debian+phosh running on PinePhone

[cefre00]

Hi All!

@a-wai thank you for your awesome work! I power up my PP every morning: apt-get upgrade, check what packages are changing and check how the changes work. It's great, I really love it. In the meantime I upgraded my contract, so mobile data is working too.

A short question here: when you say new image --> do I need to re-flash my card, or keeping it upgraded is ok too?
Thanks again, I really like Debian on my PP.

[cefre00]

Hi All!

@a-wai thank you for your awesome work! I power up my PP every morning: apt-get upgrade, check what packages are changing and check how the changes work. It's great, I really love it. In the meantime I upgraded my contract, so mobile data is working too.

A short question here: when you say new image --> do I need to re-flash my card, or keeping it upgraded is ok too?
Thanks again, I really like Debian on my PP.

Just minutes after this post I managed to break my system, thanks to interrupting an update accidentally.
So re-flash is due...

Pls don't mind me...

[a-wai]

OK, I'll make some more tests with Firefox and include it soon-ish.
Meanwhile, those wanting to try it can just "apt install firefox"

Would adding a bit of 'swap'  add to the performance,  or is that mostly for "old equipment"  ?

swap doesn't improves performance, and is a bad thing when using flash memory.

I would also vote for Firefox or even better Morph. After using UT for a few days the Morph browsing experience seems better than any other I've experienced so far.

Morph being a UT app and Qt-based, I don't think it will ever be included in this image. Someone should first package it for Debian, which might not be an easy task.

Is there a GUI for the phone ringer sounds ?

Not yet, the system sounds are managed by package "sound-theme-freedesktop"

A short question here: when you say new image --> do I need to re-flash my card, or keeping it upgraded is ok too?

Keeping it up-to-date with apt is enough, but every once in a while there are significant changes requiring to start from a fresh image (last one was about 2 weeks ago, iirc)

[parkerwb]

Oops... word of warning if you're thinking of apt upgrade today (35 package updates woohoo!)... it's hanging on "Setting up pinephone-modem-scripts (0.5)" and the phone is getting REALLY hot. That's not good. Haha. Time to nuke and pave and start from scratch again. :-)

EDIT: --fix-missing after a reboot thankfully brought it all back up

[Luke]

@a-wai concerning the odd situation where the UI becomes completely unresponsive; it happens very rarely when you use the pull-down drawer (with bat life, screen orientation, sound, light and power-off). It happens rarely and very difficult to replicate - I'll keep trying.

I'm also seeing some battery drain oddities. Yesterday I ran the phone for upwards of 7 hrs without issues. Today I had the battery go from 85% to 48% in just an hour. I suspect this may depend on which band the modem currently uses - I know some bands are relatively bat life friendly whilst others consume a lot of energy.

[a-wai]

@Luke right, I guess you hit the same issue vinnie ran into:

- I noticed that by pulling down the panel (which also contains the power off button) and pressing the side button to turn off the screen (without pulling up the previous panel), when I turn on the screen again the touch doesn't respond anymore and the only thing I can do is to turn off the phone by holding down the side button for a long time

The good news is I can reproduce it, so it's just a matter of time before I come up with a fix

it's hanging on "Setting up pinephone-modem-scripts (0.5)" and the phone is getting REALLY hot.

How many time did you wait before shutting down the phone?
I know this isn't documented, but updating the modem-scripts package triggers a modem restart lasting ~30s (I have yet to come up with a better solution)

Other news: I created the project's wiki on gitlab.
For now it's only about software packages and the development TODO-list, but improving it might be a good way to contribute for non-coders
People with knowledge of Debian packaging or GTK development should find what they can help with in the TODO list.

[rico]

Very good.
A todo plan with details about your mods and what it means.
Thanks again

[bcnaz]

Running updates today,  froze at 12%...
waited for about one hour,  no progress.... then did manual/hard reset

Is next release about 5 days away ?

[fishbowlkraken]

Hey all! I've been messing with the Debian Phosh image on my Pine for the past few weeks or so and am amazed at the progress made so far by you all in such a short period of time! I'm no good at coding, personally, so I don't think I'll be much help in that regard, but I figured I could mention a few things I've encountered that I haven't seen mentioned here yet.

For one, while I would love to see Firefox (or possibly Chromium? Privacy concerns abound to be sure but it's still a good browser) tweaked to fit on the screen and packaged for this device in the future, in the meantime I found a browser in the repositories called Falkon that seems to scale more reliably for the Pine's screen than either of those two, and find the experience using it to be fairly pleasant. Changing the settings to anything other than the defaults can be a bit of a pain though, since the settings screen doesn't fit right on either orientation of the screen. However, for any mobile browser going forward, I think one necessary tweak would be to try and get it to demand the mobile version of most websites, as navigation can be an issue otherwise on some desktop sites.

Now, for a few little things that I'm not sure have been reported as bugs, but here goes. The first thing is that the sound is really quiet, and the input moreso, to the point that I'm having trouble determining if there is something wrong with my microphone or if this is just a bug in the software at the moment. Also, is there any fix for the fact that the desktop wallpaper seems to go a bit haywire every time the screen rotates? And is there some way to sort of "pan" around windows that don't fully fit into the phone screen that I'm not aware of so I can access the entirety of settings menus on applications not strictly designed to be used within Phosh? Apologies if these have all been answered already, I didn't see an answer anywhere though.

Lastly though, I really just wanted to reiterate, thanks so much for taking the time to work on this, I am having so much fun just faffing about with my little phone here, and every day brings new surprises from you all.

[dukla2000]

Bluetooth

Out of the box 20200322.img can connect just fine with my keyboard via Settings | Bluetooth.

Code:

$ dmesg | grep Blue
[    8.555951] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.22
[    8.564353] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized
[    8.570765] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized
[    8.575719] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized
[    8.580892] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized
[    8.683487] Bluetooth: HCI UART driver ver 2.3
[    8.688107] Bluetooth: HCI UART protocol H4 registered
[    8.693502] Bluetooth: HCI UART protocol LL registered
[    8.698899] Bluetooth: HCI UART protocol Three-wire (H5) registered
[    8.705854] Bluetooth: HCI UART protocol Broadcom registered
[    9.473634] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: examining hci_ver=07 hci_rev=000b lmp_ver=07 lmp_subver=8703
[    9.488146] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: chip_type status=0 type=5
[    9.497554] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: rom_version status=0 version=1
[    9.503688] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: loading rtl_bt/rtl8723cs_xx_fw.bin
[    9.512450] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: loading rtl_bt/rtl8723cs_xx_config-pinebook.bin
[    9.543019] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: cfg_sz 63, total sz 19427
[    9.919987] Bluetooth: hci0: RTL: fw version 0xaa5ca4dc
[   10.352734] Bluetooth: BNEP (Ethernet Emulation) ver 1.3
[   10.358124] Bluetooth: BNEP filters: protocol multicast
[   10.363505] Bluetooth: BNEP socket layer initialized
[   13.038713] Bluetooth: RFCOMM TTY layer initialized
[   13.043682] Bluetooth: RFCOMM socket layer initialized
[   13.048940] Bluetooth: RFCOMM ver 1.11
[  474.969824] Bluetooth: HIDP (Human Interface Emulation) ver 1.2
[  474.975935] Bluetooth: HIDP socket layer initialized

and things are as expected in bluetoothctl:

Code:

[bluetooth]# list
Controller 00:E0:4C:23:99:87 pinephone [default]
[bluetooth]# paired-devices
Device 34:88:5D:CC:AF:D2 Keyboard K380

and the keyboard works great.

Do a reboot and the bluetooth controller has vanished! So no connections ... I have repeated this twice with same result, not sure what else to look for in logs:

Code:

$ dmesg | grep Blue
[    7.821168] Bluetooth: Core ver 2.22
[    7.829500] Bluetooth: HCI device and connection manager initialized
[    7.835894] Bluetooth: HCI socket layer initialized
[    7.840855] Bluetooth: L2CAP socket layer initialized
[    7.845991] Bluetooth: SCO socket layer initialized
[    8.016530] Bluetooth: HCI UART driver ver 2.3
[    8.021053] Bluetooth: HCI UART protocol H4 registered
[    8.026424] Bluetooth: HCI UART protocol LL registered
[    8.031759] Bluetooth: HCI UART protocol Three-wire (H5) registered
[    8.038426] Bluetooth: HCI UART protocol Broadcom registered
[   12.399196] Bluetooth: BNEP (Ethernet Emulation) ver 1.3
[   12.404612] Bluetooth: BNEP filters: protocol multicast
[   12.409932] Bluetooth: BNEP socket layer initialized