Hi everyone!                                                                                             
                                                                                                         
I've tried to enable GPU support and hardware video decoding in Chromium on Manjaro using the flags found in the Wiki. While they indeed make chrome://gpu show "Hardware accelerated" for most of the grahics sub-systems, they actually cause Chromium to run slower and more sluggish than without. And hardware-based video decoding still doesn't work, chrome://media-internals shows it's using a software decoder nonetheless.

I was almost ready to accept that having GPU suport in Chromium on Linux is just not really supported, even more so on ARM. Then I tried one of the ChromiumOS images (ayufan's R77) and much to my suprise, GPU support and hardware acceleration worked just fine! GL support, VP8/9 and MP4 hardware decoding - it just worked and Chromium also felt faster all around. From chrome://gpu :                                       
                                                                                                         
Manjaro:
GPU0  VENDOR= 0x0000 [VMware, Inc.], DEVICE=0x0000 [llvmpipe (LLVM 9.0.1, 128 bits)] *ACTIVE*

ChromiumOS:
GPU0  VENDOR = 0x0000 [ARM], DEVICE= 0x0000 [Mali-T860] *ACTIVE*                                         

Can somebody shed some light on why GPU support works fine in ChromiumOS but not in Manjaro? Which (kernel?) patches, drivers, config, flags do make the difference here?
                                                                                                         
(Note that apart from Chromium, hw decoding works just fine for me in Manjaro using mpv for example.)    

Thanks,                                                                                                  
krist

I see larger eMMC module available on pine64 website, has anyone tried upgrading to 64 GB ?

About to download and load the latest image.

Have been running image number 279 for ~ 1 week as my sole phone off of the internal storage.
It was very pleasing to be able to use the phone throughout the week. I am not certain if any feedback is being looked for or if this is the place to do so. However seen other threads in a similar fashion...

Some memorable observations.
Phone was set to 2g/3g/4g in settings.


Phone calls for the most part worked superbly. Audio was crisp and of good volume both for myself and those on the other end of the call. There were a couple of times that the phone connection was completely void of audio but simply closing the call and recalling rectified the situation. Answering was a bit of a hassle as you had to be looking at the phone when the call came in. Did not ring or wake up when a call came in.

SMS messages worked flawlessly until later on in the week. Slowly the messages would no longer be received. As of late yesterday and all of today I am only able to send SMS messages, not receive them. If sent a webpage link, clicking the link would not open the link and trying to copy the message to the web browser also did not work. The copy would only work to another SMS message.

MMS: Not certain if it was functioning or not. I was not able to receive pictures sent to me. I was not able to attach pictures through the gallery or file manager options when adding an attachment. I entered the apn settings as provided from my service provider after calling / chatting online indicating that I would be attempting to use a phone in development. The apn settings were given for internet and mms, however I was not able to enter them in this way. Entering them together would not allow me to press the check mark or would not appear in the list of apn's after pressing the check mark. Occasionally the added apn would make it into the list but only as an "internet" setting. Adding a separate mms from the internet setting would allow me to enter both. In the apn list selecting both with the checkbox would not show as selected after moving up to the mobile settings and back into the apn list.

Internet. Mobile internet worked as intended after entering the internet portion of the apn. Wifi likewise worked as expected. Turning the wifi off and on again would not display a list of access points or reconnect to an already configured access point as noted in other threads. Running nmcli radio wifi off && nmcli radio wifi on re-enabled the wifi again as noted in other threads. Further on into the week the wifi would begin dropping out and likewise the mobile internet / cellular connection. This made using ssh to access the phone from a computer almost useless as it would take ~ 30 seconds to issue one command.

Email. I was unable to get dekko2 to work for me. When adding an account the UI would not update unless flipped back and forth with another app. In the middle of configuring I was unable to reach the bottom of the configuration page to press a "next/submit" button beyond the smtp server settings. The keyboard was always in the way due to automatic appearance when flipping between apps to have the UI update. In place of dekko2 I have loaded local copy of rainloop running on nginx. Details in another thread found here.
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...4#pid64144
This has worked well enough though obviously it was not be very well integrated and slow (as each action resulted in a mail server connection and webpage reload). Likewise to the MMS situation I was unable to add attachments through any of the options presented (gallery, file manager, etc). I could download and save attachments but I was not able to open them (pdf, rtf, doc, odt, etc) as there was no app installed for such file types.

Open Store: Open Store ran quite well and I was able to download a few apps (dekko2, unav) however when trying to remedy the above problem with email attachments by downloading document viewer I was unable to do so. The download would get about 1/3 of the way; The progress bar would bounce back and forth a few times and stop; The install button would reappear; Nothing installed and pressing the install button again would net the same result.

The weather app: Simply put it blew me away with the layout and information provided. Worked perfectly and far better than what I am used to on my old phone.

Clock/Alarm app, calendar app, calculator, file manager, Notes, Terminal, Contacts, etc: works as expected. No fault found. I did not try the media player, music, gallery, and external drive apps.

Camera: did not function as noted elsewhere. Admittedly I have not spent much time on it other than open the app and play with some settings. Also did not find how to enable the camera flash led to use as a flashlight.

The settings app. I liked the coverage of the available settings. Some of the settings from what I can tell were not working quite right. Examples being stated with the wifi and the apn above. Also I was not able to turn off and on bluetooth on the fly. I could toggle off bluetooth, reboot and bluetooth would be off. Vise versa to turn it back on. I did not try any bluetooth connectivity as I do not use bluetooth often. ( only really in the car on longer trips. )

Morph browser worked quite well for me. I wish it was available for use on the other pinephone images.

Terminal. Worked well. The only thing I was looking for quite often was to have a "CTRL X " option available on the keyboard.

Phone in general, as noted earlier I was very pleased to be able to use the phone solely over the week. Overall the phone worked quite smoothly throughout its use. Unity would crash every now and then but most times would reload. A few times a reboot seemed to be needed. The touch screen does continue to function even when the screen is off / locked. The battery for my use was able to last ~ 5hrs. The time was originally incorrect and I had to run dpkg-reconfigure tzdata. I did download unav but did not use it beyond just seeing how it looked. I have noticed that the gps does not appear to work however this was not explored in anyway to try and make function. I was glad to see the screen rotation working in this image, though I did find it a bit aggressive at times. Lying flat on the table it would flip around a few times before settling on a position. Not always however. I was unable to find applications via the regular repositories to install via apt that would work on the desktop. Most would not find a display to be able to connect to. Reading online it seems that to run most conventional applications you should use libertine. I was not able to have libertine function as it would error out with failed to create lxc container or produce no error but appear to do nothing / hang even after an hour of waiting.

Now to load the newest image and get a fresh start for a new week. Hopefully the receiving sms messages will begin to work again.
If anyone has any ideas/hints/tricks to find error logs/information or resolve any of the issues about I would be glad to hear of them and take a look. I will set the currently installed image aside for the time being in case it is needed.

I originally thought my device was damaged on delivery as the screen was stuttering on any image I flashed, but recent images have stopped that now I just have lines running vertically across the screen. I tried different systems(postmarketOS, Arch, Manjaro, Fedora) with the same results.  Any idea to what configurations could be causing this if it is software, I have been using X11 for 20 some odd years but Wayland is something I am not too familiar with. Currently booting off of SDCard with the build from March 26th though I don't imagine EMMC or SD would have any effect on this. Also as a side note if it is a HW short of somekind any idea what it would be and how to go about fixing it?

Was unable to upload a photo for some reason so here is a link to the ubports post I made with a photo in it

https://gitlab.com/ubports/community-por.../issues/78

Hello

Please consider the following for the registration form:

1. to directly show when a password entered is too long. There is a message shown when the two boxes don't match, so why do I have to click submit (and again deal with that reCaptcha Google *insertswearwordshere*) to find out that it's too long?!
   
2. please consider switching from reCaptcha to e.g. hcaptcha
   

Hello,

Hope everyone is doing OK and staying safe in their respective lock downs!

I'm having a strange issue with the latest ubports image: it wont boot.

• With the UBPorts SD card in I am just not able to boot the phone at all, either plugged in to power or not.
  
• Sometimes after pressing and holding power there is brief white/green flash of the status LED.
  
• Confirmed that battery had charge by booting PMOS on another SD card.
  
• Reproduced the same issue by writing the same UBPorts image to the known working SD card.
  

Manjaro ARM Alpha5 for PinePhone!

Official Manjaro Forum Link

Changes since Alpha4:

• Outgoing and Incoming Audio Call works.
  
• New SMS app called spacebear, A re-write of spacebar.
  
• Added some new apps.
  
• Angelfish browser is quite smooth and can add webpages to homescreen.
  
• Updated and more stable Plasma Mobile interface.
  
• Current Alpha image is using Testing branch.
  

• Buho - Simple Note Taking app.
  
• Nota - Simple Text editor app.
  
• Vvave - Audio player app. (Can play youtube Videos in it)
  
• Qwikaccess - Simple shortcut buttons app
  
• Peruse - Comic Book reading App.
  
• Koko - Kde Plasma Image gallery.
  

 Hello Pine64,

The Pine Store has a listing for replacement back covers for the Pinephone,

BUT they are "Out of Stock"  

Complete phones are on open 'Pre-order status'  so there must be a factory making these covers.

I have been extra careful opening my phone, but after opening it so many times it has finally cracked on me.

I am not blaming anybody,  but I DO wish to purchase one or two replacements,   P L E A S E   !

A response here on the forum may save a lot of emails to and from the store.

Thank You

Hi all,
I'm looking for some advice with regards to controlling a relay from a web page. 

I am familiar with using the RPi.GPIO to control the actual relay(s) on the pine64.

What I am confused about it how to have the web page button onClick event send the python code to the pine64.
Does html have an event or method "onClick" or is this only available using javascript?

Would I create a html (PHP) webpage  add a button, then have a cgi script run the python RPi.GPIO code?

I'm trying to come up with the right strategy of how to go about this so any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance
Dave

What's the current state of the art for getting Netflix running on various distros, (especially Manjaro)?

If anyone has a reproducible procedure, maybe we can make it public here?