PMOS PinePhone arrived
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Hey everyone,
I just got my Pinephone, I'm gonna try and use it as a main phone for a week and see how it goes. I'll post here if I find anything worth posting.
Can anyone quantify the freeness of the phone? While I do realize it's no x200 level of free, I would feel better using this than Apple or Google's garbage.
What would be some precautions I could take, because usually an FSF-approved distribution would NOT lead you to non-free things whereas the Pinephone might because they are not aiming for a free software phone, this is my own goal.
Please also tell me of any problems you run into, and any solutions you may have found around such. I think since the software is so new that there's bound to be issues that users find a solution to before developers.
Cheers
Beko
Can anyone quantify the freeness of the phone?
Freedom-wise, it is as good as a phone can be at this time. There is non-free software running on the modem, which is inherently unavoidable in a cell phone for legal reasons. In addition, the WiFi/Bluetooth card requires non-free firmware. In theory, a phone could have a freedom-respecting WiFi card, but at this time there is no such WiFi card suitable for use in a cell phone (due to issues like power usage). This makes the Pinephone better freedom-wise than the Android devices that support Replicant, as in addition to the modem, WiFi, and Bluetooth they require a non-free bootloader.
Some of the other distros available for the PinePhone, like UBPorts or Manjaro ARM probably include additional non-free software, but PostmarketOS does not. Apart from the WiFi/Bluetooth firmware, the PostmarkOS image is equivalent freedom-wise to Debian main. However, like Debian it includes some software that is under a free license but may guide the user to install something non-free, such as Firefox.
Amongst the distros you have tested have you found one that you would recommend besides PmOS, ideally just as free, just more usable?
I set a password when I got the phone for PmOS, but I think the touchpad mis-recognized some of my clicks and I don't know the password I set. I tried running passwd command from Terminal but I don't know the SU password lol..
I think I need to install a fresh distro regardless because I soft-locked my phone already messing around with it. I only care about the free distros, I kind of don't want to even approach Ubuntu or Manjaro versions.
Thanks!
Also I have the dongle for the Pinephone so I can hook up a keyboard and monitor if need be.
Just so you know, it's very slow. It's fine for basic phone stuff like texts and calls but I would not want to reply on it as a laptop.
> very slow
The orange pi one has an allwinner h3
cpu. Testing armbian I started several
programs simultaneously and they
ran fast. Exceptions. Hd video if
running free software version of
armbian. Firefox browsing. I
was told it could be about lack
of software support. If the required software support
can be provided with non free software, I do
not know? Also not if there are free
software solutions?
https://linux-sunxi.org/A64
Is the allwinner a64 not as fast
as the h3?
You rule out the pinephone can act as a
desktop?
https://www.pine64.org/2020/07/29/invitation-to-play-along/
> You rule out the pinephone can act as a
> desktop?
In theory yes. In practice it would be quite painful, unless you were to install a lightweight desktop like a minimal window manager, maybe Xfce. The actual phone desktops I tested (Phosh, Plasma Mobile, Unity) all are very laggy on the Pinephone.
Right, I still have no idea, why Purism chose to collaborate with Gnome on Phosh. Wouldn't it be better if they chose as base a DE other that the heaviest one around? Actually, I think today's Gnome is too heavy even for most desktops.
Btw, how does Xfce actually work on small touchscreen? I've never had an opportunity to run a non-mobile desktop on a mobile, so I'm just wondering how it looks and feels like. Must be a weird experience...
Btw2, I suddenly recalled, that there's one more mobile-enabled desktop out there and I don't seem to see You, Chaosmonk, mention it in your thread[1]. Enlightenment. It's even packaged in Debian&friends. Why don't You guys try it and tell us if it's any lighter, than the others? :)
> Right, I still have no idea, why Purism chose to collaborate with Gnome on Phosh.
Branding/familiarity maybe? GNOME is the default DE for the desktop version of PureOS, and they may want the mobile version to have a similar look/feel. The Librem 5 is supposed to have higher specs than the PinePhone, so maybe it will be able to run Phosh without the lagginess it has on the PinePhone.
> Btw, how does Xfce actually work on small touchscreen?
It should be usable with a stylus, or with an external mouse connected, but is not designed for use with sausage fingers. It would not make for a good mobile DE, but should work if someone wanted to connect their PinePhone to peripherals and use it as a desktop system (though I have no idea why there are people interested in doing this, when they could have just bought a Pinebook Pro).
> Btw2, I suddenly recalled, that there's one more mobile-enabled desktop out there and I don't seem to see You, Chaosmonk, mention it in your thread[1]. Enlightenment.
I tried that on my PocketChip years ago. I found it overly complicated to use, but it is possible that it has improved since then. For a while I used Enlightenment as my DE, but I eventually gave up on it because it was too buggy. Are there any Pinephone images with Enlightenment as the default DE?
> Are there any Pinephone images with Enlightenment as the default DE?
No idea. Although I seem to recall reading sth about Samsung having lots of bugs and security holes in Tizen (its os, which utilized Enlightenment), so It doesn't seem surprising, that You fount that DE buggy...
Now, I'm also wondering, if it'd be feasible to run Android's DE (I think it's called Surface Flinger, might be wrong) under a non-Android kernel. That Anbox tool from another thread[1] seems like a possible solution. Or maybe there's some caveeat I don't know about?
> Amongst the distros you have tested have you found one that you would recommend besides PmOS, ideally just as free, just more usable?
I haven't booted up my Pinephone in a while, not since before the Community Edition units began shipping. At that time, out of the three distros I tried (pmOS, UBPorts, and Debian+Phosh), only UBports was close to usable. I'm sure pmOS has improved by now, if Pine64 is shipping pmOS CE units. Not sure about Debian+Phosh. I have not tried Manjaro ARM and can't speak to its usability.
Freedom-wise, only Debian+Phosh with contrib and non-free disabled is likely to be as good as pmOS. I would guess that the Manjaro ARM edition has everything in the Manjaro repositories, and Manjaro has no policy against non-free software, and does not even separate it out into separate repositories like Ubuntu and Debian do, so you'll need to check the license of everything yourself to make sure it's free.
UBport's application installer does not use the normal Ubuntu repositories, and in fact if you use the command line to install a graphical program from the Ubuntu repositories it will not even launch without some additional configuration. Instead it has an "app store" like iOS or Android do, containing a lot of Facebook/Instagram/Netflix crap. I think it's mostly wrappers around webapps, though there may be some native apps too.
Btw, in case you don't already know how to try other distros, dd the ISO to a microSD card the way you would dd a Trisquel ISO to a USB drive. Then put the SD card in the slot next to the SIM card slot, and turn the phone on. If a bootable SD card is present, it will boot into that. If you remove the SD card, you can boot back into the original OS again.
I don't know whether pmOS came installed with full disk encryption or not. If not, you may be able to reset your password by booting into an SD card, chrooting into pmOS, and running "passwd [your username]".
I think I selected to encrypt on the welcome page, but I'm not even sure... When I turn the phone off and on I don't need to put in the password sometimes and I still get in lol.. I'm able to navigate the phone without remembering the lock password. I also don't want to boot from SD, can I install from the boot-able media like Trisquel you reckon? I'm planning to store and save things on the SD card and have the OS installed (flashed?) inside the phone.
I would not need the original sudo password to rewrite the entire installed OS right..?
For chroot if I understand correctly you are saying temporary (SD) booted OS affects --> installed OS ?
Thanks for the help!
> I also don't want to boot from SD, can I install from the boot-able media like Trisquel you reckon?
You mean a USB drive? I have no idea. I have not heard of anyone doing this, but it might be possible with a USB-C to USB adapter, if the bootloader is configured to boot into such a medium before the internal storage like it does with the SD card.
> I'm planning to store and save things on the SD card and have the OS installed (flashed?) inside the phone.
I didn't mean to do that permanently. I meant to do that for system recovery or to try out different distros. Once you decide which distro to stick with, you can install it to the internal storage and go back to using the SD card normally.
> I would not need the original sudo password to rewrite the entire installed OS right..?
Yes, if you wipe the original OS then you will not need to recover the password.
> For chroot if I understand correctly you are saying temporary (SD) booted OS affects --> installed OS ?
Yes, chrooting into the installed OS will give you root access, which you can use to change passwords. Unless you use full disk encryption, which it sounds like you are not if you are able to boot into the OS without a password.
Thanks I'll give all this a shot tonight once I have more time :)
postmarketOS is a GNU/Linux distribution so you can truly have root privilege. Someone argues that it uses musl instead of glibc. But it uses many GNU components and is POSIX compatible. There aren't many smart phone/tablet OSes even freer than postmarketOS.
> Someone argues that it uses musl instead of glibc. But it uses many GNU components
Really? Which GNU components does it use? It is based on Alpine, which I thought I had read does not use any GNU components for the base system, instead using lightweight alternatives which include musl, but also busybox instead of coreutils, etc.
wget, make, gcc, many things
> wget, make, gcc, many things
In Alpine those are optional packages. They aren't a crucial part of the core userspace like they are in GNU/Linux distributions. It would make about as much sense to call Alpine and PmOS "KDE/Linux" or "BSD/Linux".
I'm just saying we should be consistent. The argument for the name "GNU/Linux" is that GNU is as important to the operating system as Linux. With Alpine I just don't see how anyone can argue that this is the case.
grub
I guess you are right then, it can be run GNU-less. As long as you don't ever try to build a package or download a file from the command line or do lots of other stuff that normal distros would commonly do. It's kind of an interesting semantic exercise, but not terribly practical.
> As long as you don't ever try to build a package or download a file from the command line or do lots of other stuff that normal distros would commonly do.
What makes you say that? Alpine has its own package manager (apk), and while I'm not sure what the default alternatives to wget there are plenty they could choose from, like aria2. Alpine and PmOS are fully functional distros.
OK. I see that there's a busybox version of wget that they are using also.
Makes sense. Alpine's userspace is based on lightweight alternatives to GNU. GNU has some extensions that these alternatives don't, some of which are nice to have, (for example, I get very frustrated with Busybox grep because it doesn't have all the same command line options I'm used to with GNU grep) but none that are necessary to have a complete operating system.
> quantify the freeness of the phone?
According to postmrketos the phone can run on free software with
the following limitations.
Modem and gps is on a separate chip and it requires non
free software. Because the chip has an usb
connection replicant.us would make use of usb
guard.
https://github.com/USBGuard/usbguard
You may also use the hardware switch.
The sdio wifi card requires non free software. And the wifi card gets it
from the pinephone cpu's software system. If you reject
non free software then make sure the wifi card's firmware is
not on the system running the pinephone.
Some graphical matters do not work at their best if the system is
a free software system.
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