Hi all,

I'm excited to announce the release of a new UI for the Pinephone I've been working on for a little while named Sxmo (which stands for Simple X Mobile). The concept is to use simple and suckless X programs to compose a fully functional Pinephone UI/OS setup. The UI includes texting/calls (via dmenu scripts navigatable with the Pinephone buttons), a good onscreen keyboard, a great terminal and browser, scripts for viewing youtube video/audio via mpv, RSS scripts via dmenu, and more. The core of the UI is based on a patched version of dwm (usable with the Pinephone buttons by differentiating single-double-triple clicking) and also the UI supports touch screen gestures as well.

Documentation and more about the Sxmo project is at:
http://sr.ht/~mil/Sxmo

Prebaked images (PmOS + Sxmo UI) are available at:
https://images.lrdu.org/pinephone/

Demo videos of the UI in use are here:
http://media.lrdu.org/sxmo_pinephone_demos/

And the userguide is here:
https://git.sr.ht/~mil/sxmo-docs/tree/ma...ERGUIDE.md

There's a lot that went into making the UI usable and there are still a few rough edges but it's working great for me and I'm looking to gather some feedback. Also I think the scripts, new C programs, and modifications to existing (mostly suckless) software that are in Sxmo may be helpful to others who are looking to make their own Pinephone UIs in a similar vein. In particular the dwm multikey patch makes using dwm on the PP quite possible by letting you differentiate commands by single/double/triple click of the hardware PP buttons; and lisgd, a new piece of software made for this project, is a great minimalistic way to manage touchscreen gestures on the PP.

I'm open to feedback on how to improve the project so feel free to put in patches/tickets over on sr.ht/~mil/Sxmo or comment here.

--
Edit:

Release notes for each new image are posted to the ML at:
https://lists.sr.ht/~mil/sxmo-devel

Also if anyone is curious about more in depth changes between versions - I setup a script to automatically generate an aggregated changelog so all changes can now be seen here:
https://git.sr.ht/~mil/sxmo-docs/tree/ma...ANGELOG.md

Hi

I'm not sure if this is the way its supposed to be, but currently I've got debian installed on my eMMC. I've also got debian running on an SD card, but whenever I want to boot from the SD card I first have to boot debian on the eMMC, log in and reboot in order for the PBP to boot from the SD card. Is this the way its supposed to be, or is there a setting to not have to do this procedure and just boot directly from SD without having to reboot?

Hello Piners!
I'm not getting any power to my Pinebook Pro anymore. I'll try to be as brief as possible with anything I can think of that's pertinent.

• Purchased in November 2019, received January 2020. The power cord didn't work but USB-C charging did.
  
• Replaced the power cord & it's worked fine.
  
• I've swapped OSes on it a few times, both to the internal eMMC & a microSD card without issue.
  
• I've installed a Sabrent Rocket NVMe drive which, to the best of my understanding, supports the low-power spec & shouldn't be an issue (it ran fine with it for 3 weeks).
  
• I've looked at Luke's post which directs to the Pine wiki and was quite meticulous about how I disassembled & reassembled the Pinebook Pro (I've work in consumer IT & enterprise IT for 14 years, I've taken apart a large number of microelectronics if you're concerned about experience level).
  
• I've tried powering the Pinebook Pro on just the battery, AC adapter+battery, USB-C + battery, AC adapter only, and USB-C only. I saw warnings on another post about connecting AD adapter + USB-C at the same time & it causing damage to the CPU so I've avoided doing that.
  
• I've tried disconnecting the Sabrent NMVe drive.
  
• I've flipped the eMMC switch to both the on and off positions as once before this happened & for some reason that got it powering on again (not sure if this is actually related or just coincidental).
  

When I open default camera app, it's just a black screen with buttons, obviously app cannot reach the cameras. So how do I enable it? Thanks!

I flashed Ayufan's latest pre-release with the gnome build and booted it.
The experience is, for a relatively heavy DE, incredibly smooth. So far the only thing I have found that doesn't immediately work as it should is sound.

Overall a vary good impression, kudos to Ayufan!

Edit: Regarding sound: neither the speakers nor the headphone jack works, I haven't been able to test hdmi yet.

Is there a pinout for the RockPro 64 MIPI-CSI connector? Is this connector standardized across boards such as the Pi 3/4 and the Jetson Nano?

In this article we test the proposed Wireless Firmware Update feature for PineTime... And observe what happens inside PineTime during the firmware update.

https://lupyuen.github.io/pinetime-rust-...es/dfutest

I believe it would be worthwhile to create another add-on for the PineTab that adds smart home controller functionality to it. The expansion could support a few popular radio types, such as:

- 433Mhz, by adding a RFM69 radio module. This is already open hardware. The MySensors project supports this radio. Candle builds on MySensors, for example.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rfm69&iax=images&ia=images

- A zigbee and Bluetooth Low Energy module (I believe the existing bluetooth chip doesn't support LE?). Recently there have been some great community developments, such as Zig-A-Zig-Ah and the Shepherd project, which underlies the Zigbee2Mqtt project. I don't know to what degree the TI chip they use can support Bluetooth LE and Zigbee at the same time.

https://www.reddit.com/r/homeautomation/..._hardware/
https://github.com/Koenkk/zigbee-herdsman

- Alternatively, add/use a NRF24 chip to add Zigbee, Bluetooth LE and/or MySensors support in one chip? 


- Perhaps add a Z-wave radio too?



Such a module would allow this tablet to function as a complete portable smart home controller. It would allow for the development of a more open counterpart to the "smart displays" being sold by Google, Facebook, Xiaomi, etc.


The backpack

Alternatively, a stand could be created that connects to the keyboard pins (which I read act as a USB 2.0 connector), and adds these radios that way. It could also add a speaker and microphone array to allow for fully local, privacy friendly voice control.



But then the downside would be that the tablet would have to stay fixed to that stand for the radio modules to be connected. If there was a built-in module, it could stay mobile and control the home at the same time.

With the imminent sale of the devices starting, isn't it about time it gets it own section in the forum?

Moved to the Sopine Linux section
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...&pid=68036