Add PinePhone post
This commit is contained in:
Gregory Hellings
committed by
Greg Hellings
Greg Hellings
parent
4c2df30856
commit
88d4dd2923
@@ -0,0 +1,139 @@
|
|||||||
|
---
|
||||||
|
title: "Pinephone"
|
||||||
|
date: 2021-10-15T10:20:44-05:00
|
||||||
|
draft: false
|
||||||
|
---
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
So I recently grabbed a [PinePhone](http://www.pine64.org/pinephone),
|
||||||
|
because my old Galaxy S9+ has been dying
|
||||||
|
a slow death. The old one started out being finnicky about docking to the
|
||||||
|
car, then charging became an intermittent hassle, then the screen started
|
||||||
|
to die slowly. So it was time to get a replacement. Might as well go with something
|
||||||
|
very different and out of place, eh? Why not take a look at the only generally
|
||||||
|
available smartphone that was running an upstream version of Linux?
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
So I grabbed a PinePhone back at the end of August. It took until late September
|
||||||
|
for delivery to go out. Pine64 is shipping them out to the US in batches.
|
||||||
|
But waiting a month isn't so bad when it's a device you've been wanting.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
## First Boot
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
So the phone arrives, I promptly pop out my nano SIM, place it into the
|
||||||
|
micro SIM adapter, and slide it into the phone. I boot up, connect Manjaro
|
||||||
|
to my home Wifi, and am ready to upadte. But... I have no idea how to do that.
|
||||||
|
I'm a Fedora user, and Manjaro is not built on the same technology. OK, so
|
||||||
|
I finally figure that out.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
`sudo pacman -Syyu`
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
Boom, everything is up to date. I disable Wifi, and try to bring up a browser
|
||||||
|
to test out mobile data. No luck. I'm not getting anything.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
As an AT&T customer, I stopped by the local AT&T store and got them to register
|
||||||
|
the phone's IMEI and get a new SIM just in case there's an incompatibility
|
||||||
|
there. Nope, there's nothing. But I'm able to make a phone call. So that's
|
||||||
|
promising.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
After a week of back and forth between Fedora and Manjaro, I did finally get
|
||||||
|
data working, sometimes, in Manjaro after I ran `sudo pinephone-modem-setup.sh`
|
||||||
|
from the terminal. It's still more flaky than in Fedora, but it does get
|
||||||
|
the job done some of the time.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
## Fedora?
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
As I mentioned above, I'm a Fedora user. So I went and grabbed the
|
||||||
|
[Fedora image](https://github.com/nikhiljha/pp-fedora-sdsetup/releases)
|
||||||
|
based on Btrfs. I burned it to a spare SD card I have, and dropped that
|
||||||
|
into the back of the PinePhone. One nice thing about the PinePhone is that
|
||||||
|
it will boot off the SD card if there is a bootable one in place before
|
||||||
|
it drops back to the internal ROM. This allows me to test out as many
|
||||||
|
different distros as I want, easily, without needing to walk through the
|
||||||
|
slightly more complicated process of burning the images to the internal
|
||||||
|
memory or losing the step there.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
So I boot up Fedora and run its updates.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
`sudo dnf update -y`
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
Error. There is an existing package, `pinephone-helpers`, that cannot
|
||||||
|
update from 0.2.0 to 0.3.0 because it is... conflicting with itself? OK,
|
||||||
|
that's weird. But we can work around that very easily.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
```bash
|
||||||
|
sudo dnf remove pinephone-helpers
|
||||||
|
sudo dnf update -y
|
||||||
|
sudo dnf install pinephone-helpers
|
||||||
|
```
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
Now, my system is fully updated (as of time of writing, these images are
|
||||||
|
in Fedora Rawhide, which will become Fedora 36; 35 is about to land in
|
||||||
|
stable). Immediately I noticed an improvement over Manajaro's Plasma
|
||||||
|
Mobile.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
First, and immediately obvious to me, [Phosh](https://github.com/agx/phosh)
|
||||||
|
has a button in the lower right
|
||||||
|
that makes it easy to toggle the on screen keyboard on and off. This is
|
||||||
|
a huge boost to usability. In Plamsa Mobile the keyboard will sometimes
|
||||||
|
fail to appear when tapping into a text box, most frequently in the
|
||||||
|
browser. This little button in Phosh, though, allows me to quickly bring
|
||||||
|
up the keyboard without having to blur/focus/blur/focus until the phone
|
||||||
|
brings up the keyboard of its own volition. HUGE usability bonus that
|
||||||
|
Plasma KDE would do well to emulate.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
Secondly, and maybe more significantly, Fedora quickly brought up mobile
|
||||||
|
data on AT&T's network without a hiccup. No switches, no changes, no
|
||||||
|
questions to ask or forms to fill out. It just comes up and works! So,
|
||||||
|
that big issue is resolved.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
## Fedora's Woes
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
Except for one thing. I need to chat with my wife, so I gave her a ring
|
||||||
|
from the phone. No audio. She can't hear me, I can't hear her. Huh, that
|
||||||
|
seems a bit strange. Phone can do everything but make calls? So I pop
|
||||||
|
into the settings menu and bring up the sound page. Fedora can't even
|
||||||
|
see the audio hardware in the device. That sounds like the root of the
|
||||||
|
problem.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
Lots of other people are over in the IRC room for #fedora-mobility are
|
||||||
|
having issues with their audio switching between calls and playback
|
||||||
|
when the phone app starts, but no one else is having absolutely no luck
|
||||||
|
in the audio department. But it's not a hardware problem, as the audio
|
||||||
|
works just fine in Manjaro.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
Based on the discussions in the room, I swap out pipewire-pulseaudio for
|
||||||
|
plain pulseaudio, then reboot.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
`sudo dnf swap pipewire-pulseaudio pulseaudio`
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
Suddenly my audio is working great, and the Settings app can see the audio
|
||||||
|
devices on the phone! Huzzah! But it won't switch to call audio unless
|
||||||
|
you do some finagling on the command line after every reboot. Developers
|
||||||
|
are working on that.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
# Bring the experience together
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
So here I am, on the one hand I have Fedora
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
* Audio only working with pulseaudio (funcitonal but laggy)
|
||||||
|
* Call audio still won't go through, without some finagling
|
||||||
|
* Data works marvelously
|
||||||
|
* Phosh is a delight
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
While on Manjaro
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
* Audio works fine, including with calls
|
||||||
|
* Data started working after I ran the helper scripts, but is flaky
|
||||||
|
* Plasma Mobile is still tough to navigate with
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
Overall, I prefer the keyboard on Plasma Mobile more, I just wish it was easier to control like the one in
|
||||||
|
Phosh is. I admit that I'm much more accustomed to Gnome and its apps and navigation than I am to KDE, as I
|
||||||
|
have exclusively been in Gnome for most of the past decade. So there is a familiarity there. The same goes
|
||||||
|
for Fedora versus the Arch world that I'm not really familiar with.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
I haven't come to a final conclusion which operating system I will use. Some of me wants to stick with Fedora,
|
||||||
|
both because of their upstream first mentality, and because I am already intimately familiar with their
|
||||||
|
systems and setup.
|
||||||
|
|
||||||
|
Anyway, that's a whole lot of stream of consciousness of what I've been thinking regarding my Pine Phone,
|
||||||
|
and of course the Pro is now recently announced and I would love to get my hands on that, too, if the existing
|
||||||
|
one proves to be a reasonable daily driver.
|
||||||
Reference in New Issue
Block a user