FP5 bugs - SD card and Fairbuds XL headphones not working

guybrush3pwood

Hello,

Just wanted to report two significant bugs I encountered when I recently installed UT onto my FP5

The phones built in sd card reader did not read the micro sd card most of the time. I tried formatting as exfat and fat32. The card would generally just never mount. It's as if it was never installed. The 'internal storage' app just hangs and file browser wont connect.

I have confirmed that this is NOT an issue with my phone, since the sd card works perfectly fine with CalyxOS and stock android ROMs.

Rather ironically, Ubuntu Touch will not connect properly to Fairphone's own Fairbuds XL bluetooth headphones... The bluetooth app will 'see' the headphones, and even attempt to connect and say they are connected, but the sadly the audio does not work and the headphones get disconnected only seconds later.

Lastly... is there a way to set an 'edge' to the top status bar? The clock ends up being cut off by the curved edge of the screen

I otherwise found UT fun to use, and I actually really liked how 'different' it felt compared to Android. But sadly it's too buggy to daily drive for me right now

stanwood

Fairphone 5 port is not yet completely finished. Updates cycle is only available in "Devel" mode by now, as it is stated as "Daily built development releases". So a few bugs still might occur.

Probably the next "Noble 24.04" upgrade release will improve it's stability and performances.

To fix the display of the notch and corners, you may use this app, that works great on my Redmi Note 9S:

https://open-store.io/app/jerk-click.kugiigi

Mind that this app will tweak some of the the system components, so there's a (minimal) risk of bricking your device. But if you only set the top display bar (Lomiri Plus essential module) you shouldn't encounter issues....

Ida_

I have never tried using an SD card yet, but I have connected a lot of bluetooth stuff to my FP5. If I experience the behavior you describe, I run "sudo systemctl restart bluetooth" in the terminal and retry pairing/connecting. This always helps, but I have had to make the phone "forget" a device a couple of times.

You mention other roms - it is very important to be on the Android version mentioned on the FP5 device page in the installation instructions before installing Ubuntu Touch. Installing over another rom can result in everything from more bugs to an unbootable phone.

Lastly I want to encourage bug reporting here if you encounter something nobody has opened an issue on yet, or you can make a comment on an existing issue thread: https://gitlab.com/ubports/porting/reference-device-ports/android11/fairphone-5/fairphone-fp5/-/issues/?sort=created_date&state=opened&first_page_size=100

wgarcia

@guybrush3pwood said in FP5 bugs - SD card and Fairbuds XL headphones not working:

Lastly... is there a way to set an 'edge' to the top status bar? The clock ends up being cut off by the curved edge of the screen

There is an "apply_notch" hack but there is no specific patch for the FP5. Nevertheless, the FP4 patch works quite well for me, but use it on your own risk. To install it, open the UT terminal and issue the following commands:

wget -O apply-notch-hax.sh https://git.io/JtIpG
chmod +x apply-notch-hax.sh
./apply-notch-hax.sh FP4

The only problem I see is that in landscape mode the farthest indicator on the left is shown partially. I tried to fork the repository and adjust the parameters to solve this but haven't been able to make my fork patch work.

You have to run the last command above each time you upgrade UT.

guybrush3pwood

@Ida_ I didn't try connecting to any other Bluetooth devices. I just know it didn't want to connect to my headphones. Which I found funny considering they were the matching Fairphone brand lol

In trying to troubleshoot I found others on desktop PC Ubuntu having similar issues. So perhaps its a pipewire/pulseaudio shenanigan

As for other ROMs, this is not a problem. I flashed to the stock Android 13 FPOS before I ran the UBPorts installer appimage.

In fact... The installer wont actually let you install on the Android 14 version! (I actually tried by accident because I skipped that part in the instructions).

So it's not an issue of having the wrong base android

guybrush3pwood

@stanwood thanks

I might revisit in like 6 months time and see if things have improved

I actually own two FP5s (got a 2nd one recently very cheap second hand recently to muck around with) and for now I'm having fun using CalyxOS

I did rather enjoy UT for my short few days using it. As it matures I'd love to re-visit it