PinePhone Keyboard need troubleshooting guidance

[MNtinkerer]

I received the PinePhone keyboard today and it charges however it does not do anything else. I am using the Mobian CE Pinephone. It is up to date. I've tried depressing the power button on the keyboard and nothing except it will stop the onscreen cursor from blinking. By the symptoms I suspect the firmware but I am not a developer so megl's blog is greek to me. Where do I start?

[Lord Windy]

I received the PinePhone keyboard today and it charges however it does not do anything else. I am using the Mobian CE Pinephone. It is up to date. I've tried depressing the power button on the keyboard and nothing except it will stop the onscreen cursor from blinking. By the symptoms I suspect the firmware but I am not a developer so megl's blog is greek to me. Where do I start?

It said on the storepage that you needed to use some specific OSes at the moment. Like PostmarketOs or Manjaro I think?

[MNtinkerer]

I received the PinePhone keyboard today and it charges however it does not do anything else. I am using the Mobian CE Pinephone. It is up to date. I've tried depressing the power button on the keyboard and nothing except it will stop the onscreen cursor from blinking. By the symptoms I suspect the firmware but I am not a developer so megl's blog is greek to me. Where do I start?

It said on the storepage that you needed to use some specific OSes at the moment. Like PostmarketOs or Manjaro I think?

Mobian is supported:

Not all mobile OSes support the keyboard case. At launch the keyboard is supported by: postmarketOS, Manjaro Linux, DanctNIX (Arch Linux) and Mobian

However I cannot find any literature explaining what is needed by Mobian.

[zimano]

I have been using an older image for Mobian and been updating it for the last six months or so.  Got my Pinephone keyboard today and it doesn't work at all.  I downloaded the latest weekly build off the Mobian site (mobian-pinephone-phosh-20220109.img.gz) and installed this.  It works!

I imagine that this new image is based on Debian Bookworm maybe?  If that's the case maybe all we needed to do was an apt dist-upgrade

I'll go back to my old image and give it a go.  I hope this helps folks though.

[MNtinkerer]

I have been using an older image for Mobian and been updating it for the last six months or so.  Got my Pinephone keyboard today and it doesn't work at all.  I downloaded the latest weekly build off the Mobian site (mobian-pinephone-phosh-20220109.img.gz) and installed this.  It works!

I imagine that this new image is based on Debian Bookworm maybe?  If that's the case maybe all we needed to do was an apt dist-upgrade

I'll go back to my old image and give it a go.  I hope this helps folks though.

This was the fix that I needed. I believe Debian Bookworm was the trick. To future-proof your solution I will provide the link to Mobian builds and a quick tutorial. Again, thank you again!

To have a working PinePhone-keyboard with the PinePhone using Mobian, use a current image from Mobian's weekly build, or at least at the time of this post, an image based on Debian Bookworm. Weekly images can be found:

https://images.mobian-project.org/pinephone/weekly/

In order to flash the image to the eMMC of the PinePhone, it is necessary to use a tool like JumpDrive available here:

https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Ju...e/releases

All a user has to do is have a spare SD card and flash the ~43MB JumpDrive file to the SD card. Then insert the SD card into the PinePhone and boot. Attach a USB C data cable from the PinePhone to the computer AFTER THE PINEPHONE BOOTS and flash the Mobian (or whatever OS) to the PinePhone. Power off the PinePhone and remove the SD card, then reboot the PinePhone. For Mobian the initial password is currently 1234.

I used a command line and the dd utility being careful to write to the correct drives.

[VitalKoshalew]

I was able to upgrade Mobian to Bookworm without reinstallation. Just follow the instruction here.
I was doing the upgrade via a wired LAN connection over SSH and inside screen session. This may be important as WiFi connection and screen unlock PIN stopped working during the upgrade process. Maybe disabling screen lock and doing the upgrade on the device screen is also possible.
After upgrade was complete and after first reboot screen unlock still was not working. I've rebooted again and the issue fixed itself as per this note.
I also had to play a bit with turning on/off airplane mode and rebooting few times to make both cell connection and WiFi work.