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My Pinephone Setup

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Re: My Pinephone Setup

#22
> Gomuks: Ever wanted to get Matrix protocol notifications on your Pinephone, without the sluggishness of an Electron UI? Now you can!

AFAIK: not without draining the battery you can't. You have to either disable the deep sleep mode ("CRUST") while the screen is blanked or leave the screen on, otherwise any Matrix client including gomuks won't run at all once you turn the screen off. (So no notifications for incoming messages.)

Maybe this isn't a problem if you're a very occasional Matrix user, and the battery drain even with everything running isn't too bad, but if you've been using it as long as I have and are in a lot of active rooms it's just not workable.

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#23
post #11

While PinePhone is definitely an interesting product, GrapheneOS + Termux is such a versatile combination I've stopped looking at these "real Linux" phones. You get access to modern power-efficient hardware with a Google Pixel, a proper touch interface, a ton of hardening under the hood, and then to top it all off, Termux offers a very usable Linux environment.

Android in general has broken more of termux every version; does GrapheneOS fix that?

Isn't that just the Play Store version? I've not had any problems with the FDroid version.

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#24
Nice. Recently received my PinePhone keyboard add-on and am looking to replace my Android phone as a daily driver quite soon. This information will prove useful.

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Android in general has broken more of termux every version; does GrapheneOS fix that?

Isn't that just the Play Store version? I've not had any problems with the FDroid version.

It's still more sandboxed WRT at least filesystem access, and I thought Google had made changes to selinux policies that would increasingly break it, although I'm not immediately seeing a source to back up that memory. And in fairness, a custom ROM could fix selinux policies, but it's extra work.

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#26
OP's setup looks actually pretty similar to my one, though where the pinephone really - really - shines is pentesting.

The compatibility with external Wifi USB adapters and BT hardware like the ones from scott's gadgets make it an amazing pentesting device.

For serious mobile-friendly usage I don't think that we can build UIs the way they're built on Linux systems anymore.

I challenge every defender of that GTK/QT crap to build a swipeable sidebar into their native and responsive UI. If it takes more than 10 minutes, you lost, cause that's what it takes to use CSS, even without any IDE or toolkit.

I wish GTK wasn't built inhouse and would focus on using established toolchains instead of reinventing their own programming language ecosystem with every new release. Nobody wants to use vala. Nobody wants to use glade. Nobody wants to use any of the ecosystem, because it's much more pain than any established UI framework's methodology.

There's a reason why everyone uses electron, and the reasons are not the same why you think your GNOMey toolchains matter. And this has to stop. Otherwise everybody will hop on QT at some point.

I still hope that webkit, javascriptcore and nodejs can be combined into something that allows to easily call C-ABI compatible libraries without 300MB of build size like electron. [1]

[1] https://github.com/tholian-network/retrokit

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#27

OP's setup looks actually pretty similar to my one, though where the pinephone really - really - shines is pentesting. The compatibility with external Wifi USB adapters and BT hardware like the ones from scott's gadgets make it an amazing pentesting device. For serious mobile-friendly usage I don't think that we can build UIs the way they're built on Linux systems anymore. I challenge every defender of that GTK/QT cr…

> I still hope that webkit, javascriptcore and nodejs can be combined into something that allows to easily call C-ABI compatible libraries without 300MB of build size like electron. [1]

Build it

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#28

OP's setup looks actually pretty similar to my one, though where the pinephone really - really - shines is pentesting. The compatibility with external Wifi USB adapters and BT hardware like the ones from scott's gadgets make it an amazing pentesting device. For serious mobile-friendly usage I don't think that we can build UIs the way they're built on Linux systems anymore. I challenge every defender of that GTK/QT cr…

> though where the pinephone really - really - shines is pentesting.

Its worth having some near field communication pentesting apps on it, as many mental health hospitals use NFC bracelets for locking people up and to control what corridors they can get access to within the building so it could be an easy way to walk out of those sorts of establishments where lock and key are no longer used.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near-field_communication#Criti... https://resources.infosecinstitute.com/topic/near-field-comm...

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#29
post #20

Advice for anyone considering it: * There are rough edges, but the basics are there: calling/SMS/4G/WiFi/audio/browsing/suspend. * If you want to try it, put https://xnux.eu/p-boot-demo/ on an SD card and plug that into your PinePhone. That has a bunch of different distros and UIs on it. * To keep up to date, follow https://www.pine64.org/blog/ and https://linmob.net/ I'm excited to use a community driven phone!

Did they ever fix the modem disappearing on suspend? I have the latest kernel (as of a month ago) and a build of bitkorgii's modem firmware from last year but I still need to reboot the phone every time I pull it out to check my texts.

EDIT (I'm throttled and can't reply): I already have a script/service/runlevel that handles periodically waking the phone for notifications (I wrote it fall 2020 when I got mine.) I'm talking about the bug that causes the modem USB device to disappear and not get probed again after a random number of wakes from suspend. It's not an issue if you're only on WiFi and use VOIP but some people get annoyed that they can't call me while I'm driving.

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#30

> Gomuks: Ever wanted to get Matrix protocol notifications on your Pinephone, without the sluggishness of an Electron UI? Now you can! AFAIK: not without draining the battery you can't. You have to either disable the deep sleep mode ("CRUST") while the screen is blanked or leave the screen on, otherwise any Matrix client including gomuks won't run at all once you turn the screen off. (So no notifications for incoming…

That's not necessarily true. Instead of just suspending you can make "suspend" a runlevel which includes a service that periodically wakes the phone up so apps can manage connections to servers that might push data to them. I wrote my own stuff that does that and I think many distros include something similar now.
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