Arch Linux ARM on PinePhone

[Danct12]

1. When booting I could not feel any vibration.
   

I've got report of that on someone's braveheart device. What device are you on?

1. Sound is good quality but rather faint. After installation of alsa-tools and setting the volumes to 100% it is ok, but could not find out how to make these settings permanent?
   

I'll look into this sometime soon.

1. Could not find out how to get the USB-dock working.
   

What is your PinePhone edition? Braveheart and UBports CE has a flaw with the VCONN switch which prevents OTG from working.

[LinAdmin2]

I have postmarketOS edition with 3GB RAM and USB dock from pine64.org.
wlr-randr --output HDMI-A-1 --on   returns that this interface is not present.

If I may add another wish: gnome-weather (3.36.1) does not adapt to the screen size and when switching the phone to landscape mode it crashes.

[LinAdmin2]

Any hints how to correct above problems???

[Lousy Fisherman]

If someone has the same problem updating like me: You need to add another repo first in /etc/pacman.conf
https://discord.com/channels/37059558709...9401141268

Please provide the actual information. A link to an outside site which requires javascript to function is inaccessible to many.

TIA
LF

---

NOTE: For anyone from previous builds, please add this repository to /etc/pacman.conf: -- it should look like this after done

Code:

[danctnix]
SigLevel = Never
Server = https://p64.arikawa-hi.me/danctnix/aarch64/

No need to go to discord at all.

https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pi...g/20201024

HTH
LF

[bcnaz]

@Danct12 

I heard there has been some more minor hardware changes again, to the current "Manjaro" release of the Pine phone, will this affect how the Arch OS
interacts with the phone. ?

Is there one Pine phone edition (revision) that works best with Arch OS,  'out of the box'  ?

> Brave Heart,  UBPorts,  Post Market,  Manjaro <   ?

Thanks

[Danct12]

I heard there has been some more minor hardware changes again, to the current "Manjaro" release of the Pine phone, will this affect how the Arch OS
interacts with the phone. ?

Is there one Pine phone edition (revision) that works best with Arch OS,  'out of the box'  ?

None, the minor hardware change only fixes the backlight issue with USB-C docks.

And right now, no OS works best with the PinePhone as the software are still in the beta stages. This is expected to change in the future.

[Lousy Fisherman]

4th upgrade was successful after adding the repository. It is the best of the releases, it is the worst of releases.

Unfortunately I have no outgoing sound on any phone calls, incoming or outgoing so I had to stop using Arch as my daily driver. I reverted to an older Mobian on SD card. I'm kind of scared I may lose voice on Mobian too if I upgrade

The best: 2 days totally uninterrupted service, no problems, battery still had 37%.

The worst: at times the phone will not wake once it goes to sleep. Hard boot and repeat. The above success occurred after I spent 3 hours trying various power/display/sleep settings. I had given up and was quite surprised the next morning when it responded. At times I also had sound issues, of the notification sounds, bark would work properly but the other three occasionally produced an identical whine/buzz

The phone goes flaky whenever a USB cable is connected or removed. However, power management is vastly improved once the phone is charged. I now ensure it is 87% charged (mine won't charge higher?) before doing any work with it.

Communication  between the modem and the OS still goes sideways after suspend/sleep. The icon will show no connection but the phone responds to incoming calls and texts but data does not work. A reboot is required for data.

Megapixels works very well other than it will not flip more than once. Looking forward to the resolution enhancements.

I am using the dock on a regular basis now. phosh will use the HDMI screen as a secondary, I must drag running applications
from the phone screen to the big one. Currently messing with the display manager to allow xfce when on the big screen and phosh
when standalone. An external power source is essential.

In attempting to port Kalliope I ran into an upstream Arch issue to do with the math libraries (blas/atlas/lapack) as well as Fortran versions... sigh.....
Since Kalliope runs easily on Debian I am going to move that project over to the Mobian SD card.

Thanks to all who contributed.

YMMV
LF

[Danct12]

Unfortunately I have no outgoing sound on any phone calls, incoming or outgoing so I had to stop using Arch as my daily driver.

The worst: at times the phone will not wake once it goes to sleep. Hard boot and repeat. The above success occurred after I spent 3 hours trying various power/display/sleep settings. I had given up and was quite surprised the next morning when it responded. At times I also had sound issues, of the notification sounds, bark would work properly but the other three occasionally produced an identical whine/buzz

The phone goes flaky whenever a USB cable is connected or removed. However, power management is vastly improved once the phone is charged. I now ensure it is 87% charged (mine won't charge higher?) before doing any work with it.

Communication  between the modem and the OS still goes sideways after suspend/sleep. The icon will show no connection but the phone responds to incoming calls and texts but data does not work. A reboot is required for data.

As for sounds, you need to do pacman -Syuu to downgrade the PA package (if the repository was added before [core] order), the latest PA has issues on the PinePhone. On new images this is not needed.

As for the phone not waking up, this seems to only happen on Braveheart (also happens on newer if modem killswitch is off) and caused by USB driver hanging during suspend. Unfortunately it seems like a lot of us in Pine64 dev channel have talked about this and still hasn't come with a fix yet.

The phone only charges up to 88%, all of this started when megi implemented some battery safety feature to 5.9 kernel, I think there is a workaround for that in sysfs, but I'm definitely not going to turn that off or revert the changes.

Other than that, I'll look into other issues and I'm sorry for unsatisfied experience.

[firefox-58]

For me the unreliability of incoming calls and SMS are the absolute biggest problem now.
If You use the PP as an daily driver important calls will be missing and SMS also.

A phone should be a phone. And a phone has to make reliable calls and SMS.

NO build from Manjaro, Arch, mobian, UB-Touch and others work reliable in this aspect ATM. So the PinePhone is a nice gadget, but not usable for any important communication in aspect of daily use. Maybe we have to wait some months more. But the functionality and reliability of the modem has not improved since August.

Maybe this is a "endless project" and would never be finished :-(

[LinAdmin2]

A phone should be a phone. And a phone has to make reliable calls and SMS.

Don't be so strict or you will get problems with the gang of unreasonable PninePhone addicts.
I had to learn that pine64.org has fulfilled all it's promises because the phone has the fantastic capability to get other phones ringing... THAT is what "calling" does mean