bookworm vs trixie discussion for mobian in pinephone regular.

[zetabeta]

bookworm vs trixie discussion for mobian in pinephone regular.

this is a discussion of bookworm vs trixie and maybe staging. so like possible problems and how to fix them. which one is better, and how well it works. here are some generic arguments. this is for pp regular, here is for pp pro https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=18839 .

arguments for bookworm:
- stable.
- basics work.
- do not have dependency problems, or broken packages.
- smooth security updates.

arguments against bookworm:
- gets outdated.
- some features are missing, because pinephone is a beta product.
- stuck to the older kernel.

arguments for trixie:
- newer packages.
- features, which are missing in older versions.
- newer kernel, see serious point below.

arguments against trixie:
- dependency problems, broken packages.
- some thing do not work, because of unstable packages.

it seems that pipewire is required and default. package is "pipewire-audio".

practically speaking users should go for trixie, unless users can tolerate basic features. i recently updated to trixie, seems to be ok. but moving into trixie from bookworm wasn't straightforward though. pp regular is stuck to 6.1 kernel for now.

it seems that bluetooth mic does not work, headset seems to work.

i put more information when i encounter them.

[Zebulon Walton]

So far I've been sticking with bookworm for the stability. Since I only use the Pinephone for phone calls having that basic function working is my primary concern. However there are some rough edges in bookworm that, if fixed in trixie, might motivate me to switch.

Volume controls don't work during phone calls with bookworm's stock pulseaudio setup. I tried moving to pipewire and the volume controls then worked, but audio routing between the speaker and earpiece was very buggy. So, back to pulseaudio and doing without volume control.

Bluetooth audio doesn't work, it just results in static. This can be mitigated for phone calls by using a wired headset but of course that's a bit clumsy. I've also found that the headset needs to be plugged in after the call is started or the microphone doesn't work.

[zetabeta]

seems to be that kernel development goes forward, this is from staging (unstable).

Code:

Package: pinephone-support
Priority: optional
Section: metapackages
Installed-Size: 10
Maintainer: Arnaud Ferraris <aferraris@debian.org>
Architecture: all
Version: 0.2.9
Depends: eg25-manager, firmware-ov5640, firmware-realtek-rtl8723cs-bt, linux-image-6.6-sunxi64, mobian-pinephone-tweaks, mobian-tweaks-common (>= 0.5.5~), mobile-usb-networking, systemd-zram-generator, u-boot-menu (>= 4.2.1mobian1~)
Conflicts: zram-tools
Filename: pool/main/p/pinephone-support/pinephone-support_0.2.9_all.deb
Size: 3240
MD5sum: ae53c015380f1a5d73814f0199ec2e83
SHA1: 4a1acce1359bd3d5ba9ed95163c955afeb0405e6
SHA256: 2a0983cb7db6c40c816ef63a4a14fc0cae1116df73d04235bb81dab706d2e72e
SHA512: 86bbc38fe0221971522e9cabd91a09fcbbf1834a6f38c610965a5e87777c5c5c0d3bc1e86691412064bea2c2af21a805d6da0b008c48df0e908db78f0e48072e
Description: Hardware support packages for PinePhone
Homepage: https://salsa.debian.org/Mobian-team/devices/pinephone-support

however, i don't know what happened behind the scene.

it is not yet in trixie though.

[anonymous]

Bluetooth audio doesn't work, it just results in static. This can be mitigated for phone calls by using a wired headset but of course that's a bit clumsy. I've also found that the headset needs to be plugged in after the call is started or the microphone doesn't work.

Hello Zebulon

Bluetooth audio worked for me one year ago under Mobian Bookworm but it broke later. After trying to use a Bluetooth external speaker, the internal speaker stopped working and I had to switch to Mobian Trixie to workaround or fix somehow this regression.

I haven't tried to send MMS under Mobian Trixie yet (N.B: multiple APNs), I assume that it doesn't work. The only regression I've observed when switching from Mobian Bookworm to Mobian Trixie is the frequent disconnection, I hope that I'll succeed in fixing that very soon.

P.S: The workaround seems to work under Mobian Trixie too

[Zebulon Walton]

he only regression I've observed when switching from Mobian Bookworm to Mobian Trixie is the frequent disconnection, I hope that I'll succeed in fixing that very soon.

Let us know how that works out, frequent disconnections do not sound promising. I'm still on bookworm since it's working well for me aside from some rough edges like no volume control during calls.

[anonymous]

The workaround works, I no longer have frequent disconnections but I can use my phone only about 6 hours with a full battery.

I'm sorry, the phone calls are horrible, it's very difficult for others to hear me.

Good point: I get a notification when an MMS can't be parsed.

[Kevin Kofler]

I'm sorry, the phone calls are horrible, it's very difficult for others to hear me.

Check your "Mic 1 Boost" setting. (It looks like Mobian also picked up the broken default. I read another similar complaint from another Mobian user a few days ago.)

[anonymous]

I'm sorry, the phone calls are horrible, it's very difficult for others to hear me.

Check your "Mic 1 Boost" setting. (It looks like Mobian also picked up the broken default. I read another similar complaint from another Mobian user a few days ago.)

I've just made the change, I'll provide a feedback very soon, thank you.

P.S: Your suggestion solved my problem, someone phoned me and I phoned him back, he could hear me correctly.

[anonymous]

There are some synchronization problems when playing a video, it doesn't freeze on Vimeo, the audio works but it freezes Mozilla Firefox and I have to reboot the Pinephone on Youtube (I don't like Youtube anyway and I try to avoid using it when it's possible).

[Kevin Kofler]

So, to have this documented here in case the Manjaro forum ever goes down or deletes the old thread:

For the last couple weeks, people had been complaining about being unable to understand what I was saying on my PinePhone during phone calls (no matter who initiated the call). I could usually hear the other end very well, but not the other way round. (As I was told later, the problem was that the voice had some bizarre, hard-to-describe echo-type effect that made it pretty much unintelligible, no matter what microphone volume I set in the Plasma Mobile settings GUI.)

So, after a painful experience today where I was trying to call several people and none understood more than a tiny fraction of what I said, I had a debugging session in the evening with my mother, involving her calling me while we were both at home, and me playing around with alsamixer settings (from my desktop over SSH to the PinePhone, because the alsamixer TUI is much easier to operate that way).

Thankfully, I found the culprit pretty quickly (it was actually the first knob I tried): The Mic 1 Boost setting. For some reason, this was set to the maximum 100. I found that when I toned it down to some arbitrary value (it ended up at 45), the other end could understand me much better. Then I tried toning it down all the way to 0 and that made it even better.

This leads to the “public service announcement”: If you have an original PinePhone, you will want to set Mic 1 Boost to 0. Having it set to 100 makes for horrible sound for the other end of phone calls. For me, the setting was remembered once set, I did not have to explicitly save it somehow.

To locate the setting, either run alsamixer and use the F6 key and the resulting popup to switch from the virtual PulseAudio device to the real hardware where the setting is, or (especially if you are on the device and do not have a physical keyboard with an F6 key plugged in) run alsamixer -D hw:0 to get to the hardware device directly. Then use the cursor key to the right until the cursor is on Mic 1 Boost and the cursor key down to set its volume to 0. (Cursor keys can also be found in the special key row above the virtual keyboard in QMLKonsole.)