New Pine Phone User In Canada

[Katsujinken]

Greetings Everyone!
I just receved my new Pine Phone last night and it seems to work with our Fido network. Fido is a dummy company of Rogers to give us the illusion of having more choices than we do. So it likely works on their network since it's really the same as the one I'm posting from now. If anyone here wants to update on the wikia of compatible carriers then please do.

Thus far I've been using the preinstalled Manjaro with mixed results. I often get error messages that the modem is busy or otherwise cannot connect to my mobile network. When making calls I have to go into the settings to manually switch from the loudspeaker to the earspeaker then manually switch it back again when I'm done. Attempting to save files like JPGs through Angelfish does nothing. Does anyone know of fixes for these?

I would consider tryjng another OS like Ubuntu Touch but it has its own compatibility issues at present so are there any other OSes that can reliably use the Pine Phone to make calls, text, lightly browse online and listen to MP3s? It doesn't have to be pretty so long as it works. I use Zorin on my desktop and a modified version of Rasbian on my Pi 4b in a tablet enosure so I have some basic experience with different types of Linux.

Thanks in advance and I will look forward to participating on this forum with all you freedom lovers, hackers and other enthusists!

[dachalife]

Greetings Everyone!
I just receved my new Pine Phone last night and it seems to work with our Fido network. Fido is a dummy company of Rogers to give us the illusion of having more choices than we do. So it likely works on their network since it's really the same as the one I'm posting from now. If anyone here wants to update on the wikia of compatible carriers then please do.

Thus far I've been using the preinstalled Manjaro with mixed results. I often get error messages that the modem is busy or otherwise cannot connect to my mobile network. When making calls I have to go into the settings to manually switch from the loudspeaker to the earspeaker then manually switch it back again when I'm done. Attempting to save files like JPGs through Angelfish does nothing. Does anyone know of fixes for these?

I would consider tryjng another OS like Ubuntu Touch but it has its own compatibility issues at present so are there any other OSes that can reliably use the Pine Phone to make calls, text, lightly browse online and listen to MP3s? It doesn't have to be pretty so long as it works. I use Zorin on my desktop and a modified version of Rasbian on my Pi 4b in a tablet enosure so I have some basic experience with different types of Linux.

Thanks in advance and I will look forward to participating on this forum with all you freedom lovers, hackers and other enthusists!

Hi, Katsujinken,

I know where you are coming from. I got mine about a month ago with Manjaro installed; out of the box, battery life was about 4 hours & got a few error messages as well. Was able to fix the errors & improve the battery time, but it just wasn’t right.

Downloaded Mobian & flashed it to a freshly formatted sd card & most of my problems were solved.
Had to manually put in the APN for mobile internet, but that was a minor thing.
(If you do the same, please update the WIKI for your area’s settings or post them here).

Battery life really depends upon what you are doing, today after 17 hours still at 70% (no calls, just a short 5 minute demo of its features for the I.T. department at another job site). If I run a lot of media, then the battery goes down quickly.

I primarily use it as a phone and after some weeks of testing, I found for me, that it is a viable option to Android/Apple.

Geary is working fine for email, I’m receiving missed call messages from my mobile provider & Firefox ESR seems to be more reliable than Angelfish for most websites

If you intend to use the alarm, leave the application open; found that sometimes it wont go off if you close the app.

I’ve been using it as my only phone since I bought it last month & I love it.

If you have any questions or concerns, please post them and welcome.

[Katsujinken]

Greetings Everyone!
I just receved my new Pine Phone last night and it seems to work with our Fido network. Fido is a dummy company of Rogers to give us the illusion of having more choices than we do. So it likely works on their network since it's really the same as the one I'm posting from now. If anyone here wants to update on the wikia of compatible carriers then please do.

Thus far I've been using the preinstalled Manjaro with mixed results. I often get error messages that the modem is busy or otherwise cannot connect to my mobile network. When making calls I have to go into the settings to manually switch from the loudspeaker to the earspeaker then manually switch it back again when I'm done. Attempting to save files like JPGs through Angelfish does nothing. Does anyone know of fixes for these?

I would consider tryjng another OS like Ubuntu Touch but it has its own compatibility issues at present so are there any other OSes that can reliably use the Pine Phone to make calls, text, lightly browse online and listen to MP3s? It doesn't have to be pretty so long as it works. I use Zorin on my desktop and a modified version of Rasbian on my Pi 4b in a tablet enosure so I have some basic experience with different types of Linux.

Thanks in advance and I will look forward to participating on this forum with all you freedom lovers, hackers and other enthusists!

Hi, Katsujinken,

I know where you are coming from. I got mine about a month ago with Manjaro installed; out of the box, battery life was about 4 hours & got a few error messages as well. Was able to fix the errors & improve the battery time, but it just wasn’t right.

Downloaded Mobian & flashed it to a freshly formatted sd card & most of my problems were solved.
Had to manually put in the APN for mobile internet, but that was a minor thing.
(If you do the same, please update the WIKI for your area’s settings or post them here).

Battery life really depends upon what you are doing, today after 17 hours still at 70% (no calls, just a short 5 minute demo of its features for the I.T. department at another job site). If I run a lot of media, then the battery goes down quickly.

I primarily use it as a phone and after some weeks of testing, I found for me, that it is a viable option to Android/Apple.

Geary is working fine for email, I’m receiving missed call messages from my mobile provider & Firefox ESR seems to be more reliable than Angelfish for most websites

If you intend to use the alarm, leave the application open; found that sometimes it wont go off if you close the app.

I’ve been using it as my only phone since I bought it last month & I love it.

If you have any questions or concerns, please post them and welcome.

Awesome thanks for the info! Would it help performance if I flash Mobian directly to the internal memory or is there an inportant reason you put it on an SD card? Maybe you're right to do it that way regardless. Manjaro will hopefully get lots of support given enough time since Pine64 chose it as their pack-in OS so I may want to keep it there to try periodically.

[bcnaz]

NOTE :
Running the O.S. from the sd card is a Great Pinephone option for testing the different operating systems.
It only takes a moment to swap the sd card in and out of your Pinephone.

I strongly recommend using 'Balena Etcher' for flashing your micro-sd cards... * ( "we often refer to the micro-sd cards as simply sd cards"}
Also for "testing" operating systems on your Pinephone, a 16gb is an ideal size, maybe as large as 32gb, but larger is kind of wasteful of $

Zorin is a decent operating system, and the personalized support from the 'brothers' and their forum there is quite amazing, I have used Zorin a bit myself.

---

***

"dummy company"
These are MVNO's 'Mobile Virtual Network Operators' or resellers.

On the plus side they are a bit cheaper than the Main carrier.

On the negative side, on a busy cell tower, the resellers may have a lower priority to premium high speed services.

[tllim]

NOTE :
Running the O.S. from the sd card is a Great Pinephone option for testing the different operating systems.
It only takes a moment to swap the sd card in and out of your Pinephone.

I strongly recommend using 'Balena Etcher' for flashing your micro-sd cards...  * ( "we often refer to the micro-sd cards as simply sd cards"}
Also for "testing"  operating systems on your Pinephone,  a 16gb is an ideal size, maybe as large as 32gb, but larger is kind of wasteful of  $

Zorin is a decent operating system, and the personalized support from the 'brothers' and their forum there is quite amazing, I have used Zorin a bit myself.

---

***

"dummy company"
These are MVNO's  'Mobile Virtual Network Operators'  or resellers.

On the plus side they are a bit cheaper than the Main carrier.

On the negative side,  on a busy cell tower, the resellers may have a lower priority to premium high speed services.

Not aware PinePhone already has the Zorin OS supported.

[bcnaz]

@tllim
Above, I was referring to a home computer operating system.

Though I did talk to one of the Zorin brothers about the Pinephone last year.

They were working on adding the arm/pi software as their first arm supported O.S.

At that time they had their hands full, but he did say they 'may consider supporting the Pinephone in the future' ...

[Katsujinken]

Greetings Everyone!
I just receved my new Pine Phone last night and it seems to work with our Fido network. Fido is a dummy company of Rogers to give us the illusion of having more choices than we do. So it likely works on their network since it's really the same as the one I'm posting from now. If anyone here wants to update on the wikia of compatible carriers then please do.

Thus far I've been using the preinstalled Manjaro with mixed results. I often get error messages that the modem is busy or otherwise cannot connect to my mobile network. When making calls I have to go into the settings to manually switch from the loudspeaker to the earspeaker then manually switch it back again when I'm done. Attempting to save files like JPGs through Angelfish does nothing. Does anyone know of fixes for these?

I would consider tryjng another OS like Ubuntu Touch but it has its own compatibility issues at present so are there any other OSes that can reliably use the Pine Phone to make calls, text, lightly browse online and listen to MP3s? It doesn't have to be pretty so long as it works. I use Zorin on my desktop and a modified version of Rasbian on my Pi 4b in a tablet enosure so I have some basic experience with different types of Linux.

Thanks in advance and I will look forward to participating on this forum with all you freedom lovers, hackers and other enthusists!

Hi, Katsujinken,

I know where you are coming from. I got mine about a month ago with Manjaro installed; out of the box, battery life was about 4 hours & got a few error messages as well. Was able to fix the errors & improve the battery time, but it just wasn’t right.

Downloaded Mobian & flashed it to a freshly formatted sd card & most of my problems were solved.
Had to manually put in the APN for mobile internet, but that was a minor thing.
(If you do the same, please update the WIKI for your area’s settings or post them here).

Battery life really depends upon what you are doing, today after 17 hours still at 70% (no calls, just a short 5 minute demo of its features for the I.T. department at another job site). If I run a lot of media, then the battery goes down quickly.

I primarily use it as a phone and after some weeks of testing, I found for me, that it is a viable option to Android/Apple.

Geary is working fine for email, I’m receiving missed call messages from my mobile provider & Firefox ESR seems to be more reliable than Angelfish for most websites

If you intend to use the alarm, leave the application open; found that sometimes it wont go off if you close the app.

I’ve been using it as my only phone since I bought it last month & I love it.

If you have any questions or concerns, please post them and welcome.

Okay so after several attempts I finally got Mobian to successfully flash onto a 64GB sd card and successfully resize itself and initialize. So far I am very satisfied with it. It still had a bit of jank and occasional rashes but it runs much better & cooler, Firefox already has uBlock installed so no ads, terminal is much more familiar using Debian, calls & txt works and yes so does mobile data!

SO we can officially confirm that Mobian on Pine Phone is compatible with Canada's Fido Network. The Access Point is named FidoLTE and the APN is ltemobile.apn

Thank you so much for your help thus far! This is really what I wanted. SO what other fun can I have with my new toy? I installed retroarch but may need to use an external monitor  to configure it as the menu text is so tiny. Have any of you tried whether its touch screen overlays work?

[dachalife]

Glad to hear that you got Mobian installed & it’s working fine, it does take a bit for that resize.

Sorry I can’t help with retroarch, hopefully someone here can jump in on the games part, or you’ll have to delve into the documentation & have a go at it yourself. That could be your first challenge, just document your steps & produce a guide. I used to do that on WINEHQ years ago.

As far as other fun, start testing out applications, figure out how to make them work/work better
or make your own, the possibilities are what you make them. Just don’t forget the backup or to use a test card & if you find something helpful, post it so that others can use it.

Good Luck and fun with it.

[Katsujinken]

Glad to hear that you got Mobian installed & it’s working fine, it does take a bit for that resize.

Sorry I can’t help with retroarch, hopefully someone here can jump in on the games part, or you’ll have to delve into the documentation & have a go at it yourself. That could be your first challenge, just document your steps & produce a guide. I used to do that on WINEHQ years ago.

As far as other fun, start testing out applications, figure out how to make them work/work better
or make your own, the possibilities are what you make them. Just don’t forget the backup or to use a test card & if you find something helpful, post it so that others can use it.

Good Luck and fun with it.

Absolutely! I'll keep track of what I learn and report anything important that I learn back to the forum.

It doesn't appear Mobian has headphone jack support yet. Do you know whether Bluetooth headphones work? It's not a huge deal either way but I'm still trying to figure out how to simply select a specific music file or folder in Lollipop rather than it just autoloading everything in random order.

[Zebulon Walton]

A wired headset will work with Mobian but what you have to do is first dial the call then plug the headset into the jack. Kind of goofy but hopefully that will be remedied at some point.

I've never been able to get bluetooth audio working. My Samsung bluetooth headset, which worked perfectly fine with my old flip phone, just spits out static when connected to the Pinephone.