UBPorts 1 week in

[antiX-Dave]

About to download and load the latest image.

Have been running image number 279 for ~ 1 week as my sole phone off of the internal storage.
It was very pleasing to be able to use the phone throughout the week. I am not certain if any feedback is being looked for or if this is the place to do so. However seen other threads in a similar fashion...

Some memorable observations.
Phone was set to 2g/3g/4g in settings.


Phone calls for the most part worked superbly. Audio was crisp and of good volume both for myself and those on the other end of the call. There were a couple of times that the phone connection was completely void of audio but simply closing the call and recalling rectified the situation. Answering was a bit of a hassle as you had to be looking at the phone when the call came in. Did not ring or wake up when a call came in.

SMS messages worked flawlessly until later on in the week. Slowly the messages would no longer be received. As of late yesterday and all of today I am only able to send SMS messages, not receive them. If sent a webpage link, clicking the link would not open the link and trying to copy the message to the web browser also did not work. The copy would only work to another SMS message.

MMS: Not certain if it was functioning or not. I was not able to receive pictures sent to me. I was not able to attach pictures through the gallery or file manager options when adding an attachment. I entered the apn settings as provided from my service provider after calling / chatting online indicating that I would be attempting to use a phone in development. The apn settings were given for internet and mms, however I was not able to enter them in this way. Entering them together would not allow me to press the check mark or would not appear in the list of apn's after pressing the check mark. Occasionally the added apn would make it into the list but only as an "internet" setting. Adding a separate mms from the internet setting would allow me to enter both. In the apn list selecting both with the checkbox would not show as selected after moving up to the mobile settings and back into the apn list.

Internet. Mobile internet worked as intended after entering the internet portion of the apn. Wifi likewise worked as expected. Turning the wifi off and on again would not display a list of access points or reconnect to an already configured access point as noted in other threads. Running nmcli radio wifi off && nmcli radio wifi on re-enabled the wifi again as noted in other threads. Further on into the week the wifi would begin dropping out and likewise the mobile internet / cellular connection. This made using ssh to access the phone from a computer almost useless as it would take ~ 30 seconds to issue one command.

Email. I was unable to get dekko2 to work for me. When adding an account the UI would not update unless flipped back and forth with another app. In the middle of configuring I was unable to reach the bottom of the configuration page to press a "next/submit" button beyond the smtp server settings. The keyboard was always in the way due to automatic appearance when flipping between apps to have the UI update. In place of dekko2 I have loaded local copy of rainloop running on nginx. Details in another thread found here.
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...4#pid64144
This has worked well enough though obviously it was not be very well integrated and slow (as each action resulted in a mail server connection and webpage reload). Likewise to the MMS situation I was unable to add attachments through any of the options presented (gallery, file manager, etc). I could download and save attachments but I was not able to open them (pdf, rtf, doc, odt, etc) as there was no app installed for such file types.

Open Store: Open Store ran quite well and I was able to download a few apps (dekko2, unav) however when trying to remedy the above problem with email attachments by downloading document viewer I was unable to do so. The download would get about 1/3 of the way; The progress bar would bounce back and forth a few times and stop; The install button would reappear; Nothing installed and pressing the install button again would net the same result.

The weather app: Simply put it blew me away with the layout and information provided. Worked perfectly and far better than what I am used to on my old phone.

Clock/Alarm app, calendar app, calculator, file manager, Notes, Terminal, Contacts, etc: works as expected. No fault found. I did not try the media player, music, gallery, and external drive apps.

Camera: did not function as noted elsewhere. Admittedly I have not spent much time on it other than open the app and play with some settings. Also did not find how to enable the camera flash led to use as a flashlight.

The settings app. I liked the coverage of the available settings. Some of the settings from what I can tell were not working quite right. Examples being stated with the wifi and the apn above. Also I was not able to turn off and on bluetooth on the fly. I could toggle off bluetooth, reboot and bluetooth would be off. Vise versa to turn it back on. I did not try any bluetooth connectivity as I do not use bluetooth often. ( only really in the car on longer trips. )

Morph browser worked quite well for me. I wish it was available for use on the other pinephone images.

Terminal. Worked well. The only thing I was looking for quite often was to have a "CTRL X " option available on the keyboard.

Phone in general, as noted earlier I was very pleased to be able to use the phone solely over the week. Overall the phone worked quite smoothly throughout its use. Unity would crash every now and then but most times would reload. A few times a reboot seemed to be needed. The touch screen does continue to function even when the screen is off / locked. The battery for my use was able to last ~ 5hrs. The time was originally incorrect and I had to run dpkg-reconfigure tzdata. I did download unav but did not use it beyond just seeing how it looked. I have noticed that the gps does not appear to work however this was not explored in anyway to try and make function. I was glad to see the screen rotation working in this image, though I did find it a bit aggressive at times. Lying flat on the table it would flip around a few times before settling on a position. Not always however. I was unable to find applications via the regular repositories to install via apt that would work on the desktop. Most would not find a display to be able to connect to. Reading online it seems that to run most conventional applications you should use libertine. I was not able to have libertine function as it would error out with failed to create lxc container or produce no error but appear to do nothing / hang even after an hour of waiting.

Now to load the newest image and get a fresh start for a new week. Hopefully the receiving sms messages will begin to work again.
If anyone has any ideas/hints/tricks to find error logs/information or resolve any of the issues about I would be glad to hear of them and take a look. I will set the currently installed image aside for the time being in case it is needed.

[antiX-Dave]

Update:
Went to load a newer image but it had trouble booting. (It seems others had this issue as well). I have yet to try the newest image.
Loaded an image of debian phosh which on first boot received all the sms messages that I had received over the past week as well as the ones that were not received. However after this influx of messages the debian phosh image also failed to receive more than one test message. Sending still works.

I have rebooted into the original ubports image and did an apt update && apt full-upgrade which did update a few items but did not fix the sms receiving.

Currently I have contacted my service provider who verified that all the messages are being queued till the buffer is filled (further messages are dropped). This is also the case for messages I have indeed received on the phone. So it seems that the phone would originally download the messages but not notify the service provider's server that it has done so. Interesting to note: with further chatting and looking at the logs (by the service provider) it seems the phone never actually downloads the messages as there is a logged connection from the phone to the server, a check for messages and then the phone disconnects. Unfortunately after some talk with management I am not authorized to have or share any line copies from the log for show and tell. In prior chats (when asking for the connection information and notifying them of what I was hoping to do) the service provider did confirm they will not be blocking anything in regards to the pinephone. The overloaded buffer can be cleared by putting the sim card back in old old phone, however this does not re-enable the ability to receive sms messages.

I am not certain how I can manually test the sms reception. I suppose that this is done through ofono but I am failing to locate documentation / example procedures. If anyone could point me in the right direction I would be grateful. This is all very new for me compared to the usual X86/amd64 based pc.

[visiblink]

I might be out in left field, but I seem to recall something about the modem having a cache that fills up with SMS messages - - and then needs to be cleared every once in a while. That definitely sounds like what might be happening in your case. But like I said, it's a vague recollection. I've searched around trying to find the source, but without any luck.

[antiX-Dave]

Indeed you are correct, that was the case. Thank you for the lead.
As I had loaded a new image on another sd card it seemed to me that it could not be cached on the os file system. Checked if anything could be cached on a sim card, however stopped looking for this as I figure if anything this would be cleared by putting it in my old phone. After looking into internal cache to the modem I found a pdf for AT commands for the modem.
https://www.quectel.com/UploadImage/Down...l_V1.3.pdf
Which has a section on sms commands.

So through ssh I installed minicom with
apt update && apt install minicom
Followed by connecting to the modem tty through minicom by
minicom -D /dev/ttyUSB2
Entered
AT+CMGD=?
Which as far as I know from the pdf outputs a list of messages by number ending in the memory buffer / cache as.
+CMGD: (1,2,3,4,5,6,etc),(0-4)
Taking the 0-4 from the end I entered it into the delete command from the pdf like so
AT+CMGD=0,4
Which as best as I could see itterated through a list of buffers/items and cleared everything from the 0-4 memory buffer.
Rerunning the command to list the messages (AT+CMGD=?) it came back as
+CMGD: (),(0-4)
Which verified to me that the list of messages was cleared.
Then exited minicom with a reset. by pressing Ctrl + A then X and selected yes.
Rebooted the phone for safe measure and ran a few test messages and they came through as expected.

Some testing:
- Received test messages are stacking up again
- Deleting the messages from the chat application does not clear the cache.
- Clearing the cache the messages still remain available in the messaging app.
Seems to be a bug. I do not know if this is in the latest image.

Is there a way to do AT commands automatically via the command line to be able to script this delete action?
Now perhaps there is a way to move items from the modem cache to the file system / user's home and clear the cache (perhaps because they remain after purging the cache this is already so / meant to be) ?

[antiX-Dave]

A small update.
I was able to keep sms messaging working by purging the cache every now and then.
Making a script under /usr/local/bin/ named clear-cache.sh I am able to do this without the use of minicom.
The contents of /usr/local/bin/clear-cache.sh are:

Code:

#!/bin/sh
echo "AT+CMGD=0,4" > /dev/ttyUSB2

Which I gave the permissions of 755
Also added the script to cron via "crontab -e" with the entry of

Code:

*/10 * * * * /usr/local/bin/clear-cache.sh

clearing the cache every 10 minutes. This could be less frequent but if a few people send sms messages at the same time it could plug up the buffer / cache if set longer.

It was nice to see in later images that the ringtones/notification sounds started working.
Calling seems to be more spotty than the version used above.
This time around have been using image numbers 297/298 if I remember correctly

[hikingpete]

...
clearing the cache every 10 minutes. This could be less frequent but if a few people send sms messages at the same time it could plug up the buffer / cache if set longer.

You've got a bit of a race condition here - if a message arrives just as you start clearing the cache, it might get deleted before it's copied off the modem. It looks like using 'delflag' 1 would be safer, only deleting messages that have been read.

I haven't done much with my pinephone so far, but I've really liked what I've seen from UBPorts, so I appreciate seeing the tips in the forum. Thanks for the write up.

[antiX-Dave]

Agreed. Thanks for the tip, I will look at the delflag 1 option.
However this will need to wait till after I have mms working from what I can tell as mms messages also queue up but I have no way of reading / viewing them at this moment. So they would they not also plug up the cache if deleting only the read messages?

[thwright]

A small update.
I was able to keep sms messaging working by purging the cache every now and then.
Making a script under /usr/local/bin/ named clear-cache.sh I am able to do this without the use of minicom.
The contents of /usr/local/bin/clear-cache.sh are:

Code:

#!/bin/sh
echo "AT+CMGD=0,4" > /dev/ttyUSB2

Which I gave the permissions of 755
Also added the script to cron via "crontab -e" with the entry of

Code:

*/10 * * * * /usr/local/bin/clear-cache.sh

clearing the cache every 10 minutes. This could be less frequent but if a few people send sms messages at the same time it could plug up the buffer / cache if set longer.

It was nice to see in later images that the ringtones/notification sounds started working.
Calling seems to be more spotty than the version used above.
This time around have been using image numbers 297/298 if I remember correctly

Using your idea as a base, I did the following. I was having an issue with USA T-Mobile (not CDMA) on the PureOS port for PP CE in which T-Mobile spam sent MMS messages to me (perhaps trying to confirm something). This was further exacerbated by being in an area without signal and the phone's battery dying regularly. I created the following script to delete the messages they send.

Code:

#!/bin/bash

MODEM=`sudo mmcli -L | awk '{print $1}' | awk -F'/' '{print $6}'`
oIFS=$IFS
IFS=$'\n'

CACHEDSMS=""

for CACHEDSMS in `sudo mmcli -m $MODEM --messaging-list-sms | awk '{print $1}' | awk -F'/' '{print $6}'`; do
    if sudo mmcli -s $CACHEDSMS | grep 'smsc: +12063130057' ; then
        sudo mmcli -m $MODEM --messaging-delete-sms=$CACHEDSMS
    fi
done

While I haven't put this in a cron, the script works and should be able to be placed in a cron.

See also this post.