Genode OS

[Samurai_Crow]

On the mailing list, the Genode team said they would be coming out with premade images in their next release.

[PineFone]

This is live:

https://genodians.org/nfeske/2023-02-01-mobile-sculpt

https://depot.genode.org/nfeske/image/

Curious to get an expert evaluation by the likes of @Samurai_Crow and others since if I run into issues with my own testing I'm not likely to know the difference between a design flaw and operator error.

[PineFone]

Installed Genode OS and followed the step by step laid out in: https://genodians.org/nfeske/2023-02-01-mobile-sculpt

It booted as advertised and the phone worked right away. The # on the touchpad doesn't work in this early version.

No message/texting yet as a feature.

I followed the prompts for installing their add ons like their browser and it says the install was complete, but I didn't see any new option to boot. Turns out, you press the far left of the screen and wait 30 seconds to bring up the add ons to show off the 3d screen rendering bonafides. All popped up, except the morph browser and instead shows the [runtime] log stating in blue towards the bottom of the thread "Warning: morph-browser : configured RAM exceeds available RAM, proceed with 1413106113" [The log is tiny on the screen and doesn't allow for zooming in]

I've got the $199 3GB PinePhone which I believe is the "PinePhone version 1.2" it recommends, so I'm not sure if it's a glitch on their end or if I need to update something on my end to proceed with 1413106113 which I can't figure out how to do.

The main interest was the battery life.

I started at 51% and saw it drop a percentage point just about every minute and then stabilize at 30% for awhile and then resume the drop. It provides a "Performance" and "Economic" option to pick your battery draw, but I didn't see much of a difference when toggling between the two.

"The battery percentage value is not always reliable. It is the plain information received from the power-management chip without any sanitizing. Take it lightly."

It's currently showing 18% and I'll let it go for a few hours to see if it powers down due to battery draw. If not and it stays on, I guess that verifies that the "percentage value is not always reliable" with the true power being higher, but just not something I can verify at the moment. Maybe it's still 51% after an hour of toying with it.

Update: been playing around while the mobile network is activated and the power is holding at 15% instead of the steady drop from earlier. Will see how low it can go/how long it takes.

Overall, I like what I see and I just need the # button activated and texting added as a feature which I'm sure they're working on and I'd be happy to use this as my default OS. The morph browser would be nice, but I can live without since I'm just in need of a vanilla phone most of the time.

Is it time to create "Genode on PinePhone" as a forum category yet? My vote is "YES" based on this initial experience.

[Zebulon Walton]

I gave it a try and had no trouble bringing up the modem and making calls. There is some noticeable screen flicker but not too bad. I didn't try mobile internet since that's a feature I don't use and it looks like wifi is not implemented yet. Haven't tested power drain yet, in fact I was running with AC power attached. I love the fast boot time, it's up and running in seconds. (It takes Mobian about a minute and a half to boot up.) Obviously this is in the very early stages but looks like it has some real possibilities moving forward.

[PineFone]

Day II Testing

"I started at 51%" - Didn't pay attention to when the phone finally died running Genode after it hit 18%. I charged it up again and when it got to 12%, I unplugged the charger and the power showed 51% so apparently that's a default message since it was clearly at 12% moments before.

"Warning: morph-browser : configured RAM exceeds available RAM, proceed with 1413106113" - Couldn't find any answers after a web search. If anyone has a suggestion on how to proceed with 1413106113 is much appreciated.

"No message/texting yet as a feature." - Their road map ( https://genode.org/about/road-map ) says this won't show up until their August update with their next big update in May which is supposed to allow 3rd party applications. Seems short sided since this isn't usable as a basic daily driver until Texting is added. I'm sure they have their reasons.

One big question I have is that I found out about Genode about a week ago on this forum and I appear to be the only one spreading the gospel about it with no sign of Genode on the official PinePhone forum to promote and answer questions about their PinePhone OS.

They've got a reddit page where they announced this new Feb 1st Distro, but nothing here. Go figure.

[nfeske]

Genode developer here. Thanks a lot for giving the first Sculpt OS image for the PinePhone a try!

Regarding the morph browser, it takes a while to start. The huge Chromium engine must be loaded from the SD card after all. On my device, it takes 30 seconds once I load the preset. The diagnostic message "configured RAM exceeds available RAM" is not critical. Please make sure to have "Mobile data" activated in the "Network" section of the UI. As an experiment, once you do not see any progress in the log after waiting some time, could you try restarting the "gpu drv" component in the "Runtime" view? Just curious.

About SMS, the current version is knowingly not ready to be used as a daily phone. So we refrain from promoting it as such. There are multiple things (like a prolonged standby mode, a proper sleep mode) missing. We ultimately need to prioritize. Prioritizing user-facing features over platform/stability/efficiency issues would wrongly suggest that it might be ready for end users. Please take the current version as a tech preview.

[PineFone]

@nfeske Thanks for the prompt reply.

"Sculpt OS" - Should I now refer to it as Scupt OS instead of Genode OS? Either way, given there are three PP OS's that haven't had an update on this forum in a few years (Lune,Replicant,&/e/), how do we get a dedicated OS forum for Sculpt/Genode setup on Pine64 forum since this is clearly an up and coming OS that should be pretty popular based on how user friendly it's been so far.

"Regarding the morph browser" - I actually had the log terminal up for about 1-2 minutes while I was reviewing the RAM error message with Mobile Data turned on. I guess I just needed to wait a little longer because after retesting today it came up 10 seconds after I saw the log terminal screen.

I think your browser is the best I've tried on PP (once zoom in is turned on). Having the digital keyboard up the whole time is kinda nice to avoid fumbling around for the toggle button to bring it up when I need to use it. I can see why some want it to go away for certain uses like watching videos/reading articles.

The back button works while inside one site, but as soon as you jump to a second one, you can't go back to the previous site without bringing up the browser history and clicking on the previous site link.

"About SMS" - Makes sense and as soon as that's added (along with a clock and a few other minor things I can't think of and won't notice until they're unavailable), I'll be making this my Daily Driver PP Distro.

One suggestion that I've posted elsewhere on the Pine64 forum is adding Reticulum which is a decentralized internet similar to PineDio, but doesn't require modems and can carry packets over the internet, ham radio signal, wifi, bluetooth, and yours or their own LoRa's as long as it's flashed with their firmware.

The biggest problem for PP is that if it actually makes a dent in the market (after figuring out battery life), the carriers might decide to just drop it. Reticulum already has a messenger called NomadNet/Sideband that can work without the net. Since there are python VOIP programs out there, according to the creator, you can do the same with Reticulum which means the PP + a battery friendly Distro (Sculpt OS) + PP LoRa backplate + Reticulum = a phone that works without a carrier which is a pretty revolutionary idea.

Since Sculpt is still in the design phase, it seems like making Reticulum a native app or easy to add down the road will be a huge benefit to both projects and the user. Reticulum is currently putting all their focus on Android, but has posted that they're looking at PP for the future.

Here's their latest post:
https://unsigned.io/articles/2023_01_16_..._Here.html
along with their road map:
https://github.com/markqvist/Reticulum/b...Roadmap.md

With or without Reticulum, still looking forward to Genode/Sculpt OS.

[nfeske]

Should I now refer to it as Sculpt OS instead of Genode OS?

Good question. Both are technically correct. You can think of Genode as the underlying operating-system technology - the concept of Lego bricks for building operating systems so to say - whereas Sculpt OS is a concrete assembly of Genode components into a tangible system - like the fire department built from Lego. From an end user's perspective, Sculpt OS would probably be a more meaningful term for referring to the specific incarnation that's running on the phone. From a technology perspective, Genode is a more suitable - and slightly better know - term. Personally, I'd lean towards referring to "Genode" but either way would be fine.

I actually had the log terminal up for about 1-2 minutes while I was reviewing the RAM error message with Mobile Data turned on.
[...]
I think your browser is the best I've tried on PP [...]

It is good to know that you got the browser running. I suspect that the stuck situation occurred after directly switching from the gpu-test preset to the morph-browser preset, which can make the GPU driver choke. That was why I suggested trying to manually restart the GPU driver in this case. This will be fixed in the next version.

The non-toggleable static keyboard is not final. It just happened to be the simplest solution for now.

Thanks for the pointer to Reticulum, which I haven't heard before.

[nfeske]

Sculpt OS 23.04 released

I am happy to announce the today's release of Sculpt OS 23.04, which is the first version that we published for PC hardware and the PinePhone in parallel. Please find the official announcement at https://genode.org/news/sculpt-os-release-23.04.

Compared to the early system image published back in February, the following improvements stand out:

• Much improved performance and stability of the browser, the camera, and the GPU driver. I think you will notice the difference in the morph browser.
  
• Wifi connectivity
  
• New support for interactively installing and integrating individual components, complementing the hard switch between presets.
  
• Principle support of the 2 GiB model in addition to the 3 GiB model. Note, however, that the 2 GiB model has not received much testing yet. The larger presets (morph and jitsi) will probably not work.
  

As inspiration for your experimentation, I have updated my original Genodians.org article with information about Sculpt 23.04: https://genodians.org/nfeske/2023-02-01-mobile-sculpt

Happy sculpting!

Norman

[PineFone]

This is great! Look forward to testing it out when I get some time over the next few days.

Given Sculpt's development is moving along and hitting it's deadlines, the question is when does Sculpt/Genode OS gets it's own PinePhone subforum alongside the other distros?