Pinephone immediately locks, completely unusable

[calavicci]

Just got my new Pinephone. It worked OK for a day or so, but now it immediately locks the screen whenever I unlock it. Sometimes it gives me a few (fewer than 5) seconds, and sometimes it re-locks so fast that the lock screen appears without anything else even flashing briefly. Most of the time, it locks in a quarter of a second or less.

I'm trying to update the software to see if that will fix it, but that's just not practically achievable. Discover doesn't seem to be doing anything; I tried it when the phone wasn't displaying this problem. It certainly downloaded a lot, and it told me that the phone needed to reboot, and the phone told me it was installing updates on the boot screen when it did reboot. However, all of the packages remained at the same versions, and Discover reported that the same number of updates needed to be installed. I did this three times to no avail.

This problem appeared some time in the space of a few hours after that.

So now I'm trying pacman. I've unlocked the device hundreds of times now, and I have occasionally been able to enter a single character into the terminal (with my USB keyboard; the on-screen keyboard does not even have a chance to appear). The problem seems to be getting worse, though, and at this rate, I don't expect to be capable of even finishing typing this one command.

I have no idea what the problem is. I am assuming it's a software issue, but I suppose it could be a hardware one. Are there any other reports of this happening? Any suggestions of what to do?

At the moment, I don't have a serial adapter or a microSD card. I'm going to try to acquire them, but suggestions that don't require them are especially helpful.

[fxc]

Just got my new Pinephone. It worked OK for a day or so, but now it immediately locks the screen whenever I unlock it. Sometimes it gives me a few (fewer than 5) seconds, and sometimes it re-locks so fast that the lock screen appears without anything else even flashing briefly. Most of the time, it locks in a quarter of a second or less.

I'm trying to update the software to see if that will fix it, but that's just not practically achievable. Discover doesn't seem to be doing anything; I tried it when the phone wasn't displaying this problem. It certainly downloaded a lot, and it told me that the phone needed to reboot, and the phone told me it was installing updates on the boot screen when it did reboot. However, all of the packages remained at the same versions, and Discover reported that the same number of updates needed to be installed. I did this three times to no avail.

This problem appeared some time in the space of a few hours after that.

So now I'm trying pacman. I've unlocked the device hundreds of times now, and I have occasionally been able to enter a single character into the terminal (with my USB keyboard; the on-screen keyboard does not even have a chance to appear). The problem seems to be getting worse, though, and at this rate, I don't expect to be capable of even finishing typing this one command.

I have no idea what the problem is. I am assuming it's a software issue, but I suppose it could be a hardware one. Are there any other reports of this happening? Any suggestions of what to do?

At the moment, I don't have a serial adapter or a microSD card. I'm going to try to acquire them, but suggestions that don't require them are especially helpful.

Please do not worry, these are software bugs. The locking sounds like an older bug, where the configuration file for the screen lock contained faulty values. Owning a microSD card is pretty mandatory to recover the phone from that point, please buy a microSD card (they are cheap, no excuses) and reflash as explained under https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_P...structions.