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?

We need to run Android as we are in a low bandwidth situation and to be able to download Netflix so we can watch without a fast enough stream we need to use either Android or iOS. In the past I have run Android on a RPi 3B+. But now I have a much more capable RockPro64 board! I know I could dedicate it to Android, but then it is really restrictive from being able to do other things for me.

So, I was thinking maybe the best solution would be to try running Android as a QEMU guest on top of a Debian / Ubuntu base (I could also go Manjaro.... point being a "full Linux base"). Any tips or pointers? Could I just try to use the Android RockPro64 image directly with QEMU? Or is there another way to go about this? I have also looked at Netflix in Anbox but that isn't working so well, even with the Google Play store also installed in Anbox.

Thanks for any advice.

I bought the Rock64 over 2 years ago. I never really used it. None of the Linux OS were stable for my needs.

I just need one that works well as a mini desktop computer. For a browser to work and play videos just fine. To also work as a Samba server. I want it to run through a VPN (the router would hanlde this, so no probs there).

And is there a way to make the SD card redirect the OS to run from a hard drive instead?

If none of the above, the I'll just have to try to sell it...

Good Evening,
first time post and very newbie to the Pinebook Pro (PBP).
I have successfully loaded Manjaro 20.06 (xfce) on to the eMMC of my PBP (previous default OS was Debian. PBP ordered in Nov 2019, received in Jan 2020)

recently, when i attempt to power up the PBP, i press the power button as usual, the power indicator turns red (as usual) then turns green (as usual) but the screen remains black.
I long press the power button to turn off the PBP.  I wait a moment, and do the exact same steps (I don't hold the button longer or shorter) the red light comes on, followed by the green light (and perhaps the green power light flickers a bit more) the then the manjaro ARM login pops up, and i'm good to go.

no other issues.  it simply takes more than 1x to power up the PBP, sometimes 2-3 times.  Nothing different between each attempt.

Any insight as to a solution if this is a known hardware issue,  would be greatly appreciated.  My search attempts on Manjaro and Pinebook forums capture issues related to eMMC not booting at all. Which is not my issue. PBP boots fine but takes multiple attempts to do so.

If this is a Manjaro ARM issue, i'll scoot over and make inquiry on the Manjaro forum.

thanks in advance!

I had problems importing contacts. On my previous phone I exported my contacts to both my SIM card and SD card.

On the PinePhone, I used the contacts app to import contacts. It said that there were no contacts on the SIM card - and the google import just span around. I looked at the vcf file and imported a few by hand, but since I had hundreds of contacts I stopped.

Today, I managed to import all of my contacts :-)

I used a terminal, typed 'sudo su' with my screenlock password to get a root shell.

Then 'lsblk' to find the name of my devices and then 'mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mt' to get access to the sdcard.

I then used the file manager app to view /mnt, then double-click the .vcf file, and choose open with 'Contacts' which then imported all!

Hope this helps someone.

I have a few question regarding the Pinebook Pro. First has anyone gotten Netflix or Amazon Prime Video to work on the Pro machine? I created two bootable micro SD cards with Chromium arm64 live. One using belenaEtcher and the other Rufus. Zilch noda no run on my pro. Used both Etcher & Rufus to make bootable USB drives for my desktop and micro SD cards with Manjaro 20.06 and they worked just fine. Is there a magic trick to run Chromium on the Pinebook Pro? I got the iso's from Pinebook Pros Wiki page. Youtube is ok but Netflix and Amazon Prime Video is the way to watch movies.

I did run the NPB3.4.1-MZ Benchmark on my cluster of 7 compute modules. Here are the results for SP-MZ Class=B:






For comparison:



My Intel Core-i5 5300U needs 72 seconds on two cores to complete the benchmark.






I plan on doing some more benchmarks, let me know what you think!

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I haven't been able to find my 5Ghz network since i got the pinephone Ubports edition. Connects fine to my 2.4Ghz. Is the phone not compatible with 5Ghz?

Good evening,

My Rock64 won't boot anymore : the SD card has no issue, the text displayed at the boot is only garbage and after a time the red light is blinking twice quickly and wait 1 second, then twice b;inking again and so on ... 

Could somebody help to understand what happen ?

Many thanks in advance,
Regards,
Jean