[capableweb]

> I bought a PinePhone hoping to be able to start using it and developing on it. But until it can reliably make it through the day, stay connected to the network, and not miss calls and texts, I have to use my android phone and I don't have two sim cards, so I can't really use it and develop on it.

I recently also looked at the PinePhone but felt it was too early for me to get involved, because it's very, very clear that you can't actually use it as a day-to-day phone yet, at least that's from what I gathered, but somehow you ended up with the idea that you could actually use it as a phone. I'm wondering if you never looked at their official resources for PinePhone as they make it kind of clear it's not ready to be used in any normal fashion yet?

[chriswarbo]

Not sure what your experience has been, but I've been using mine as my only phone for over a year and it's been fine. Running Manjaro, which it came with (although I've been tinkering with NixOS on an SD card).

It's been a smoother ride than my previous phone, an OpenMoko FreeRunner which I got around 2008. The default OS on that was already abandonware by the time I got it!

[choward]

What's the NixOS experience like? I haven't tried in a while but my phone would get stuck on the NixOS splash screen. How did you install yours? So you have a public repo I could look at?

[chriswarbo]

I used a pre-build image from Hydra. The mobile-nixos project site links to their Hydra jobs:

https://hydra.nixos.org/jobset/mobile-nixos/unstable

That links to the latest build for pinephone aarch64, e.g. https://hydra.nixos.org/build/164693256

That gives the output path, e.g. /nix/store/6py525nywqdbyjs7jy1rm9vw53hmm5f1-pine64-pinephone_full-disk-image.img

We can look up that hash on cache.nixos.org, e.g. https://cache.nixos.org/6py525nywqdbyjs7jy1rm9vw53hmm5f1.nar...

That gives us the download URL, e.g. https://cache.nixos.org/nar/087ljdm30k8wqgdhdjdhc15bmkk01g69...

We can unxz that, then trim the leading bytes according to the Nar file format (described in Dolstra's PhD thesis, figure 5.2, page 93 https://edolstra.github.io/pubs/phd-thesis.pdf ). Since this .nar only contains one file, we can just ignore the header bytes (they're padded to multiples of 8 bytes; I think in this case we need to skip the first 96 bytes). We can do this while dd-ing the image to our SD card, e.g.

    sudo dd if=087ljdm30k8wqgdhdjdhc15bmkk01g69zqvr3gv13sra8pkgk387.nar of=/dev/my-sd-card bs=96 skip=1

This is quite convoluted, but I did this while stuck on a crappy Chromebook ;)

Note that the above images have no usable user accounts. I mounted the resulting SD card and edited the /etc/shadow file to enable root login without a password. I could then log in to a text console, using an external keyboard :)

[choward]

Thanks! I'll try it out again soon and see what happens.

[jcun4128]

Some notes from a Pinephone owner:

Wondering if the thoughts in this thread factor in the Pinephone Pro yet or no? I am looking to get one of those eventually. I think it just started doing pre-orders.

I got a second basic text/call line for my Pinephone but I don't use it as a phone right now. The modem is finicky when it works, seems to need a certain battery charge (like near full). I also have to restart it several times to get the modem to work. I'm using Mobian/Phosh. I'm not 100% a fan of the Phosh look/how it works multi-task wise but it does work out of the box more than a couple other "front ends" I tried. KDE Plasma was pretty but I couldn't just plug in an external monitor and have it work. Overall I like the idea of the phone/want to learn to develop for it. Unfortunately my screen is falling apart/peeling near the top edges. Also the battery even in airplane mode will die within a day or so.

What was neat was running ARM VS Code but it was slow as hell eg. 5 second click lag.

Old screenshot https://i.imgur.com/a7OHjcZ.png

[jcun4128]

Here's a mini rant. Samsung Galaxy Buds. Bluetooth Headphones. I had to accept/enable like 10+ permissions just so I could turn off the default equalizer that makes everything sound bassy. That is annoying.

I can't deny that my $300 Android phone I'm using now would run circles around Pinephone Pro but I still look forward to that idea one day.