PinePhone won't boot
11-15-2020, 04:17 AM
Hi all,
I obtained my PinePhone yesterday. It also didn't boot and that's how I ended up on the forum and this thread.
Meanwhile it is working. TL;DR: my phone does not boot if no SD card with a boot image is inserted. Now running Mobian.
More details: after initially consistently failing to boot the device I created an SD card with the Manjaro Beta 2 version. The phone booted from it and I played with Manjaro for some hours. The beta 2 version is quite unstable. Several apps frequently froze (e. g. Firefox on advanced Web sites) and I had to reboot, sometimes also perform a hardware reset. The boot time was 2 min at least. There is an initial flash of the red LED, a brief backlighting of the screen and then it goes dark for a long time. - I had a look around and saw many users with positive impressions of Mobian. Thus I created an SD card with Mobian:
https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_S...ses#Mobian
Mobian has a similar user interface as Manjaro but it "feels" much better. Boot time is faster, 1 vs. 2 min. Scrolling on pages is more fluid. In two hours of playing I didn't experience a single freeze. There are more apps. Particularly Chromium is a good browser. There was a problem with Manjaro throughout all apps: the "Open file" dialog was outside of the screen. This bug is not present on Mobian. I like the Mobian package administration which I run on the command line. Adding Nextcloud as an online account I can sync contacts with my Nextcloud server.
On my "to do" list:
I obtained my PinePhone yesterday. It also didn't boot and that's how I ended up on the forum and this thread.
Meanwhile it is working. TL;DR: my phone does not boot if no SD card with a boot image is inserted. Now running Mobian.
More details: after initially consistently failing to boot the device I created an SD card with the Manjaro Beta 2 version. The phone booted from it and I played with Manjaro for some hours. The beta 2 version is quite unstable. Several apps frequently froze (e. g. Firefox on advanced Web sites) and I had to reboot, sometimes also perform a hardware reset. The boot time was 2 min at least. There is an initial flash of the red LED, a brief backlighting of the screen and then it goes dark for a long time. - I had a look around and saw many users with positive impressions of Mobian. Thus I created an SD card with Mobian:
https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_S...ses#Mobian
Mobian has a similar user interface as Manjaro but it "feels" much better. Boot time is faster, 1 vs. 2 min. Scrolling on pages is more fluid. In two hours of playing I didn't experience a single freeze. There are more apps. Particularly Chromium is a good browser. There was a problem with Manjaro throughout all apps: the "Open file" dialog was outside of the screen. This bug is not present on Mobian. I like the Mobian package administration which I run on the command line. Adding Nextcloud as an online account I can sync contacts with my Nextcloud server.
On my "to do" list:
- Find a way to do a screenshot. I have tried three apps and none of them work.
- Set up SSH.
- Test phone function.
- As a charger I use the one for a Samsung S8.
- SD card is Samsung 128 GB EVO.
- For file transfer I had successfully used Filezilla on Manjaro.
