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My Pinephone Setup

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Re: My Pinephone Setup

#41

Post by jcelerier »

chrismorgan wrote: post #35
zozbot234 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that both PinePhone and pmOS have yet to reach "daily driver" status, especially if you actually care about using the phone featureset, want to run a proper mainline (not vendor) kernel and (as for pmOS) want to go outside the narrow subset of hardware that's endorsed by that project as 'working properly'. Also, many users have noticed that phone/tablet/mobile hardware in general tends to become super flaky when…

As an example of the flakiness: if I use my PinePhone heavily, the screen tends to stop working spontaneously, so that if on at the time of failure, it ceases to update, and when turned off and on again it will be black. Touch input still works. Restarting the graphical session (e.g. ssh in and run `systemctl restart phosh` for phosh or `systemctl restart tinydm` for sxmo) fixes it. “Heavily” tends to mean at least t…

The "phone stuck with black screen" thing happened to me on every android phone I ever had though (and here I can't restart the x session, I have to reboot it or take off the physical battery when things go really bad), so maybe it's more of a kernel level issue ?

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#42

Post by linmob »

ryukafalz wrote: post #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…

There‘s a script for waking the PinePhone up regularly to mitigate this: https://codeberg.org/Silmathoron/pinephone-autowake

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#43

Post by chrismorgan »

spijdar wrote: post #39
robbedpeter wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe tie those systemctl commands to the power button and state, so it restarts the screen every time you blank the screen, or when coming back on use a restart for the service? I have a feeling mainstream phones use all sorts of these ux hacks in the background - it only looks good, under the hood is just as messy and chaotic as any other software/hardware collision.

In this case, what's happening (based on what GP says, not personal experience) is the window server (phosh as a wayland compositor or Xorg in sxmo's case) is crashing, possibly (probably?) due to a crash in the Mali driver or some sunxi component managing the physical display output. Restarting the window server here would "reset" the relevant GPU bits, and get the display back. It also will (effectively) restart th…

Sway in sxmo’s case, actually. I’m not sure what exactly is falling over, but the session is all still there, with the compositor (Sway or Phosh) still responding to I/O, and, from my very limited probing, still working perfectly… except that its screen output is dead and it doesn’t realise it. Nothing interesting in the journal or dmesg, for example. If the compositor had crashed, it would have been restarted automatically.

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#44

Post by heavyset_go »

cookiengineer wrote: post #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 cr…

> 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.

You get this for free with Qt's QML Drawer type, and it's also a declarative UI, so you don't have to implement anything yourself[1]. It's swipeable by default.

You also get it for free with Flutter's NavDrawer.

[1] https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtquickcontrols-sidepanel-example.htm...

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#45

Post by spijdar »

chrismorgan wrote: post #43
spijdar wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, what's happening (based on what GP says, not personal experience) is the window server (phosh as a wayland compositor or Xorg in sxmo's case) is crashing, possibly (probably?) due to a crash in the Mali driver or some sunxi component managing the physical display output. Restarting the window server here would "reset" the relevant GPU bits, and get the display back. It also will (effectively) restart th…

Sway in sxmo’s case, actually. I’m not sure what exactly is falling over, but the session is all still there, with the compositor (Sway or Phosh) still responding to I/O, and, from my very limited probing, still working perfectly… except that its screen output is dead and it doesn’t realise it. Nothing interesting in the journal or dmesg, for example. If the compositor had crashed, it would have been restarted automa…

Ah, interesting, I didn't know they'd built an alternative shell around wlroots, I'd only tried it back when it was a bunch of shell scripts around dwm.

If the GPU and window server are still okay, you might get away with forcing a mode-switch. Maybe it's not the GPU itself but some supporting chip that handles the LCD driver, and changing the resolution or something else would reset it without destroying the session. Hmmm...

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#46

Post by chriswarbo »

zozbot234 wrote: post #17
blendergeek wrote: post #9

> 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 e…

Note that both PinePhone and pmOS have yet to reach "daily driver" status, especially if you actually care about using the phone featureset, want to run a proper mainline (not vendor) kernel and (as for pmOS) want to go outside the narrow subset of hardware that's endorsed by that project as 'working properly'. Also, many users have noticed that phone/tablet/mobile hardware in general tends to become super flaky when…

> Note that both PinePhone and pmOS have yet to reach "daily driver" status

Meh, I don't find such blanket statements compelling.

My Pinephone is a perfectly good "daily driver": I use it for phone calls, SMS, email, scanning QR codes, displaying QR codes (train tickets, parcel deliveries, etc.), Web browsing, etc.

People also said the same thing about OpenMoko, yet that was my "daily driver" for a decade.

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#47

Post by OJFord »

jcelerier wrote: post #41
chrismorgan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an example of the flakiness: if I use my PinePhone heavily, the screen tends to stop working spontaneously, so that if on at the time of failure, it ceases to update, and when turned off and on again it will be black. Touch input still works. Restarting the graphical session (e.g. ssh in and run `systemctl restart phosh` for phosh or `systemctl restart tinydm` for sxmo) fixes it. “Heavily” tends to mean at least t…

The "phone stuck with black screen" thing happened to me on every android phone I ever had though (and here I can't restart the x session, I have to reboot it or take off the physical battery when things go really bad), so maybe it's more of a kernel level issue ?

Yeah I was about to say I have a very similar problem with my Nokia 3.4. I can usually hold power to reboot though, which I think after long enough it does itself. Sometimes I'm only aware of it (not currently using it, certainly not heavily) because it suddenly reboots itself.

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#48

Post by OJFord »

cookiengineer wrote: post #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 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.

Have you seen Tauri?

(Happy user, for a couple of side tinkerings, not otherwise affiliated.)

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#49

Post by DeathArrow »

blendergeek wrote: post #9

> 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 e…

Apart from a device called "Purism Librem 5" none of the listed devices have fully functional hardware. [1]

This might be ok for some enthusiasts but not ok for someone wanting to use his phone at it's full capability.

[1] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices

Re: My Pinephone Setup

#50

Post by OJFord »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #18
Enginerrrd wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Okay, perhaps some qualification needed: There are Linux distros, both for mobile and desktop, that can probably be run completely from the GUI. Arch Linux is not one of them, and is vanishingly unlikely to ever be one of them - consider that on desktop, Arch doesn't even install a GUI by default, and this is not considered even remotely a bug.

Arch can be run entirely from GUIs if you want that and so install them. There isn't one 'Arch GUI' no, but there's not really one ' GUI' either, for your choice of value for distro. (At most some more exotic/niche ones might limit what can be easily installed?)
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