01-27-2022, 07:35 PM
(This post was last modified: 01-31-2022, 03:07 AM by phelion.
Edit Reason: Added UPDATE2
)
So the Pinephone Pro arrived and am really rather pleased with it. Manjaro with Plasma Mobile is nice to use, looks good and the phone responds well. Haven't had a lot of time to play around with it just yet but thought it might be worth mentioning a couple of things if you are expecting your order to arrive soon:
tldr: -With a 2A USB charger the battery charging indicator will show but the battery will not charge and the phone will slowly drain.
-Updating the base installation of Manjaro with Plasma Mobile may not be entirely straightforward if you assume that a quick 'sudo pacman -Syu' will do the trick.
UPDATE: The 2A charger problem seems to be specific to the Pinephone Pro with the initial pre-loaded Manjaro Plasma OS on the eMMc.
- I'd been trying out Mobian from the SD Card (with the most recent updates applied) and thought I'd just check that the charger still did the same thing as before.
- It now charges fine with that same underpowered charger, so it looks like it's a software issue.
UPDATE2: Now that I've managed to update the Manjaro Plasma pre-installed image on the eMMc, the 2A Charger charges the Pinephone Pro - so it looks like the Pinephone Pro is not quite as picky about chargers once properly updated
- if you're Manjaro Plasma pre-installed image is not updating properly (using 'sudo pacman -Syu' in the terminal) and your phone is not charging, then troubleshoot the updating issue first before your battery runs out!
Chargers
I have quite a few old USB phone/tablet chargers that I use regularly and just assumed that they would work fine, maybe they'd just charge slowly, but unfortunately they are not up to the task - they'll happily charge a Nexus 5 phone and Nexus 7 tablet but I kindof forgot that technology has moved on since 2013
I'm pretty sure that the Nexus 7 charger is 5V and 2A but even with the screen off the battery slowly dwindled and had me worried that there was something wrong with the hardware.
Of course it states in the 'Pinephone Pro User Manual - Quick Start Guide' that "The Pinephone Pro should be charged using a 15W (5V 3A) USB-PD power adapter. Charging at a higher voltage may result in damage to the device." but I didn't pay too much attention to that, just happy knowing that I wasn't going to be damaging my device with my low powered charger, but they don't mean 'for best results use a 5V 3A charger' they mean 'use a 5V 3A charger'
Fortunately I have a half-decent laptop with a USB-C port, so I bought a USB-C to USB-C cable at the supermarket down the road and have been able to charge it with that until I order a decent modern charger to use with it.
Updating Manjaro
There were about 312 updates when I first switched on the phone and connected to Wifi. The 'Discover' application told me about the updates and so instead of using the Command Line equivalent of 'sudo apt update' for Manjaro I gave Discover's Update function a try but it threw up some errors.
Unfortunately, running 'sudo pacman -Syu' from the terminal threw up some errors as well (something to do with PGP Signatures and 'unknown trust'). I tried a bit of 'sudo pacman -Syyu' and also 'sudo pacman -Syyuu' for good measure but to no avail.
There is probably a better way to fix the issue directly but I was poking about in the terminal and found a program called 'pinephonepro-post-install' which sounded interesting and after running sudo pinephonepro-post-install it seems to have generated some trusted keys and then let me update using 'sudo pacman -Syu' without issue.
If anyone has any suggestions for a better way to get updates working on the pre-loaded Manjaro/Plasma system, then it could be useful to let others folks know so that they can easily update to the most recent version of Manjaro and Plasma Mobile and test it out on their new Pinephone Pro.
Shutdown
Not sure why this happens but it seems that with my Pinephone Pro, if it's plugged in to a charger then it will start up automatically. Even if it's the underpowered charger that doesn't charge the battery.
Pressing and holding the Power button for 8 seconds will shut the phone down
-A long press of the power button will bring up the Shutdown, Restart options in Plasma Mobile too - shutdown works from there: looks like it has stalled for a little while but then shuts down nicely.
'sudo shutdown now' in the Terminal also works similarly.
BUT if the charging cable is plugged in (even if it's not giving enough power to charge the battery) it starts up again immediately after shutdown.
This may be specific to my Pinephone Pro, but it seems like at the moment it isn't possible to charge the phone without the phone switching on. It might be different when I get a suitable charger, but I'd be interested to know if anyone else is experiencing this same behaviour with their Pinephone Pro.
tldr: -With a 2A USB charger the battery charging indicator will show but the battery will not charge and the phone will slowly drain.
-Updating the base installation of Manjaro with Plasma Mobile may not be entirely straightforward if you assume that a quick 'sudo pacman -Syu' will do the trick.
UPDATE: The 2A charger problem seems to be specific to the Pinephone Pro with the initial pre-loaded Manjaro Plasma OS on the eMMc.
- I'd been trying out Mobian from the SD Card (with the most recent updates applied) and thought I'd just check that the charger still did the same thing as before.
- It now charges fine with that same underpowered charger, so it looks like it's a software issue.
UPDATE2: Now that I've managed to update the Manjaro Plasma pre-installed image on the eMMc, the 2A Charger charges the Pinephone Pro - so it looks like the Pinephone Pro is not quite as picky about chargers once properly updated
- if you're Manjaro Plasma pre-installed image is not updating properly (using 'sudo pacman -Syu' in the terminal) and your phone is not charging, then troubleshoot the updating issue first before your battery runs out!
Chargers
I have quite a few old USB phone/tablet chargers that I use regularly and just assumed that they would work fine, maybe they'd just charge slowly, but unfortunately they are not up to the task - they'll happily charge a Nexus 5 phone and Nexus 7 tablet but I kindof forgot that technology has moved on since 2013
I'm pretty sure that the Nexus 7 charger is 5V and 2A but even with the screen off the battery slowly dwindled and had me worried that there was something wrong with the hardware.
Of course it states in the 'Pinephone Pro User Manual - Quick Start Guide' that "The Pinephone Pro should be charged using a 15W (5V 3A) USB-PD power adapter. Charging at a higher voltage may result in damage to the device." but I didn't pay too much attention to that, just happy knowing that I wasn't going to be damaging my device with my low powered charger, but they don't mean 'for best results use a 5V 3A charger' they mean 'use a 5V 3A charger'
Fortunately I have a half-decent laptop with a USB-C port, so I bought a USB-C to USB-C cable at the supermarket down the road and have been able to charge it with that until I order a decent modern charger to use with it.
Updating Manjaro
There were about 312 updates when I first switched on the phone and connected to Wifi. The 'Discover' application told me about the updates and so instead of using the Command Line equivalent of 'sudo apt update' for Manjaro I gave Discover's Update function a try but it threw up some errors.
Unfortunately, running 'sudo pacman -Syu' from the terminal threw up some errors as well (something to do with PGP Signatures and 'unknown trust'). I tried a bit of 'sudo pacman -Syyu' and also 'sudo pacman -Syyuu' for good measure but to no avail.
There is probably a better way to fix the issue directly but I was poking about in the terminal and found a program called 'pinephonepro-post-install' which sounded interesting and after running sudo pinephonepro-post-install it seems to have generated some trusted keys and then let me update using 'sudo pacman -Syu' without issue.
If anyone has any suggestions for a better way to get updates working on the pre-loaded Manjaro/Plasma system, then it could be useful to let others folks know so that they can easily update to the most recent version of Manjaro and Plasma Mobile and test it out on their new Pinephone Pro.
Shutdown
Not sure why this happens but it seems that with my Pinephone Pro, if it's plugged in to a charger then it will start up automatically. Even if it's the underpowered charger that doesn't charge the battery.
Pressing and holding the Power button for 8 seconds will shut the phone down
-A long press of the power button will bring up the Shutdown, Restart options in Plasma Mobile too - shutdown works from there: looks like it has stalled for a little while but then shuts down nicely.
'sudo shutdown now' in the Terminal also works similarly.
BUT if the charging cable is plugged in (even if it's not giving enough power to charge the battery) it starts up again immediately after shutdown.
This may be specific to my Pinephone Pro, but it seems like at the moment it isn't possible to charge the phone without the phone switching on. It might be different when I get a suitable charger, but I'd be interested to know if anyone else is experiencing this same behaviour with their Pinephone Pro.
