A week with Mobian on PinePhone Pro
June 15, 2023
It’s been a bit more than a week since I start daily driving the PinePhone Pro with Mobian, some parts of my journey are documented here.
IME and Keyboard #
Both Phosh and Plasma provide their own work flow for setting up IME and adding extra language support, but so far I’m unable to get Phosh’s ibus-based input system to work with PinYin when using on-screen keyboard. I’m able to install PinYin and Anthy from Phosh’s software center, but those methods only work when used with external keyboard, switching to either of those from on-screen keyboard makes no difference when typing.
Plasma Mobile uses Maliit framework for on-screen keyboard, a small set of additional input methods including Chinese (PinYin) can be configured from Mobile Plasma Settings -> On-Screen Keyboard -> Configure Languages, then run im-config to make sure maliit is selected. After doing so it works mostly as expected.
Battery Life #
A fully charged battery provides around 1.5 hours of use time consisting of light web browsering via LTE network and messaging, anything intense like watching Youtube via Firefox can drain the battery within 30 minutes. In order to daily drive it, I always attach it to the PinePhone Keyboard which triples the battery life, combining with power saving tweaks (lowering screen brightness, disable wireless when not in use…), it’s possible to get 8 hours of run time, which is good enough for me.
At the moment of writing, Pine64 does not sell battery pack, but someone at Reddit finds out it’s possible to use Samsung’s EB-BJ700BBC battery pack (designed for Galaxy J7) on PinePhone, as PinePhone Pro uses the same battery as PinePhone, it should also work on my device, but I haven’t tested it. Pine64 is also said to be exploring a case with extended battery in 2020, but I haven’t heard any update on that.
I also experienced a few cases of battery not charging despite being connected to the power supply, in such cases the phone will display a very small current draw from the battery. Maybe that’s due to a bug between the OS and the RK818 PMIC chip but I haven’t dive deep enough to find the root cause.
Scale #
The default display scale is set to 200% under Phosh and similarly high under Plasma Mobile, which might be optimal for touch-focused usage, but is certainly not usable with most desktop applications in landscape mode, for example, Firefox won’t display application manu unless I lower the scale to 125%. Many application (e.g. Mumble) would not function correctly with anything higher than 125%, with most controls outside of display area and overflowing text. As such, I set both Phosh and Plasma Mobile to use 125% scale.
Messaging #
Install fluffychat via Flatpak #
I hardly use instant messaging, even less so on mobile devices because I find laptop to perform much better for reading and writing, but maybe the existence of Matrix can change this. As for now, I use fluffychat as my Matrix client. It’s not packaged for debian yet, so I decide to install it via flatpak, which seems to be the least intrusive method:
# setup flatpak
apt install flatpak
# optional: use flatpak plugin for Gnome Software manager
apt install gnome-software-plugin-flatpak
# setup flatpak repository
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
# install fluffychat
flatpak install im.fluffychat.Fluffychat
After using it for a few days I think it’s by far the most usable messaging software I tried on mobile.
SMS and MMS APN Setting #
SMS works out of the box, bidirectional messaging is possible and no configuration is required. On the other hand, Mobian doesn’t seem to autoconfigure the APN (Access Point Name) for MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) globally, but both Spacebar (chat client from Plasma Mobile) and Gnome Chatty allow users to set custom MMS APN manually. Most mobile service provides will provide this information on their website, I find mine by searching Provider Name + MMS APN.
With the same correct APN setup for Spacebar and Gnome Chatty, only Chatty seems to work properly in terms of bidirectional image transfer, Spacebar would attempt to download the media file then fail instantly.
Network Sharing #
The mobile LTE connection can be shared to other devices either wirelessly or via USB cable.
Setup Wireless Hotspot from GUI #
Hotspot management is inside Settings -> Hotspot under Plasma mobile and Settings -> WiFi -> “Turn on WiFi Hotspot” under dots menu. Plasma’s wizard default to using WEP encryption with no way of changing it to more secure WPA2/3 but Gnome’s wizard does the right thing and default to WPA2. You might want to turn off auto sleep under Phosh Settings -> Power -> Automatic Suspend, otherwise your hotspot will be turn off after a 5 minutes timeout.
Setup Wireless Hotspot with nmcli(1) #
Doing things from GUI is not always desirable, and if you prefer cli, there is nmcli(1) available:
# setup hotspot
nmcli device wifi hotspot
# show password and SSID
nmcli dev wifi show-password
USB Ethernet #
PinePhone supports USB Host-to-Host bridges with ethernet subclass, it attaches to my OpenBSD laptop as a cede(4) device and my Debian laptop as an usb0 network interface using cdc_ether driver. To enable routing through it:
# turn on frame forward
sysctl net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
# install and enable nftables for forwarding
apt install nftables
systemctl enable nftables.service
# create a table
nft add table nat
# add the prerouting and postrouting chains
# this is required by the nftables framework for NAT
nft -- add chain nat prerouting { type nat hook prerouting priority -100 \; }
nft add chain nat postrouting { type nat hook postrouting priority 100 \; }
# enable masquerade NAT with upstream being wwan0
nft add rule nat postrouting oifname "wwan0" masquerade
You can replace wwan0 with other upstream you wish to use. (e.g. wg0)
Then set the default gateway of your client device to PinePhone’s usb0 IP address and traffic should start to flow, in my case:
ip route add default via 10.66.0.1
See this article from RedHat for setting up different type of NAT with nftables.
For adhoc network sharing, socks proxy over ssh might be simpler to setup than NAT.
Bluetooth Audio #
Bluetooth audio connections mostly work fine with Phosh’s setting panel with the exception of bluetooth low-energy protocol, which doesn’t seem to pair properly, I’m not sure if this is hardware issue or a software one. After the audio device is connected, it’s necessary to manually select it as the default output device, otherwise audio stream will continue to play with the internal speaker. Multiple codecs/profiles exist and can be switched on the fly, SBC/SBC-XQ/LDAC all work reasonably well with no difference in sound quality compare to Android devices as far as I can tell, however any profile making use of microphone will cause extremely bad audio play back quality.
If you cannot, or don’t want to run a bluetooth stack, it’s also possible to use a bluetooth audio adapter (like the Creative BT-W3 I used on my OpenBSD laptop, since OpenBSD doesn’t support bluetooth), such adapter can handle bluetooth codec logic in a dedicate hardware and present a generic audio output device to the OS, which also seems to help with audio jitter under high system load.
Epilogue #
There are many things to be explored and wrote about, from virtualization (KVM for aarch64 should just work) to LoRa backplate, I’m not sure what the future of this device would look like, but it’s certainly an interesting one.