PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition • Hacker News Board

Re: PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition

#151

Post by genghizkhan » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 10:15 AM UTC

markstos wrote: post #126

genghizkhan wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I prefer Ubuntu LTS to Debian's testing/stable approach. May I ask why?

It's nice that Ubuntu has been very predictable getting releases out on a schedule, while Debian's approach has been "when it's ready", which could sometimes be a very long time between stable releases.

Debian's been on a 2-year release cadence since at least 2007. I agree, they don't come out like clockwork the way Ubuntu LTS editions or macOS do but they come out in the first half of the year they're supposed to. At worst it's 2.5 years between releases at best it's under 2 years.

Re: PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition

#152

Post by megous » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 10:18 AM UTC

justinclift wrote: post #142

megous wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That requires a customized PID 1 init program and a lightweight GUI (that map app is just ~10MiB of code + some code for postgresql that runs in the background) - most of the delay there is waiting for the postgresql to start up, actually. Arch Linux to some lightweight GUI based on Xorg/i3wm takes about 8s. Similar for my Electron/X11 fullscreen based GUI for the phone (also in the video). Both are much larger. Sadl…

Is this one of the cases where PostgreSQL is overkill and something like SQLite would be a better fit?

I like the fact that I can get easy to set up replication, without much effort, that works reliably with frequent network failures and such.

Re: PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition

#153

Post by megous » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 10:32 AM UTC

tpxl wrote: post #148

megous wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, you can contribute just by doing something for the project you're interested in. None of the development is centrally organized. There's plenty of stuff to do. I can give you a bunch of hints if you're a kernel dev. :)

I'm not (yet?) a kernel dev; I haven't ever contributed to any OS project, but I'd like to start with the pinephone.

Bootlin has some very nice introductory training materials online:

https://bootlin.com/doc/training/linux-kernel/ https://bootlin.com/docs/

Allwinner SoC used in PinePhone has a longstanding community around it organized around http://linux-sunxi.org/ There are a lot of materials, including datasheets there, etc.

https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/PinePhone wiki also has a lot of information.

#pinedev at freenode is where the kernel development discussion happens, so feel free to join there.

Re: PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition

#154

Post by COGlory » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 12:26 PM UTC

bleepblorp wrote: post #150

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the only other easy distro is Ubuntu, and not having the AUR or the Arch wiki or the quite good Manjaro forums and having to use potentially-dead PPAs for things because Ubuntu packages are out of date is less easy.

The OpenSUSE distros--Leap and Tumbleweed--don't get a lot of attention but they're worthy, relatively easy to use, alternatives to Ubuntu and Arch respectively. Leap is an LTS distro that is more up to date than Ubuntu LTS and Tumbleweed is a rolling release that has enough QA that it doesn't blow up as frequently as Arch.

I just installed OpenSUSE on 7 computers over the last month. On my personal ones, I was previously running Kubuntu, then Manjaro, and now OpenSUSE. On work ones, most were on CentOS 7. I installed Tumbleweed on the personal ones, including a laptop, and Leap on the work ones.

Overall my experience has been great and I love OpenSUSE. However, I definitely would not recommend them for beginners for a few reasons.

Tumbleweed doesn't support certain browser video out of the box in Firefox. I had to enable a repository, and download libav packages to get it to work. The package names were confusing (why do I need libav 56 and 57 when 58 is already installed?). I had already installed the packages from the default repo, but they specifically needed to be installed from Packman.

GUI scaling between different displays is completely broken on Leap. Certain things scale, other things don't, and it looks horrible.

Normally, I get super annoyed when people take little things like that and make a huge issue out of them. They are little problems and I solved both of them, and love OPENS USE. But with Manjaro, I didn't have any problems from fresh install. Even switchable laptop graphics worked. Manjaro is very easy to recommend to someone afraid to open a terminal.

Re: PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition

#155

Post by justinclift » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 12:52 PM UTC

megous wrote: post #152

justinclift wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this one of the cases where PostgreSQL is overkill and something like SQLite would be a better fit?

I like the fact that I can get easy to set up replication, without much effort, that works reliably with frequent network failures and such.

Cool. :smile:

Re: PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition

#156

Post by fsflover » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 1:54 PM UTC

Waterfall wrote: post #98

Can the pinephone hardware realistically be used to run Linux comfortably on mobile? The pinebook sucked and this is the same hardware,the pinebook pro has 4gb and still struggles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bH3RbrwhNd8

Re: PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition

#157

Post by MayeulC » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 4:30 PM UTC

klerpi wrote: post #120

MayeulC wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or regular upstream https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/jfltexx/ Not sure how /e/ is supposed to be more private yet less open? I'm using my i9506 (ks01lte) as a daily driver, though I think I'll switch to a i9505 because it has official lineageos support, which means probably less weird SD card bugs.

Support for my phone got dropped :( I wish I could install it on my mi a1

Take it up :)

I am not sure how much work that would be to maintain it yourself on your particular phone, but it might not be that much? I don't really know, though.

Re: PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition

#158

Post by Const-me » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 6:03 PM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #147

Const-me wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There're devices out there which started as proprietary hardware, then community implemented the support. RTL-SDR was initially a TV tuner, Raspberry Pi SoC was designed for a set top box, people made XBMC (now Kodi) re-purposing game console into a Linux media player. Why that never happens to cell phones, what's so special about them?

Cellphones have a lot of peculiar, absolutely undocumented and very buggy peripherals, and tricky system-level power management demands. Pi's SOC was meant to be designed in to a variety of products, so needed to be documented and understood. Cell phone chips are dumpster fires, as a rule, and are forgotten by their manufacturer within months of first delivery.

Good points, but on the other hand the market penetration is enormous, e.g. Samsung probably shipped hundreds of millions of their galaxies.

There’re thousands of exceptionally good software developers worldwide. It’s surprising no one so far found a good way to re-purpose the hardware. The OS kernel is open source already (wasn’t the case for the original xbox), and all these proprietary firmware blobs are shipped with the devices.

Re: PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition

#159

Post by JeremyNT » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 6:38 PM UTC

candiddevmike wrote: post #17

I personally would avoid anything Manjaro related due to recurring controversies around the project leadership: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/hxpj87/change_in_man... I wish PinePhone would partner with Arch or Debian instead.

> I wish PinePhone would partner with Arch or Debian instead.

I exclusively use Arch on my other computers, so I initially put the upstream Arch ARM on my PinePhone, but it's just not in a state that most users (even tinkerers) would be inclined to work with. Manjaro and some of the other distributions are close to fully functional.

I'm sure Pine64 would love to partner with Arch ARM (or any distribution) that would like to focus on providing a good user experience on the device.

IMO, Postmarket OS provides the best experience on the device at this time.

Re: PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition

#160

Post by ncmncm » Tue, Sep 01, 2020, 7:29 PM UTC

Const-me wrote: post #158

ncmncm wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cellphones have a lot of peculiar, absolutely undocumented and very buggy peripherals, and tricky system-level power management demands. Pi's SOC was meant to be designed in to a variety of products, so needed to be documented and understood. Cell phone chips are dumpster fires, as a rule, and are forgotten by their manufacturer within months of first delivery.

Good points, but on the other hand the market penetration is enormous, e.g. Samsung probably shipped hundreds of millions of their galaxies. There’re thousands of exceptionally good software developers worldwide. It’s surprising no one so far found a good way to re-purpose the hardware. The OS kernel is open source already (wasn’t the case for the original xbox), and all these proprietary firmware blobs are shipped w…

The blobs are compatible only with a particular, ancient and very heavily patched kernel version. Most of the important code is entirely inaccessible in the "baseband processor" that actually operates the radio hardware, and really owns the whole phone. And solving one phone model would barely help with the next one, if at all.