Just received Pinephone - system crashes
11-04-2020, 08:01 PM
I just received my Pinephone "Manjaro With Convergence Package" and have been playing around with it a bit just as a pocket Linux computer - I've not tried to do anything with a SIM card yet.
The good: Screen is very nice, good brightness and no dead pixels. The phone connected to my home wi-fi with no issues. Although the back of the phone does feel kind of fragile I figured out how to get it off and back on with no problem. Maybe will order an extra or two "just in case". Internal speaker test worked, and volume seemed good. Haven't tried any real audio yet but the test sounded clear and undistorted. Overall feel of the hardware is that of a solid product.
The bad: I realize the Manjaro software is still alpha, but I wanted to get some feedback on whether what I'm seeing is expected, or am I looking at possible hardware issues. (Is something like memtest available for diags?)
So far I've had two system crashes where it was necessary to remove the battery to reboot the phone since it would not even respond to the power button. This happened once while running the Terminal application, and another time in Settings. Now I have Mozilla Firefox running and that browser has locked up and does not respond, though the OS is still responsive. (I'm not able to kill Firefox using the "X" after minimizing though. How do you kill a locked-up application? Since Wayland is in use I assume xkill wouldn't work.)
If these problems are simply due to the alpha nature of the software, is Manjaro updated in-place or is it necessary to reinstall the OS as development continues? (I know, read the wiki and the Manjaro forum!)
As I am typing this the phone locked up again, totally unresponsive, while in Settings... but looking at the Manjaro ARM Beta1 known issues, I see "UI becomes unresponsive after a while." So maybe it is just software crashes, though I note that not only does the UI crash but the power button doesn't work when this happens. Maybe will try some other Linux distributions while Manjaro continues to improve and see if those have similar problems. Should be fun!
The good: Screen is very nice, good brightness and no dead pixels. The phone connected to my home wi-fi with no issues. Although the back of the phone does feel kind of fragile I figured out how to get it off and back on with no problem. Maybe will order an extra or two "just in case". Internal speaker test worked, and volume seemed good. Haven't tried any real audio yet but the test sounded clear and undistorted. Overall feel of the hardware is that of a solid product.
The bad: I realize the Manjaro software is still alpha, but I wanted to get some feedback on whether what I'm seeing is expected, or am I looking at possible hardware issues. (Is something like memtest available for diags?)
So far I've had two system crashes where it was necessary to remove the battery to reboot the phone since it would not even respond to the power button. This happened once while running the Terminal application, and another time in Settings. Now I have Mozilla Firefox running and that browser has locked up and does not respond, though the OS is still responsive. (I'm not able to kill Firefox using the "X" after minimizing though. How do you kill a locked-up application? Since Wayland is in use I assume xkill wouldn't work.)
If these problems are simply due to the alpha nature of the software, is Manjaro updated in-place or is it necessary to reinstall the OS as development continues? (I know, read the wiki and the Manjaro forum!)
As I am typing this the phone locked up again, totally unresponsive, while in Settings... but looking at the Manjaro ARM Beta1 known issues, I see "UI becomes unresponsive after a while." So maybe it is just software crashes, though I note that not only does the UI crash but the power button doesn't work when this happens. Maybe will try some other Linux distributions while Manjaro continues to improve and see if those have similar problems. Should be fun!
