@ernest said in One method to encrypt /home/phablet:

Seems that lightdm doesn't restart with the latest OTA. Any tips ?

Hmm. I've not been testing lately so hadn't noticed. Will see what I can figure out when I next have some time, but that may be a while. What errors or symptoms occur?

@Flohack said in Best decive for porting UBports for long time support.:

Well longterm.... The nature of Android brings it that its not made to be longterm. You can use an older phone for a long time given that you dont drop it, and you could replace the battery. So actually try to look for a model which has still exchangeable batteries....

LG V20 was the highest speced - and last - mainstream phone to have a removable battery, I believe, but it only got Lineage 14.1 and 17.1, skipping both 15.1 and 16 (though ISTR semi-viable device trees for one and/or the other version). I see there is a port in progress for the US T-Mobile variant, but that port is based on 14.1. As utkb asked regarding Xiaomi, is a Halium port from Lineage 17.1 viable yet?

To the typewriter icon, I would suggest of adding more, but thinner, lines of text to the paper emerging from the top, and most or all of one color. As it is, I would never guess what the stuff above the keyboard was intended to represent had I not seen this thread. You don't want to make people ask themselves, "What are those three bars supposed to mean?"

I just had a look at a few Iphone and Android icons for text editors, and all in my small sample used either multiple thin lines (edit: I just noticed this is the case of the notes icon right above your own in some of the examples above) or very thin lines spanning the whole icon, the former to indicate typed text and the latter to indicate the ruled lines of a blank notebook page.

A Halium guru could correct me, but I believe going forward your best chance is to find a device that was supported by LienageOS 15.1 (for Halium 8.1) or is supported by LineageOS 16.0 (for Halium 9).

LineageOS support presupposes a bootloader than can be unlocked, but do note that many devices come in many varieties and that not all specific submodels of a given device will work with LineageOS.

For general developer-friendliness (not UBPorts or LineageOS specific), Google devices have in the Pixel era almost always been the best, as they have full AOSP code available, but since they are unfortunately not always popular with LineageOS developers, and since Halium relies to some degree on LineageOS code, you might have more of a struggle porting to them than to the other developer-popular brands like OnePlus and Xiaomi. (The first generation Pixel and Pixel XL do have LineageOS 16.)

If you have only looked a the officially supported devices so far, you might want look into some of the ongoing ports listed on https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/, as well as the devices listed on the porting wiki: https://github.com/ubports/porting-notes/wiki

@Giiba said in Pinephone (braveheart):

I'm curious if anybody knows whats what with the update channel selection? Why are all of the channels listed numerous times?

It's a bug. If you want to switch to the developer channel, it's usually the first one listed from the top down. I think Dalton said he had found a fix for it, so maybe it work soon.

BTW, I'm impressed by your bravery in taking the DD plunge so early with the PinePhone. Truly Pine64 sold a Brave Heart to the right person!

@AppLee said in I'm about to get a Linux phone, but I have a few questions.:

@trainailleur said in [I'm about to get a Linux phone, but I have
But IMHO the quality process will help a lot with the feeling of progress and stability.

It should help with the stability for sure.

(I should add that stability has already taken great leaps and bounds forward in the few weeks I have been testing my BH; I can barely imaging how it must have progressed since the time when the BH shipped. :astonished_face: )

@opino72 said in I'm about to get a Linux phone, but I have a few questions.:

A last update :
I considered all the options and I was convinced by the dev speed of the various distros for the Pinephone.
Yesterday I ordered the latest version of the Pinephone with the extra 1GB RAM (peace of mind) and the dock (yay convergence!)
I will probably test the Postmarket OS for a few days and then flash Ubuntu Touch on it as I need it to be my daily driver.

I too have been impressed with the development speed, especially on Ubuntu Touch which has one of the most complex software stacks of all of the OSes being ported to the PinePhone. I feel however that you should temper your expectations of how daily-drivable it will be. Marius was asked in the last Q&A how long it would be before the UT experience on PinePhone would be as smooth as on one of the existing devices (the Nexus 5, I believe), and he said "months."

So it may be a while before the PinePhone is well-rounded on Ubuntu Touch. Calls, data, and SMS work (though not MMS), as do many Ubuntu Touch apps, but GPS requires a lot of setup and is evidently still flaky (I've not tested it yet myself), Anbox doesn't work, Libertine doesn't work for GUI apps I'm told (per what one of the UT developers said on Telegram yesterday - again, it's not something I've tested), etc. There are frequent application crashes, recurring sound issues, speaker phone and mute in calls aren't working, and there is the occasional spontaneous reboot.

It will be a month and a half or more before the PMOS edition phones ship, and there could be a lot of progress in that time, but I'd be careful not to let your expectations get too high. Eventually these phones will be amazing, but right now the software for them is still very much in progress.

Updated the OP with links to the postmarket versions.

Question for @PINE64 : right now (2020-07-15 16:11 UTC), both versions say the packing contents include "USB-C Docking Bar – 2x USB Type A ports, digital video port, and 10/100Mbps Ethernet port" Does this mean that the board in both versions is 1.2a?

(Apologies if I've missed the monthly update. Right now all Pine64 sites seem to be deluged with traffic. )

Edit: from reading the Pine64 July update, it seems that both versions of the phone have the 1.2a board with the USB fix (hurrah!), but only the 3GB/32GB Convergence Package has the Docking Bar. Please correct me if I'm wrong about that.

Edit 2: the page in the store is now correct.

For those who are interested and are reckless enough to forgo developer support, I got full encryption of writable data working with an elaboration of the old "remount your filesystems" trick in the encryption thread.

It's still a terrible hack, of course, but it covers far more than just remounting an encrypted home did. The right way to do this entails a lot of genuine development in the OS, but it is nice to see what some quick and dirty shell scripting can do at times.

Should be noted that any bug you see arising while using a setup like this should be reproduced on a normal install before reporting. Please don't waste developer time reporting issues you're not sure didn't arise from a non-standard hack.

(Edit: though actually one nice thing about running your system this way is that you always have a normal system lurking only a reboot away.)

Have gone further on the PinePhone and copied all of the writable data into a new luks-encrypted partition.

I now have a shell script in my home directory as initially booted that will:

1. check to see if cryptsetup is installed and if not kick off an install script
2. turn off swap so we don't end up with encryption keys in swap
3. unlock the encrypted partition
4. cd to /tmp (because not doing so was tripping me up in the next step)
5. force umount /userdata using "umount -l"
6. remount the encrypted partition on it
7. in sequence force umount each userdata-mounted writeable part of the filesystem using "umount -l" then bind mount it back on the new, encrypted userdata (the bind mounts for your system can be found with findmnt)
8. turn swap back on using a new swap file in the encrypted partition with the same -1 setting that the original swap had (a larger swap file, in my case)
9. force-reload lightdm

Is anything aside from updates writen to permanent storage other than to bind mounts on /userdata? I didn't find anything, but there's always the possibility that I missed something.

All of this adds a couple of minutes to getting the phone ready for use, of course, and there may be things I've not yet discovered which will turn out to be broken.

Given how much is not yet working in the PinePhone, I should probably replicate this on an Android-based UBPorts device like the OnePlus One or the Nexus 5 for further testing. I'm thinking it should probably work with a large container in /userdata, skipping the umount of /userdata and mounting the decrypted block file (and the consequent bind mounts) on a file within /userdata, but this isn't testing I plan to pursue for now, as other tests take priority.

I am not posting my script here because it only applies to how I have set up my PinePhone. There are a few choices I made which would break completely for someone who made different setup choices. Anyone capable of getting this working on their device will need to understand what is meant by each step above so should be able to develop a process that works for them. If anyone who does want to try this and does know what they're doing hits a snag and has a question, I'll try to answer it.

Standard caveat applies: this could break everything on your phone, and UBPorts developers will not support this or help you fix it. Proceed at your own risk.

@trainailleur said in One method to encrypt /home/phablet:

Will test on PinePhone when I get the chance, but unfortunately my BraveHeart device has been gathering dust for a few months. (Too many projects, too little time, even with all this extra quarantine time in my life. )

I finally tested this on the PinePhone (dev channel). It works fine, as expected, though instead of using a file as the encrypted block device, I created a new partition on the sdcard I'm using for testing.

Per Lukasz on Telegram, a small number of cancelled-order UBPorts Community Edition PinePhones are up for sale right now (I'm posting this at 2020-07-03 12:07 UTC). DHL shipping only. He will be tweeting about these sometime soon, so grab one ASAP if you want one.

Edit: All gone, as of 4 July.

@Bolly said in Will the Pinephone be available again?:

@jbriones
https://store.pine64.org/product/pinephone-community-edition-ubports-limited-edition-linux-smartphone/

Indeed, per Lukasz on Telegram, there are a small number of cancelled-orders being put up for sale. DHL shipping only. He will be tweeting about these sometime soon, so grab one ASAP if you want one.

Edit: All gone, as of 4 July.

I believe @alan_g, the power behind Mir, resides in the UK.

@MV said in Where is librem 5?:

Really sad to read these things. I joined the Librem5 crowfunding only because seemed there was an agreement with UBports. I'm using an Aquaris E5 HD that works fine but with a 'old and slow hardware'. I was really excited from the Librem5 idea. I should receive my phone for the end of this summer (I hope). Reading your messages seems me to understand that I'll not see UBTouch on it

Purism claim that once they start shipping final devices they will again enable refunds for pre-orders. I cross my fingers on behalf of people who still have their money locked up with Purism and hope this comes true. Maybe Purism will ship a good device in the end, but if not, it would at least be good if those who supported them from the beginning could get their money back out.

It also would have helped if they had been honest about timelines from the beginning, instead of waiting until the last minute to mention delays, and to have been honest about problems and failures instead of blatantly lying about having met deadlines, shipped devices, etc. Their founder/CEO seems to have bitten off more than the company could chew but also seems unwilling to admit to that or to any of the consequences.

I pledged to the Librem 5 not expecting Purism to succeed but thinking it a worthy cause, and I had intended to leave my money with them come thick or thin. In the end however, the endless deception and spin coming from their leadership so turned me off that I requested and received a refund, back when they were still giving them.

That I and so many others did that can't have helped with their problems (and is likely the reason they no longer offer refunds), but they could have avoided it by being open and honest instead of ceaselessly patting themselves on the back for things they claimed to have achieved but had not and trumpeting about their own transparency when they were being anything but transparent.

Though it's probably not a direction I want to go myself, Phosh seems like pretty good work for such a short timeline, and I too believe they should have partnered with hardware vendors with mobile and ARM experience, and that more people will end up running it on the PinePhone, even if Purism doesn't go bust.

@Nathan123 said in PinePhone:

@trainailleur Thank you sir. "couple of months" isn't too bad.

Unfortunately he didn't say "couple." He just said "months." I'm sure stability will come in time, but I wouldn't expect a daily driver on any particular timescale.

@Nathan123 said in PinePhone:

This may be a stupid question...but is the Pinephone community edition anywhere NEAR being stable enough for daily use?

Not a stupid question. But no, it is not yet ready to be a sole device for most users, nor even nearly ready. Marius said in last weekend's Q&A that he expected it would be a number of months before it equaled the stability of the Nexus 5 running UT.

@C0n57an71n said in Security on UT:

@trainailleur There where another articel that was refering to the same test done in UK. I will try found it again if you are curios.

I found the actual UK evaluation on the Wayback Machine. As suspected, there is no mention of Ubuntu Touch at all:

End User Devices Security Guidance: Ubuntu 12.04

The article you linked was indeed wishful thinking and bad extrapolation.

(Anyone interested in reading this may want to act fast, as the Internet Archive is currently under threat of being sued into oblivion.)

@arubislander said in Security on UT:

That article didn't make much sense to me to be honest. The security issues it mentioned were either not limited to or able to be mitigated by the phone OS, or not clearly explained why they were seen to be security issues.

Not to mention that a misconception that Ubuntu Touch would be identical to mainstream Ubuntu is one of the core assumptions of the article. There is no indication that the report the article is cribbing from made that assumption - or even discussed Ubuntu Touch at all - and the link to it is dead so it can't be checked now. I suspect this was a wishful thinking fluff piece by someone who knew very little about UT.