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My Pinephone Setup

hamblingreen.gitlab.io

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Re: My Pinephone Setup

#2

Post by megous »

It's so nice that you can replace the mainboard as a regular user, if it's broken... or even fix it yourself, since the level of integration is not terribly dense and there's no epoxy/glue anywhere, and the shielding is not soldered to the board.

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#6

Post by billybuckwheat »

emptyparadise wrote: post #3

I don't think I can handle a CLI-based phone.

It's only CLI-based because the writer seems to be using the phone that way. That's how it appears to me anyway. Kind of like Linux on the desktop ...

Everything I've seen about the PinePhone suggests that you can go full GUI.

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#7

Post by Enginerrrd »

billybuckwheat wrote: post #6
emptyparadise wrote: post #3

I don't think I can handle a CLI-based phone.

It's only CLI-based because the writer seems to be using the phone that way. That's how it appears to me anyway. Kind of like Linux on the desktop ... Everything I've seen about the PinePhone suggests that you can go full GUI.

Not in my experience with Arch on the pine phone. Arch was the only distro where almost everything worked, but I have to do CLI updates. The GUI isn't really there yet for all of the basic and necessary administration activities.

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#9

Post by blendergeek »

> All this time I was aware that the core of my phone, it's kernel, was closed source and probably out-of-date.

Android runs the Linux kernel which is GPLv2 (and thus open source). For a couple reasons this isn't seen as "true" Linux or open source.

1. Drivers are often proprietary

2. SoC manufactures release their versions of the Linux kernel without integrating them into the "upstream" manage by Linus Torvalds so even open source drivers are hard to use.

3. Android uses an non-standard user-space and UI (running apps in the DalvikVM).

"Normal" or "desktop" Linux tends to use the GNU userspace with one of several Freedesktop.org compliant desktop interfaces on top. The use of the GNU userspace leads the FSF to call this GNU/Linux lead to the GNU/Linux naming controversy [0].

However, because Android uses the Linux kernel, it is possible to bring "real" or "desktop" Linux to old Android handsets. postmarketOS [1] is a project intending to do this. Several old Android SoCs now run a "close to mainline" "normal" Linux kernel and can be used as Linux phones. I actually use a OnePlus 6 running postmarketOS.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU/Linux_naming_controversy

[1] https://postmarketos.org/

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