Unpacking libgtherm-0.0-0 (0.0.2-1) over (0.0.2-1) ...

Setting up libgtherm-0.0-0 (0.0.2-1) ...

Setting up libhandy-1-0:arm64 (0.84.0-1) ...

Setting up gir1.2-handy-1:arm64 (0.84.0-1) ...

Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.31-1) ...



As you can see, the versions to be installed are the same. Still it believes the packages are to be downgraded. I've also tried to see what happens with "dpkg -i". How to I get out of this loop?



Thank you.



Mona

So i was hoping this might be handled by the OS and my sim, but i figured why wait, i'll just manually update my apn settings. Im with freedom mobile (canada), so i looked up freedom mobile apn. Couldnt find anything official, but found many blog sites with affiliate ads and such providing info on the matter. I typed in the apn settings and i DID get a data connection! But my browser was acting all glitchy and everything seemed to have overlays trying to adjust to my screen. Not something that happens on wifi. Wondering if APN hijacking is a thing, could an APN be set up to piggy back on my carrier but route it through a third party? Not to be paranoid, but the behaviour was bizarre. Didnt help that the APN settings came from an unofficial site and not my carrier.  Anyway, i cleared it out and went back to wifi. All good for now. Might call my carrier tomorrow and ask. Otherwise it would be interesting if it was all fine and thats just how my pinephone acts on data.

Followed the terminal instructions to set up gps and got it to work! However i toggled location off in the drop down menu and back on again. Cant find location again. Do i have to manually go through the terminal each time for now? Or will the toggle on turn it back on at some point? Does it for anyone else?

I lost all sound about fifteen updates ago and now when I go back to release candidate I still have no sound. Get the odd keyboard tone when I unlock but very seldom and no other sound works. I’ve used the phone maybe a week total. It seems like hardware failure and that should not happen after a week of use. Pretty disappointed