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Post n°76 pubblicato il 01 Agosto 2023 da taichung
From Pinephone's Wiki :
As an advanced user ( The bad news is, there isn't a phone module. Therefore, no calls, no sms. Lol... "...when investigating we quickly found that the Ubuntu repositories utilised to create Rhino Linux currently ship a broken Phosh package, so we came up with an alternative. Turns out, almost all of the mobile environments aren’t working on Ubuntu right now, so we fell back to what we knew worked soundly: XFCE. To do this, the environment utilizes onboard as the system keyboard, a slightly modified version of the Rhino Linux XFCE dotfiles, and a special patch for XFCE to allow for auto-rotation. It currently uses X11, but we are looking into moving to Wayland when XFCE 4.20 comes around." The GUI is beautiful, but not finger friendly: difficult to type on the keyboard, buttons on the screen are too small, even closing a window can be difficult. Using a pen for touchscreens won't solve the problem, the cllickable area is too small. It is a bit questionable that the default XFCE Plank dock provides a button for an editor among the few available buttons (editing on a phone isn't for sure the main task) but hey, it's a desktop distro... I also would improve the look of the buttons, Imho they arent clear; I mean, you don't know what it is for until you click on it and the window appears on the screen. The dock also provides uLauncher, to start applications and search in the folders. The grid of applications is provided by Lightpad; here too, some problem: you have to slide the grid to see all the available applications, and to do that, there are 3 (it depends on the number of apps) microscopic white buttons at the button, and clicking on them is very problamatic. To switch form one virtual desktop to another, there's xfdashboard Again, you can see that the main target is the desktop pc, those are problems you won't experiment there. A gesture to close the windows would be very nice, in my humble opinion... Also setting up different session/ desktop profiles would help to improve the experience on small screens. All those considerations, as you have red, are about the GUI / DE. Since the phone doesn't work at the moment, I only could focus on other aspect of this disto. I quickly explained some of its problems on the PInephone. Said this, I believe it has a some potential. If you can contribute, I think devs would be happy for your help. The distro is a bit heavy for the Pinephone, but it seems to be quite stable, although still in beta. I didn't experiment crashes or freezes during the half day of test.
The language support isn't complete. You can find common European languages, but for ex, no Japanese, Chinese, Thai, etc... Wifi and bluetooth work. The camera works too, but there is no button to close the preview window! Updating the distro works too. Battery consumption, as usual, is one of the week points of the Pinephone. Don't expect to play with it for a long time. At the end, considering that it is still in the beta stage, Rhino Linux looks promising. Like many others. Let's see if the developers will have enough time (and money) to go on on the Pinephone too
Post n°75 pubblicato il 29 Luglio 2023 da taichung
After testing the beta 30 version of Manjaro, gave another try with the newest version, the beta 34, still with Phosh. Respect to the review for the older one, this time I installed it on the EMMC memory. I didn't notice much difference in speed respect to the old installation on a microsd card. The boot is very fast, quite impressive; the shutdown takes more time. I take the chance to open a braket about a common application by Gnome: it's Geary, an email client. Before removeing PostmarketOS from the EMMC, it was working with my own email server and self signed ssl certificates. I then noted it didn't work anymore on Manjaro (Geary 40.0) Calls, SMS work as expected, with good audio quality.
What instead I appreciated is that it seems to me that the consumption of the battery is lower respect to PostmatrketOS and Mobian. If it just could let the phone work for a whole day without draining... but in Pinephone we trust!
Post n°74 pubblicato il 03 Maggio 2023 da taichung
I tested Arch Linux with Phosh on a microSD.It fits an 8GB microSD too, the Phosh image is only 4GB wide. Arch for Pinephone provides small images, generally speaking, therefore you can try them in smaller (and slower) cards too. The SXMO image uses only around 3GB of space. The experience is similar to the one of Manjaro. Wifi works, calls in & out too, and I found the phone very responsive for the calls. I mean, respect to other distros, I get the phone ringing immediately after the first waiting tone on the calling phone, and vice versa too. SMS not tested. Bluetooth works. The GPS test made with Gnome Maps sets my position at first about 100Km far away from the real one. Later it moved closer, only 2-3 Km wrong...
Usual localization problems of Phosh with languages like Chinese. No encryption offered during the installatio process. GUI is quite responsive, one of the best I tried with Phosh. Imho this is the best feature of Arch on the Pinephone. A minimalist setup, but a phone side which works, and works well, at least for what I tested. Currently there are images of Arch Linux for PInephone with Phosh, sxmo and KDE Plasma.
I then decided to give a try to SXMO, for the first time. It's a really geeky GUI. Too much for me. You definitely must give a look at the user guide here: https://man.sr.ht/~anjan/sxmo-docs/USERGUIDE.md By the way, sxmo works both on Wayland and Xorg. Learn to use the gestures: how the hell do I close a window? Fast, well it is. I took a picture with the camera, but then I haven't been able to open it from the "button" on the app itlself. Ok. Enough for the first quick impact
Post n°73 pubblicato il 18 Aprile 2023 da taichung
I recently found on a forum a modded BIOS for the Asus EeePC 1015CX (which should work on other similar models too). The reason of the update is to enable EMT64 extension in the BIOS settings (normally that one is factory - disabled) and therefore having a full 64 bit system, to install a 64 bit OS. Linux of course. The modded BIOS is 1015CX-ASUS-1101_Messjah_MOD.zip There's an utility inside the factory BIOS for the update. Unfortunately I haven't been able to show the update... On Internet there are some indications: rename the bios to 1015cx.ROM (seems to be mandatory). The put it on an USB dongle, formatted FAT16 (!). I formatted it from Linux fat16, fat32, ext4... the BIOS utility didn't find the ROM. Then I installed, as suggested, FreeDOS (Full USB version) on the dongle, uploaded AFU236U.exe a DOS utility to flash the new BIOS; you can download it from ASUS web site, the package is : AFUDOS236.zip. I attached the dongle to the Eeps, pressed ESC when ASUS logo appeared on the screens, chose to boot from the USB. FreeDOS booted, then i run AFU236U.exe 1015cx.ROM but gor an error. I tried with some parameters, nothing.
Then, with the dongle still attached, I rebooted, entered in the BIOS settings by pressing F2, then I clicked on the flash utility, and... MIRACLE!, the new rom vas visible. Therefore I updated the BIOS form there. Now I have a full 64 bit system. As you can see from the image. Now I'll get a FAT32 USB key to create a bootable 64bit Linux distibution to install on the EeePC (minding the poor guy only has 1GB of RAM)
Post n°72 pubblicato il 03 Aprile 2023 da taichung
Nemo Mobile is based on Manjaro Linux. According to the official website https://nemomobile.net/ :
It can easily be installed on a virtual machine, so that you can test it without the need of installing it on the Pinephone. I flashed https://img.nemomobile.net/2023.05/Manjaro-ARM-nemomobile-pinephone-0.94.img.xz on my 32GB microSD card. It boots, and after some minute I can see Glacier, the GUI. It looks beautiful. The installation doesn't allow you to encrypt the device. Later I found out that only English, Suomi and Russian are available as languagese for the GUI. Neither are there other than the default, keyboards available. Glacier at a first glance (ehm ehm...) looks pragmatic and usable but... it's heavy! Changing orientation sometimes blocks the screen, there's no way to bring back the original orientation: move your Pinphone, shake it, throw it against the mirror, there's no way I changed the Mobile Network settings: it took minutes to show the modifications, but sometimes it doesn't work, I have to reboot to get the change. Since I'm talking about the network, "Connect to Internet" is an option which looks to be required to enable your SIM card, otherwise no signal in the top bar. Enabling or disabling that, again requires a reboot to take effect (Uh... is it Windows WIFI works, while the camera doesn't. No clue about GPS, there are 2 penguin - icons on the desktop, but tapping on them doesn't produce any effect. The terminal keyboard is a real terminal keyboard, with arrows and special keys; it looks nice, but it's not very finger friendly. Again, not very responsive, I got difficulties when touching keys close to the border (fat fingers, i touch the scrolling bar instead). The funny thing is, in landscape mode it's upsidedown! Packages update: there's an app on the desktop for this. I can see there are many available updates, but when I run the update, although it seems working, it seems that nothing happens. I left the device running that for hours, but no change. If I look for a program to install, nothing happens. From terminal, #pacman -Syu returns error 404... failed to syncronize all db... not a sign of good vitality. Someting weird happened to me at the beginning. After installing it, and playing a bit, suddenly an alarm came up and the telephone began to play a boring sound. Clicking like crazy on Dismiss or Snooze would stop it for a while, but then.. again and again! Reboot! Problem solved. I have the impression that at least part of the troubles of the GUI come from the slowliness of the device. Probably on the PInephone Pro it would react faster. Something which works very well on Nemo, is the suspend mode; the battery seems to me to last a longer time respect the other stable distros (I mean, those where at least mobile network, wifi, gps, BT work). Without getting calls (maybe that is the trick On Nemo you can set your favorite ringtone and notifications, which are different for different app (email, system etc). A good point is that it is actively developed
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), I downloaded the image and installed it on a microSD card. The boot isn't the fastest at all, at a certain point I also doubted it was working, the screen was completely dark, but after a minute, the pointer of the cursor appeared. The pointer? Yes, exactly. Because Rhino Linux is primary a desktop distro, which has been adapted for Pine's devices too.
I can speculate they didn't had time yet, or some problem to adapt the phone part to the customized DE. No KDE nor Phosh here. The DE is Unicorn, a customized version of XFCE. Btw, if I remember well there are already other distros with working phone, using XFCE as DE (PostmarketOS, I think). I've been asked why XFCE and not Phosh or others on Rhino Linux. The answer of the developer is:
A plus for the logo of Rhino Linux 
Free the Rhino! Have fun! 
Condividi e segnala 
Later I tested it on Mobian Bookworm and Ubuntu desktop... no difference, it still doesn't accept my certificates (which btw work on Kmail). [As I found out later, you need to manually install gnome-keyring on your distro to let Geary work with the SSL certificates].
Although what prevents me to keep as default OS on my Pinephone is the lack of the chance to chose to encrypt the FS, Manjaro is still one of the most stable distro on the Pinephone: in one week I never experimented a freeze, just some slowliness when resuming from sleep, occasionally it took several seconds to show the keyboard to input the PIN and unlock the screen.
same old story. The camera works.
Not many apps installed as default: no app to download / update sw 
Well, Arch isn't made for rookies.
. Usually it comes back after suspending it, a couple of time I had to soft reboot it. To run an application, you have to double tap on its icon, and it takes some seconds to appear.
?). I currently have gsm as preferred network, and data enabled (although my plan doesn't provide data); I can get calls, but I can't get them. It is a recurrent problem (also on other distros) on the Pinephone, when you can't manually set 2G. It could be a problem only related to my carrier. Btw, with last PostmarketOS 22.12, that problem went away (on 4g network, I call and send SMS, also get them).
Not very usable.
) the consumpion is very low. Actually I didn't test to keep it on for a whole day (yes sometimes I need to make calls) but I trust that in this condition the battery could last more or less 2 days, just to give you a vague idea.
. I look forward to the next improvements.
Inviato da: cassetta2
il 23/08/2019 alle 12:59