Megi's PinePhone Page

Maybe not a great example. The PinePhone relies on software to manage its battery charging parameters. Thermal limits are controlled entirely in software and sent to the PMIC by the kernel, if this isn't done correctly or at all it's not just possible to have a brick, but a flaming brick. Another post on the matter: https://xnux.eu/log/#017

Writing your own bootloader is an option if you want to play hard level, sure. I did follow that path, at one time https://xnux.eu/p-boot/ for another Pine64 device. ;) Anyway, I didn't say the things you're criticizing my reply for.

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!

He laid out his reasons in his blog post and explained how people can get the source code from now on[1]. He is an unpaid volunteer so it is reasonable that he does not want to pay for an expensive server. There is also an update to the situation. He is trying out Codeberg [2]. I am grateful for the work he is doing. My Pinephone is much more usable than it was in 2020 [1] https://xnux.eu/log/094.html [2] https://xnux.eu/log/096.html

Tldr; mobian are tired with state of pinephone 1 kernel support. All this drama seems to triggered by one person's dislike for GitHub: https://xnux.eu/log/094.html Interesting open source dynamics.

Respectfully, the person you are responding to knows what he is talking about: https://xnux.eu/log/

this seems to contain the latest status and build instructions: https://github.com/biktorgj/pinephone_modem_sdk there are also some interesting reverse engineering details here: https://xnux.eu/devices/feature/modem-pp-reveng.html

According to this[0] which is a neat read anyway, it "has 256 MiB DRAM, 256 MiB NAND, and a single Cortex-A7 CPU clocked up to 1.3GHz." You can run DNS, a VPN, or a small web server even on a VPS with 32MB of RAM so those are pretty cool specs. [0] https://xnux.eu/devices/feature/modem-pp.html

Hi! Do the Plasma Mobile developers also provide a distro for the Phone? Is it KDE Neon (Ubuntu) based? What kind of collaboration is there between the various developers for the PinePhone? There seem to be a lot of Kernels with different patches for HW acceleration, IC power management, modem operation etc [1]. Do you apply these to your kernel? [1] https://xnux.eu/log/#020

I don't have enough background, but I recently read that some distributions could be a fire hazard due to the lack of proper temperature regulation: https://xnux.eu/log/#017 https://xnux.eu/log/#018 If this was the case, is that still a concern and which distributions/systems address this problem?

^^ Well deserved self-promotion too. Quite a few of the mainline Linux patches for pinephone are written by megi, and iirc they were also one of the first to get calling working. You can see all of their pinephone related work here: http://xnux.eu/devices/pine64-pinephone.html

Since this is a portable battery-powered device, rather than first pushing to open-source the DDR training blob, which is non-resident in memory after it's done it's job and a fairly small binary (less chance for hiding bugs), I'd say it's more important to get open-sourced the support in the BL31 Trusted Firmware for dynamic voltage and frequency scaling of DRAM, and support for maximum power savings in suspend mode. Rockchip have not fully open-sourced the DRAM DVFS support in BL31, but it's key to achieving full run-time battery life on portable devices - see https://xnux.eu/log/083.html And the system suspend implementation that Rockchip did open-source in upstream BL31 lacks some functionality compared to their binary BL31, mostly about powering off as many peripherals as possible to save power. I'm not saying don't bother opening the DDR training, just that these two things are much more important for a portable battery-powered device.

It should be possible to alter the case to support a slide cover, like for graphing calculators: slide it off, put in on the back when in use. slide it off, put it on the front when not in use. It should be resistant to puncture damage to the screen and prevent keypresses. For LTE modules, as long as you have USB, you are able to connect one. If you want 5G, check the Qualcomm SDX55 and SDX65 (submm wave + 5G SA) on Telit. The easiest way is to get a Telit EVB + a Cinterion module. The only difficulty would be routing the audio pathways and maybe IMS registration for VoLTE, but you could use a Quectel EG25 like on the pinephone: the module can be controlled by AT commands and the existing work for audio routing could help you get started: check https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_Pro and the audio part of https://xnux.eu/devices/pine64-pinephone.html like https://xnux.eu/devices/feature/audio-pp.html#toc-voice-call-audio-rou…

[topic of funding aside] for the pinephone specifically, it feels like its ignoring what does exist? https://xnux.eu/devices/pine64-pinephone.html there is a strong kernel which is upstreaming its changes. Now, as a time-strapped developer, who gets told "if you wait, the fixes will appear, or you can double/triple your effort to manually patch things, and then undo that when those patches go mainline anyhow" like, I would personally be happy leaving my distro broken for 6+ months for that stuff to settle, cause elsewise you are going to be building apps to support APIs that might change completely between patch and mainline, because there isn't an abstraction layer like ios or android. Its a new approach, drop hardware and specs, and embrace community passion, I thought it was a bad idea at the start, but I'm now sure I'm wrong. A Kickstarter phone beginning around the same time, custom hardware and OS, even with a budget and price 3x what pine goes with, would have probably far less progress than what exists now with pine devices

I recently acquired a PinePhone, and Manjaro + KDE Plasma was installed out of the box. It was awful, utterly unusable. I brought it to its knees without even trying to, not even from poking and prodding with internals, just from trying to use the thing; I got it to crash outright once, and twice got its graphics stack basically bricked until manual restart, in two different ways, all in less than half an hour. I have found postmarketOS + Phosh, Arch Linux ARM (dreemurrs) + Phosh, and Ubuntu Touch (all via https://xnux.eu/p-boot-demo/) to each be considerably more not-simply-broken; they’re merely—ah—“minimal”, that’s what I’ll call it. I haven’t yet tried KDE Plasma under a different distribution, but will eventually, because fairness demands it. I know they said this stuff wasn’t ready to be a daily driver for any but serious enthusiasts, but I didn’t expect it to be quite as bad as I found it. I’m still going to persist. I am discouraged, but not dissuaded.

https://xnux.eu/p-boot/ https://xnux.eu/log/

- uboot w/ Pinebook Pro : https://gitlab.com/pine64-org/u-boot https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Uboot - pboot w/ Pinephone Pro: https://xnux.eu/p-boot/ - tow-boot: "ENH: "Chainload" to {grub,}" https://github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/issues/110 https://github.com/rhboot/grub2/blob/master/grub-core/loader/efi/chain…