Announcing the Mobian project

[p1trson]

So the Friday 13th prebuild image is not even passing first boot on my braveheart (flashed to eMMC via jumpdrive). I could see a note that FS resize is in progress but I gave up after waiting for 1 hour without any effect.

The screen just shows the mobian logo and is "flashing" every second (looks like brightness related). Pretty disappointed, I'll try to flash it to the SD card and boot.

[p1trson]

so the same situation happens when booting Friday 13th prebuild image from sdcard (this time I did flash with dd, locally downloaded img). Note: I can boot pmOS without any problems.

Does anybody else experience this on BH?

[bcnaz]

I have not tried yet on my Brave Heart phone,

however Nov. 15 nightly seems to run well on my Manjaro phone.   ( Talk, sms text, data )

... running from an sd card.

[p1trson]

I will test it in the same way, as soon as my 1.2b mainboard arrives (should be upcoming Monday). But it's pity that it doesn't work on BH, wanted to test it beforehand.

[p1trson]

So strange,

I did a last test with my BH motherboard. Flashed the https://images.mobian-project.org/pineph...113.img.gz via balenaEtcher to the sd card. It booted without any problems, I did setup email, imported contacts etc. Few reboots later it got stuck at boot again.

Interestingly reflashing SD card again yielded into the same problem even for first boot. I've no idea what's going on   . Not really convinced that the problem is in the sdcard, since I had the same boot problem when booting from eMMC too.

[bcnaz]

I just flashed the November 20 nightly to a sd card and plugged it into my old Brave Heart phone.

SMS text works fine, phone calls work, but the called party says it sounds like input is too high a "bit crackly"
  Volume sounds a little weak at my end, with volume turned up all the way.

 The real problem is attempting to enter the APN info .. :
  I open the 'add' screen, put in the information,  click "Save" and it goes back to the default 'Access Points' screen without saving the input  ?

I will try this on a Post Market phone and a Manjaro phone shortly,  at the moment I do not know if this is only a Brave Heart Problem .. ?

[kqlnut]

The real problem is attempting to enter the APN info .. :
  I open the 'add' screen, put in the information,  click "Save" and it goes back to the default 'Access Points' screen without saving the input  ?

I had the problem once where the password wouldn't be saved, but then I left it alone and next time I checked it was saved correctly. Not sure how it works, but maybe it was a problem with not reloading Network Manager or something to show the changed settings. You could check after a reboot and see if the settings are changed. Or you could also try manually adding the connection in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections

[AntiK]

Hey Guys,

so today I tried the current mobian image for the first time.

Debian is normally not my preferred distro.
But I was really tired of all the breakage of things happening in the archlinux arm build.
I was trying postmarketos, Ubuntu Touch and KDE Neon a few times but things don't work for me there either.

So here we are and I must say, I'm amazed by the stability offered by the mobian image. Everything works like expected so far.
I will test it for the next month and if it keeps that way I will donate some bugs weekly.

Keep up the good work!

[tommaso]

Dear all,

It's been a little more than 3 months since I started hacking a Debian image for the PinePhone, by (manually) adding new software and fixing bugs step by step. Others have joined me in this effort, and a small team has gathered and did a great job at allowing the PinePhone to be used as a daily driver, at least as long as you don't have extravagant expectations such as "decent battery life" or "working camera"

We keep moving on as we're announcing the Mobian project, aimed at bringing Debian to mobile devices with as much upstream components as possible. We're focusing first on the PinePhone of course, but we plan to extend support to other devices, the next ones on the list being Purism's Librem5 and the PineTab (that is, as soon as we gets our hands on these )

Still, Mobian is not a distribution, but only an overlay to Debian, bringing you instant access to tons of existing packages, while making things easier for us as we try to keep as few custom packages as possible. This means working with the goal of upstreaming almost all of our work to Debian, and this is already going on quite well, as the base phosh packages (phoc, phosh, squeekboard and a few others) should reach the archive soon, and work on bringing phone-specific apps (such as calls and chatty) to Debian is well under way.

With this focus change in mind, we spent the last few weeks creating an infrastructure for the project, both to ease our work as developers, and to provide better user-facing services. The Mobian project now has:

• its own website
  
• a public Matrix channel
  
• a dedicated Gitlab group, including:
  • a project-wide issue tracker
    
  • a revamped (and mostly under construction atm) Wiki
    

With this announcement comes the first PinePhone image available for download.

Most of the work has been going on under the hood, as nearly all patched software have been updated to their most recent upstream version and rebuilt for several architectures (x86-64, arm32 and arm64) in order to ease porting to other devices in the future. There are also a few (small) cosmetic changes, including renaming the default user from "debian" to "mobian".

This release also enables gnome-initial-setup on first boot, fixes wifi stability by disabling power saving in the driver (which should make your battery a bit unhappy, but greatly improve your connectivity), and brings a whole lot of small bugfixes.

New images will be automatically built on a daily basis starting next week, so you'll see fewer release announcements here as I plan to only highlight when major progress is being made, but the releases will keep rolling, and you'll keep the ability to upgrade your system using apt
(although not this time, as you'll understand switching to this new infrastructure requires you to start from a fresh image)

Of course, we're always welcoming new contributors, as there is still plenty to do: improve hardware support, package new software, improve existing ones to fit the PinePhone's screen, improve the wiki, help with our infrastructure and CI, and so on...

Enjoy!

Dear Sir,

Please could you give me the procedure?
Is it possible to boot from a usb pen?
I' used to install debian on PCs by DVD burning the iso image, how can I do this with the PinePhone?

Thanks, Best Regards

[Veraendert]

Have a look at the wiki: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_I...structions