Sound on the PinePhonePro!

In January 2022, I purchased a PinePhone Pro with the hopes of getting away from Android. I have been playing with it since, trying different distros and observing the changes in functionality with each update.

Soon after I got the phone, it stopped booting from the emmc storage after an update. Not long after I started playing with different distros installed on several SD cards. A few months ago I install tow-boot which improved the boot up experience.

I quickly found that I liked distro and wm managers that gave the best performance like Phosh and SXMO (my favorite). I really like, alpine linux (postmarketos for mobile) which is very lean and combined with sxmo is my favorite however development (problem solving seems to take longer). This results in PostmarketOS/SXMO looking really cool but the functionality just wasn't there. Primarily Audio and Calls did not work for me.

So I have been trying out Archlinux with SXMO more frequently.

I generally try to check for updates every day but it had been a few days since I had a chance to touch the PinePhonePro (ppp). Today, I was happily surprised to find that after an update and reboot, audio was working on the phone.

Now, after being so excited, I was eager to try out an audio phone call which previously had made calls but there was no audio.

Again this was running Archlinux with SXMO.

I was disappointed to find that when I attempted to make a call from the ppp, it gave me an immediate message that the call was terminated and when I tried to call the ppp from my work phone, it sent the call to voicemail immediately.

I don't think that this has anything to do with the sound setup which asked me to make a pipewire selection during the upgrade.

Using Archlinux and Phosh, I had been able to attach bluetooth headphones and audio (not on voice calls) sometimes worked however frequently the audio came out sped up too fast to understand.

So anyway that is my experience so far as I patiently wait for more updates.

Oh, lately, I have been playing around to see what I can do from the commandline when I ssh into the ppp.

I added the battery status to the status bar in tmux so I can see when I need to plug it into the charger.

Here is what I am using:

> #!/usr/bin/env bash

>

> status=$( cat /sys/class/power_supply/rk818-battery/status )

> charge=$( cat /sys/class/power_supply/rk818-battery/capacity )

>

> if [ $status == "Discharging" ]

> then

> printf "#[bg=black]\U1F50B#[fg=red]$charge%%"

> else

> printf "#[bg=black]\U1F50B#[fg=green]$charge%%"

> fi

Then in the .tmux.conf file, I added the following line:

> ...

> set -g status-right '#(hostnamectl --static) #(~/bin/bat) #[bg=white] #[fg=black] #(date +'%a_%H:%M') '

> ...

Feel free to respond:

email: nristen@ctrl-c.club

xmpp: karl@chat.theharrisclan.net

--------

Nristen (g)log index

Nristen Home