spv.sh

to_replace

my perpetual notes on the PinePhone Pro

date: may 25, 2024

this page shall serve as a perpetual collection of my notes on the PinePhone Pro.

$ cat introduction

i bought the PinePhone Pro for $399 on my birthday, and i received it 9 days later, including customs. DHL was used as the carrier, and the package was sent from Hong Kong.

the Pro doesn't come with an OS pre-installed, you have to pick one. out of the various options available, i chose postmarketOS.^[4]

it took me about an hour to realize that there is protective foil under the battery contacts, and that you have to charge a battery in order to function. :P

Tow-Boot was installed as per the guide.

KDE breaks audio, and phosh is ugly imo, so i chose gnome-mobile. it's more functional too, and the performance isn't that bad if you compile it yourself.

specifications^[2]:

• RK3399S (quad-core A53, dual-core A72)
• Mali T860 (ngl, it's shit)
• 6" IPS LCD (1440x720)
• 4GB RAM
• 128GB storage (eMMC)
• microSD slot
• USB-C (with DisplayPort!)
• IMX258 rear-camera, OV8858 front-facing
• notification LED
• quectel eg25-g

$ ls pics # or it didn't happen

$ ls good

• privacy switches! pop off the back, (they're not on the exterior), and there are 6 DIP switches allowing you to disable the modem, wifi/bt, microphone, rear camera, front camera, and UART. (we'll get to that)
• flipping the 6th switch lets you choose the 3.5mm jack to either be a usual audio port, or a 1.5Mbaud UART connection. (see the Pine64 store for details)
• you can change the IMEI with just an AT command, perfect for the paranoid!^[5]
• like a jailbroken iPhone, but without the security issues and running the latest software.
• a good Mastodon client, Tuba is available. uses native GTK4.
  • alternatively, there's Tokodon. (i haven't tried it)
• notification LED can assist with debugging,
  • when the device starts it is red,
  • yellow afterwards, and if you boot from microSD, it turns cyan.
• MaskROM is like the BootROM on an iPhone -- the device is virtually unbrickable
• GNOME is awesome
  • looks sexy as hell (TODO: add photo tomorrow)
  • GSConnect makes the device work with other GNOME devices, sharing
    • notifications,
    • SMSes (supposedly, i haven't gotten it working yet), and
    • media control (YouTube and such)
• mobian is better than pmOS for hardware support
  • you like your device actually suspending? mobian is the distro for you...

$ ls bad

• the battery is sub-par.
  • i usually have to charge at least once, throughout the day.
  • i already carry around a battery bank, but it would be nice not to have to.
  • Linux will either suspend the modem too easily, leading to disconnects, or keep the modem online and powered 24/7, and can drain too much battery.
  • suspend is broken on some distributions (looking at you, pmOS)
• no good solution for alarms? i'm using wake-mobile -- GNOME Clocks doesn't wake the device up from suspend.
• postmarketOS is not perfect -- even on the "stable" releases
  • installing any KDE software breaks some audio functions, due to pipewire incompatibilites. this includes plasma-mobile, that also means
  • if you install snapshot, as comes with phosh, which also includes pipewire, you will have audio issues. even then,
  • if you change sample rates in Lollypop^[3], the default audio player on phosh, it will refuse to play. (pulseaudio bug tmk)
  • sometimes, texts are received twice. unsure why.
  • the login keyring doesn't like unlocking itself.
  • again, suspend is borked.
  • about as stable as iOS 9 with 25-50 tweaks.
• the modem occasionally borks itself and gets >80° C, and on biktorgj's fw will send a text to you from +223344556677 which reads It's getting hot in here... (Sensor X reports YC)

$ cat conclusion

TODO  

footnotes

[1]: inspired by Jakob Kreuze's blog post.

[2]: PinePhone Pro store page

[3]: if someone could point me to the new Apps page for Lollypop, please let me know! they're retiring the wiki and it's not on apps.gnome.org.

[4]: update, may 28, 2024: i've switched to mobian -- i like being able to use suspend.

[5]: i originally thought that was a benefit of the custom modem firmware, but apparently that is possible on stock, however.

watch The Americans on FX. it's too good.

  ~ spv, 2024.