Mobian and Keyboard

[MNtinkerer]

I don't understand enough about Linux internals to walk you through a troubleshooting guide with the intent of preserving your already installed system. If it were my machine and I had to spend more than an hour or two poking around, I would do a fresh install of the system unless there were a compelling reason to keep it intact like a necessary file that wasn't recoverable from a backup.

The difficult things with the Pinephone are the different hardware revisions to the main board along with the minuscule size of the Mobian project on Pinephone. To my knowledge the keyboard case is the same, but the Pinephones can differ leading to incomplete testing between releases. You probably have more Linux experience than I do so other than encouraging you to eliminate variables and take careful notes. I am sorry if I am not more help than this:

1) Have a decent USB-C charger, 2.5A or the PinePower 125w and charge the case. Ignore the battery indicator on the screen for now, depending on the Mobian version, it may be inaccurate.

2)Even with the Pinephone installed, charge the case. One of the forum threads states that charging the phone with the case installed could lead to damage and break the case. This would require opening the case to repair by removing the burned out component and replacing, something that requires a soldering iron and likely a magnifying glass. It also requires a continuity tester using a low voltage and knowledge of electrical circuits. Search the forum for more info, it has been a while since reading the thread.

3) Some people have reported pogo pin issues between the case and phone. Given the difficulty in fixing, this is one of the few times verifying software before hardware may be beneficial. A temporary hardware fix or at least verification would be to use di-electric grease on each of the pins to ensure contact. Taking care not to smear the grease between pins and causing a short. Mild soap and water on a damp cloth will clean it off, be sure to dab and not smear, and take the battery out of the Pinephone before cleaning. One could experiment with degreasers away from the pogo pins or recepticles and have water to flush handy just in case.

4) Software. Try reinstalling if possible virgin images, the more recent the better. Mobian has broken a couple of times with updates. Sometime in May-June an update made my keyboard case not work, that original image was from August of 2021. The recent images have worked, with caveats explained below.

5) Backups. I was using jumpdrive but now tow-boot to do eMMC clone backups. Piping the image through gzip to save space on my PBP NVME storage is a little more time consuming but worth it. It is nice to go back to images that work when one breaks something, instead of a new installation and update every time. I clone right after installation, 1st update, and regularly after. The only exception is bad installations are not backed up like the one I did the other day.

I am using the Pinephone Mobian Community Edition, with mobian-installer-pinephone-phosh-20220807.img, and the most recent tow-boot
pine64-pinephoneA64-2021.10-004.tar.xz, (actually updated March 5th, 2022) and the keyboard case. As of the moment the keyboard case works, but some key assignments do not work like |, =, -, etc. Also just noticed the calamares encrypted image did not expand to the extents of the eMMC device, will try reinstalling soon. All in all, I have tried Manjaro on the Pinephone and did not like it, this was back in March, and again in early June. Not a technical assessment, just my preference to work with Debian forks.

Tow-boot source:
pine64-pinephoneA64-2021.10-004.tar.xz

Tow-boot tutorial:
https://wiki.mobian-project.org/doku.php?id=tow-boot

Mobian Source:
https://images.mobian-project.org/pinephone/

Both findable through https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_S...ses#Mobian