The Pine64 community has decided to use the default firmware in PinePhone smartphones based on the Manjaro distribution and the KDE Plasma Mobile user environment. In early February, the Pine64 project abandoned the formation of separate editions of the PinePhone Community Edition in favor of developing PinePhone as a holistic platform, offering a basic reference environment by default and providing the ability to quickly install alternatives.
Alternative firmware developed for the PinePhone can be installed or downloaded from an SD card as an option. For example, in addition to Manjaro, boot images are being developed based on postmarketOS, KDE Plasma Mobile, UBports, Maemo Leste, Manjaro, LuneOS, Nemo Mobile, the partially open platform Sailfish and OpenMandriva. Discusses building builds based on NixOS, openSUSE, DanctNIX, and Fedora. To support developers of alternative firmware, it is proposed to sell back covers stylized for each firmware with the logo of different projects in the Pine Store online store. The cost of the cover will be $15, of which $10 will be transferred to the developers of the firmware in the form of a donation.
It is noted that the choice of the default environment is made taking into account the long and well-established collaboration of the PINE64 project with the Manjaro and KDE communities. Moreover, at one time it was the Plasma Mobile shell that inspired PINE64 to create its own Linux smartphone. Recently, the development of Plasma Mobile has made significant progress and this shell is already quite suitable for everyday use. As for the Manjaro distribution, its developers are key partners in the project, providing support for all PINE64 devices, including ROCKPro64 boards and the Pinebook Pro laptop. Manjaro developers have made a great contribution to the development of firmware for PinePhone, and the images prepared by them are among the best and full-featured.
The Manjaro distribution is based on the Arch Linux package base and uses its own BoxIt toolkit, designed in the image of Git. The repository is maintained on the principle of continuous inclusion of updates (rolling), but new versions go through an additional stage of stabilization. The KDE Plasma Mobile user environment is based on the Plasma 5 mobile desktop edition, the KDE Frameworks 5 libraries, the Ofono phone stack, and the Telepathy communications framework. To create the application interface, Qt is used, a set of Mauikit components and the Kirigami framework from the KDE Frameworks, which allows you to create universal interfaces suitable for smartphones, tablets and PCs. The kwin_wayland composite server is used to display graphics. PulseAudio is used for sound processing.
Includes apps such as KDE Connect to pair your phone with your desktop, Okular document viewer, VVave music player, Koko and Pix image viewers, buho note taking system, calindori calendar planner, Index file manager, Discover app manager, sending SMS Spacebar, plasma-phonebook address book, plasma-dialer phone call interface, plasma-angelfish browser and Spectral messenger.
Recall that the PinePhone hardware is designed to use replaceable components - most of the modules are not soldered, but connected via detachable cables, which allows, for example, if you wish, to replace the mediocre camera offered by default with a better one. The device is built on a 4-core SoC ARM Allwinner A64 with a Mali 400 MP2 GPU, equipped with 2 or 3 GB of RAM, a 5.95-inch screen (1440 Γ 720 IPS), Micro SD (with support for booting from an SD card), 16 or 32 GB eMMC (internal), USB-C port with USB Host and combined video output for connecting a monitor, 3.5 mm mini-jack, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 (A2DP), GPS, GPS-A, GLONASS, two cameras (2 and 5Mpx), removable 3000mAh battery, hardware-switchable components with LTE/GNSS, WiFi, microphone and speakers.
Of the events related to PinePhone, the start of production of an accessory with a folding keyboard is also mentioned. The keyboard is connected by replacing the back cover. At present, the first batch with a keyboard case has already been released, but the overlay keys themselves are not yet ready, since another manufacturer is responsible for their production. To balance the weight of the keyboard, it is planned to build an additional battery with a capacity of 6000mAh. Also, a full-fledged USB-C port will appear in the keyboard block, through which you can connect, for example, a mouse.
In addition, work is underway to open the code of the phone stack components, port drivers for the modem to the main Linux kernel, and improve the handling of incoming calls and messages when the device is in sleep mode. The modem is already capable of loading the unmodified Linux 5.11 kernel, but functionality with the new kernel is still limited to support for the serial interface, USB, and NAND. The original firmware for the modem based on the Qualcomm chip was released for the 3.18.x kernel, and developers have to port the code for new kernels, rewriting many components along the way. Of the achievements, the possibility of making calls via VoLTE without the use of blobs is noted.
The firmware offered for the Qualcomm modem initially contained about 150 closed executable files and libraries. The community has made an attempt to replace these closed components with open alternatives that cover about 90% of the required functionality. Currently, without the use of binary components, you can initialize the modem, establish a connection and make calls using VoLTE (Voice over LTE) and CS technologies. Receiving calls using only open components does not work yet. Additionally, an open bootloader has been prepared that allows you to change the modem firmware, including using experimental firmware based on Yocto 3.2 and postmarketOS.
In conclusion, we can mention the initiative to create a new version of the PINE64 board based on the RISC-V architecture and the announcement of the Quartz64 model-A board based on the RK3566 chip (4-core Cortex-A55 1.8 GHz with Mali-G52 GPU) and similar in architecture to the board ROCKPro64. Of the differences from the ROCKPro64, the presence of SATA 6.0 and ePD ports (for e-Ink screens) stands out, as well as the ability to install up to 8 GB of RAM. Board Features: HDMI 2.0a, eMMC, SDHC/SDXC MicroSD, PCIe, eDP, SATA 6.0, SPI, MIPI DSI, MIPI CSI camera, Gigabit Ethernet, GPIO, 3 x USB 2.0 and 3.0 x USB 802.11, optional WiFi 5.0 b/ g/n/ac and Bluetooth 64. In terms of performance, the Quartz4 board is close to the Raspberry Pi 64, but lags behind the ROCKPro3399 based on the Rockchip RK15 chip by 25-52%. The Mali-GXNUMX GPU is fully supported by the open source Panfrost driver.
Source: opennet.ru