PinePhone: PostmarketOS Community Edition

https://postmarketos.org/blog/2020/06/15/pinephone-postmarketos-community-edition/

by ollieparanoid • 6 years ago

193 76 6 years ago

postmarketos.org

foo2020• 6 years ago

The RAM and internal storage seem to be too less otherwise I might have bought it.

stamps• 6 years ago

You can install an SD card.

avery42• 6 years ago

The PinePhone has 2 Gb of RAM, which is plenty for a smartphone (especially running Linux). You can put in a micro SD card to get more storage.

sukilot2• 6 years ago

How is that plenty? Is Android not Linux?

curioussavage• 6 years ago

They definitely seem low when compared to androids, but If 2 GB works as great as it does on my iphone 7 then it should be doable to get a good experience here too. 3 GB is the max ram for the chip, hopefully they come out with a version that has that, or one with a different soc that can support more.

Like the other guy said with SD card you won't have an issue with storage.

bArray• 6 years ago

Do remember that this device is running a full kernel, so actually you can get the speed and memory benefits of running such. Expect some Raspberry Pi 3-eque performance.

heavyset_go• 6 years ago

The biggest bottleneck in RPi performance has always been the slow SD card access times. I have hardware from the Pi 3 era that still flies because they run off SSDs.

NikolaeVarius2• 6 years ago

I think I'll try and use this as a PMP.

m4632• 6 years ago

Prototype Mobility Platform?

Percussive Maintenance Phone?

Pimp My Pandemic?

zootboy• 6 years ago

Portable Media Player?

jancsika• 6 years ago

I thought PostmarketOS did not (yet) support making calls.

So what's the point of running it on hardware designed to address the issue of running FOSS alongside a blackbox baseband?

If you don't need the baseband, what's the usecase that a Chromebook form factor doesn't solve?

jentist_retol• 6 years ago

So what's the point of running it on hardware designed to address the issue of running FOSS alongside a blackbox baseband?

The exercise of maintaining an open baseline is valuable. Also, having a development platform is valuable.

Some modern phones keep the blackbox baseband isolated on a non DMA bus, such as usb. In those cases, you simply don't t rust the baseband as anything but a packet forwarder, and enforce full TLS/VPN at a low level in the operation system.

It is limited, though. No argument there.

miloignis• 6 years ago

As mentioned in the article and the issues linked, you can already make and receive calls & SMS and use mobile data with postmarketOS on PinePhone. I have a Community Edition PinePhone with postmarketOS and have gotten mobile data working on a data only SIM, but won't be able to personally test calls and SMS until my new SIM arrives in a few days.

It's a very cool device, and while it's def not a daily driver for most people, it's a ton of fun to use and seems to be improving quickly.

ryantgtg3• 6 years ago

Does it support group messaging? I don’t see that mentioned. That was the deal breaker for me when I used Firefox OS, Ubuntu Touch, and Sailfish OS in the past. I loved them all! But they all had a dealbreaker or two.

pengaru2• 6 years ago

The pinephone like the librem5 has hardware kill switches so you can operate with the baseband off whenever you don't need the cellular network enough to justify the risks.

m4632• 6 years ago

I thought the librem5 had a more distinct seperation between baseband and the rest of the device. I read that somewhere, and I can't find it.

mikece• 6 years ago

I've been researching getting a mobile "phone" that is only ever used as a hotspot for an iPod touch which runs (1) an always-on VPN and (2) apps for SMS and VoIP voice calls. So in a way, phone that can't do voice calls sounds like a good thing to me.

megous5• 6 years ago

Where did you get this can't do calls?

fit2rule2• 6 years ago

As someone with a drawer full of these types of devices, from the neo1973 to the Creative Labs Zii Egg and Google G1, I'll definitely be picking up one of these phones when its available .. I've had a lot of fun with my PineTime watch already, as there are a number of different OS'es available for it .. in various states of functionality, of course .. but that's the fun of it. Its SO rewarding to have a device like this, that has so many open options. Write a watch-face in Python? Hell yeah. Learn Rust and carry my lab projects around on my wrist - for sure. Its like a breath of fresh air after decades of walled gardens and proprietary junk.

That said, the Pine-* devices are definitely not .. quite .. ready for mainstream. The PineTime watch back-face is not glued on, even .. but that just makes it a perfect hacker statement! Something so very satisfying about having a device so open, the case doesn't even close. ;P

pwdisswordfish2• 6 years ago

"It's like a breath of fersh air after decades of walled garden and proprietary junk.

That said, the Pine-* are definitely not .. quite .. ready for mainstream."

Perhaps "ready for mainstream" is overrated (from a user perespective). Consider that many of the supposedly "ready for mainstream" proprietary hardware products that consumers have been continually fed for decades are laden with problems. Consumer routers are the first example that comes to mind but there are problems with almost everything, no matter how slick the marketing. The sellers try to block consumers from fixing anything and convince the buyers that they need constant "updates" that can only come from one source: the seller. They are effectively trying to destroy the concept of ownership.

blendergeek• 6 years ago

That said, the Pine-* devices are definitely not .. quite .. ready for mainstream. The PineTime watch back-face is not glued on, even ..

This is a little unfair to the other Pine* products. The PineTime has not been released. A development kit was released. Of course the backcover wasn't fully polished. The finished products from PineTime are more polished, while still retaining a degree of hackability that is unheard of in most of the modern tech world.

bigiain2• 6 years ago

I'll add that my PineBook is a genuinely _nice_ piece of hardware. People who don't know what it is regularly assume it's some high-end laptop, due to it looking/feeling/behaving nicer that their $1k+ Windows laptop...

I'll admit there's a bit to go still in terms of "ready for mainstream" software, I wouldn't buy one of these for my mom still, but that's pretty much a) linux's problem, and b) _why_ I bought it in the first place... (I've got several MacBooks and iDevices for all the stuff where I'm happy enough with Steve's ghost telling me "You're holding it wrong" when it's not doing things the way I wanted/expected...)

megous5• 6 years ago

I've also made HDMI over USB-C work recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19gryM8n9kU

This device will be a nice portable computer, so I can travel lightly with a phone, but use it as full blown desktop anywhere I can get hold of a monitor and an USB keyboard/mouse, without having to downgrade my user experience to Android.

ryukafalz4• 6 years ago

That's my dream, but I think this crop of devices isn't quite there from a performance standpoint. If I could have the hardware of today's flagships with the mobile Linux distros running on these things...

The Librem 5 might be closer performance-wise; I'd be curious to see how it performs docked. Regardless though, both devices have accelerated development of real mobile Linux DEs, and I'm grateful for that.

Exciting times!

freeqaz• 6 years ago

What about using your phone as a thin client of sorts? I've used Docker-Machine on an external VPS before when my laptop didn't have enough RAM. The experience was pretty decent (npm install didn't run locally).

I would run my code editor locally and sync the files to the remote box.

Using my phone with external monitor/keyboard/mouse as a thin client seems fairly reasonable in 2020!

megous5• 6 years ago

It's not that horrible, even with large displays (enough for reading hacker news for sure, lol):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdKNugT-mTQ

foobar_• 6 years ago

Thats fantastic! I've been wanting to do something like that on my own with a Pi-Phone or use limbo.

sukilot2• 6 years ago

How will this OS be secure? Via obscurity?

swiley2• 6 years ago

What exactly are you asking?

MartijnBraam2• 6 years ago

through the same ways normal linux distro's are secure.

Shared404• 6 years ago

It's derived from Alpine: https://alpinelinux.org/

yjftsjthsd-h• 6 years ago

Rather the opposite; it runs an up-to-date Linux kernel and an Alpine user land. An exploit against this would likely work against most servers and/or containers on the net.

KingMachiavelli• 6 years ago

As for the hardware, we will be making an announcement closer to date; presently we are working on the assumption that the PCB to ship with this edition will still be version 1.2. We may, however, decide to make some further tweaks to this PCB design. We will, of course, document and inform you of any changes to PCB 1.2 there may be in the future.

Hmm, it will be interesting if there are any major things than need to be fixed with the v1.2 PCB. There were quite a few things fixed between 1.1 & 1.2.

harry8• 6 years ago

Every time one of these comes up I shed tears for the nokia n900 and maemo which was a linux, fully-functional smartphone that worked great.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N900

Imagine if they'd just kept it around and upgraded it in hardware and software gently as a low-ish priority. It was already fantastic. Given security updates it's still better than any droid and less icky than any apple phone.

Multicomp• 6 years ago

I'm currently prepping a Fxtec Pro1 that will become a daily driver once Lineage OS is stable on it (thanks TDM for your hard work - once I find a book on how to mod android ROMs I'm gonna join ya).

It turns out that I really wanted this N900 instead, I just didn't know it and at the time was too young to know about it.

There was some sort of attempted revival product called the Neo900 but it looks like it is dead / not updated any more. [1]

In the meantime, I will definitely order a PinePhone once they are in general availability and not pre-orders (sorry but Fxtec burned me so bad to get the Pro1 that I've learned my lesson RE: mobile device pre-orders), and I definitely will if Pine produces a physical keyboard for the PinePhone.

[1] https://my.neo900.org/

ocdtrekkie2• 6 years ago

I'm really intrigued by the Fxtec hardware, but I won't buy a phone that ships with Android. I'd buy in a heartbeat if they supported a Linux SKU of the thing.

Definitely interested in adding Pine's take on keyboards to my PinePhone.

ryantgtg3• 6 years ago

I actually threw out my G2 yesterday (battery was missing, and it had been sitting in my drawer for... 10 years?), and it made me sad. Every day I pine for a sweet slider keyboard.

So, this Fxtec Pro1 is super intriguing! I'm sorta stuck on iOS right now because my entire family uses it I would screw up their Messages game if I was on a different platform.

Also, people have PostmarketOS running on the N900. Sure, it's an ancient device, but that still cool.

boring_twenties• 6 years ago

Not quite the same thing, but you can try Maemo Leste on the PinePhone: https://leste.maemo.org/PinePhone

pjmlp2• 6 years ago

You can do the same for OpenMoko and every Linux based failed attempt to go at it.

The fact is that the market doesn't care, and even Android's case, it is more of an implementation detail than anything else.

Tomorrow ART and ChromeOS can eventually be running on Zircon and no regular consumer would notice the difference.

jacobush2• 6 years ago

AFAIK the N900 sold great in Germany without any ads. It would have been the third place of smartphones IMHO, especially considering Android was not totally dominant in the public yet then.

I think it could have been sort of the "Thinkpad" of smartphones, used by professionals and geeks.

haolez• 6 years ago

Is the hardware capable of handling an external monitor? This phone could be very useful to me if it becomes a desktop computer on demand.

megous5• 6 years ago

Yes. See above.

6274673• 6 years ago

Lately I've been thinking of the ethics of buying Apple iOS devices compared to more opened devices - most, yet, not all Android devices. In the long term, iOS device are doomed to become unserviceable my users/enthusiasts dues to its closed nature, while many Android devices seem to have it's usefulness extended in time by efforts such as postmarketOS.

Is there an inherent quality of iOS devices that make them unsupportable.

Any given gen of iOS device has, arguably, more devices than any given flavor of Android devices (more fragmentation in Android platform) so in theory it would be more fruitful and impactful to extend the use of iOS devices (if at all possible) yet, this is not what we see. Leading me to think that Apple deliberately makes iOS devices unthinkerable.

This, to me, leads to the conclusion that buying iOS devices is unethical as the only long term alternative for iOS device is to have it recycled while android devices may retain the chance for reuse into the future.

teruakohatu2• 6 years ago

Is there an inherent quality of iOS devices that make them unsupportable.

When you say inherit do you mean the Apple Axx CPU can only only execute the iOS kernel and nothing else? Then the answer is no.

https://fossbytes.com/linux-based-mobile-postmarketos-on-iph...

But for all practical purposes it cannot run anything but iOS and any discussions about running an aftermarket OS is purely academic.

arghwhat2• 6 years ago

But for all practical purposes it cannot run anything but iOS and any discussions about running an aftermarket OS is purely academic.

The project you referred to had a follow-up in late april: https://blog.project-insanity.org/2020/04/22/linux-with-wayl....

Calling the project (or any project, really) "purely academic" with the implication that it will never evolve is nonsense. Like many other projects it's of course done for the hell of it, but so is most hobby/open-source projects, and yet many evolve into something much greater. There's plenty of reverse-engineering projects out there that have brought open life into closed hardware.

The question is just whether or not there's enough people interested for it to happen.

6274673• 6 years ago

Yes, I became aware of that effort. And I applaud and look forward to them.

The problem I see in long term is: if there's no inherent property of iPhones that make them unhackable by aftermarket efforts I don't understand why there aren't more efforts or more success. Any given model of iPhone has many more units out in the market than almost any given model of android device that is officially supported by aftermarket efforts (ie. LineageOS, postmarketOS, etc).

caveman787• 6 years ago

I am loving this PinePhone concept and PostmarketOS it because it’s cheap, but because it’s right, safe, user owned and secure OS is what everyone who spends their money deserves.

PinePhone: PostmarketOS Community Edition

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