Just received Pinephone - system crashes

[rocket2nfinity]

I just ran the Postmarket OS factory test (V0.55.0 looks like the newest) from an SD card and fortunately everything tests out OK. That's a great tool for these phones! My first instinct when a computer locks up hard is to power cycle it, so I thought nothing of just pulling the battery. Any other hardware gotchas to be aware of?

Will have to play around with some more OS images to see if they're more stable than the factory-installed Manjaro. Will stick with SD card boot for now until something looks like it works well enough to flash to eMMC...

DO NOT pull the battery when the phone is on, even if it is locked up. Do a hard restart instead. It can corrupt the modem requiring reflashing the modem  firmware.

Mobian in my opinion is most functional and stable. Give it a little time and those improvements will reach the other builds.

[Zebulon Walton]

I'll give Mobian a spin, though I do plan to try out several different distributions. Booting off the SD card makes it pretty easy, though a bit of a PITA to have to open the phone up and remove the battery to access the card. (I guess that's one way of making sure the filesystem on the SD card is not mounted when you take it out.)

I won't be removing the battery again with the unit powered on! As i said it's just that on most computers what we used to call "flipping the big red switch" is the normal thing to do with a system lockup. Maybe the phone should come with a warning slip in the package. I don't recall seeing anything about it in the small leaflet of instructions but the type is so small I may have missed it if there.

If diags are to be believed the modem survived OK but I do see in the wiki there is a procedure for recovering the modem firmware if need be.

[Zebulon Walton]

To follow up on this, I finally got a chance to try out the Mobian 10-05-2020 release on an SD card and it is much, much more stable than the factory-installed Manjaro . The only time a system hang occurred with it was unplugging the Convergence Packate dock while the phone was running, and unlike the Manjaro crashes I was still able to shut it off using the power button. Other than that I played around with it quite a bit and installed some Debian packages. It basically ran well, though being alpha software of course there are still rough edges. I'll have to check out the nightly builds to see how it's coming along.