Pinephone – Community Edition: UBports | Hacker News Reader

Pinephone – Community Edition: UBports

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127 pointsfsflover36 comments

Congratulations to have made it so far!

I am really happy with my pinebook which I am using as a daily driver, hopefully I will finally be able to switch my dumbphone to a pinephone soon now.

Of course the camera does not looks great, could anyone recommand me a slim digital camera that I could easily take with the pinephone that is at least on par with current generation smartphone cameras in the $100-$200 price range?

A Sony RX100. Even the earlier generations are pretty cheap used nowadays and are miles better than smartphones cameras.

One thing stops me using UBport is no full disk encryption support. The reason seems to be there are no way for them to get around the bootloader of a standard Android phone to boot an encrypted UBport. With a more open hardware Pinephone, are there any roadmap for them to implement on it?

Would an encrypted home suffice?

Standard Android systems have a separate userdata partition that holds everything besides the equivalents of /boot/ (boot - more of a boot image in a firmware-dependent format than a real "partition", even though it's implemented as such) and a minimal, read-only /usr/, /bin/, /sbin/ (system). Everything else, not just /home/ is in the userdata partition; and the system must be able to (1) deal with a wiped userdata while preserving some kind of basic functionality, and (2) prompt for a password in case userdata is encrypted. It's a lot like running a "LiveCD with persistence", except that the space you get on the "LiveCD" part is hardware dependent, and can be very limited even on very recent Android phones.

I think they meant an actual home, not the home directory (I could be mistaken).

Ah, sorry, no I actually meant the home directory in the case of postmarketos, although I wouldn't mind extending the concept to Android. It seems like you can get 90% of the benefit with 10% of the difficulty if you have an unencrypted OS but mount your home (well "user data") from an encrypted filesystem. Heck, I can't think of any reason that on a normal unix-like[0] you couldn't mount your whole home directory with encfs or something after login. This doesn't protect you from evil maid attacks, but for common phone threat models (theft, mostly) this is still a win.

[0] I was going to say GNU/Linux system, but pmos is based on Alpine which isn't really GNU so much as Busybox/Linux...

So I was mostly thinking in the context of postmarketos, where we have a less-weird filesystem layout to work with and can assume that user data lives in the home directory and can be on its ownfilesystem.

That said: Yeah, Android+Linux is super weird if you're used to GNU+Linux:) And I'm pretty sure it would be more complicated, since I'm basically proposing that we protect data but not code; I think you'd need to protect /data at a minimum, maybe more (I forget where Android sticks the "internal storage" directory). That said, I think you could do it on Android.

> The reason seems to be there are no way for them to get around the bootloader of a standard Android phone to boot an encrypted UBport.

How so? The bootloader only boots what is in the boot partition, it shouldn't even care about anything else if it's properly unlocked. The only issue on standard AOSP is that encryption there affects the entire 'userdata' partition, so the OS must manage to boot and prompt for a password while only accessing the "system" partition, which is relatively small on many devices. But that's no different than booting a system that has had its userdata wiped (either as part of bootloader unlock or for recovery).

Huh.

So which of the Linux distros that run on Pinephone do support FDE with LUKS?

postmarketOS now has that option, and Ubunutu Touch has an unofficial guide on how to accomplish this, though very much unsupported.

Is this still the Brave Heart edition of the hardware, or is this the full production release?

> In comparison with the PinePhone 'Braveheart' devices which launched in 2019, the PinePhone UBports 'Community Edition' devices are distiguished by a new motherboard revision and a custom backplate bearing the UBports name and logo.

clicked around to find that here: https://ubports.com/blog/ubports-blog-1/post/pinephone-ubpor...

It should be the production release. It is the 1.2 hardware rev which fixes the vast majority of issues with 1.1 (Braveheart). There were a couple 'nice to have' modem debug suggestions they didn't go with apparently because it would have required a new DTB, which they really wanted to avoid. But other than that, it looks like they fixed everything that's been reported to date.

Does anyone have more recent experience with pine64 hardware quality? I bought three devices a few years back and all three stopped working within a few months, and support was non-existent. I'd be interested in this, but not if it breaks after two months and the only support is "ask the forum".

I haven't had the chance to use a UBports device at all yet. Any good phone models to try to run this on?

OnePlus One I think has the best support and can be acquired pretty cheaply (I picked one up for about US$70).

It depends on your specific need, if you want something that is daily driver ready I recommend the OnePlus One, if you want something to hack on, and you're into alternative mobile OS, then consider to buy the PinePhone.

Anyone has experience using UBport, which seems to be the touch version of ubuntu?

Yes, I've been using Ubuntu Touch since 2015, as my only mobile OS on multiple devices, I'm also involved with the UBports Community, that maintains and develops the OS. I like it and it fits my needs, however it might not be for everybody, as there are way fewer apps, including some that many people expect to have.

However if you want to have an alternative OS, not based on Android, that is GNU/Linux with the necessary arquictecture changes to be reliable on a daily driver mobile devices, and that respects your privacy, then I believe it's the best choice.

It's 'Ubuntu Touch by UBports' but people just call it 'ubports' for short.

At https://forums.ubports.com/ you can get the gist of ubports and get answered any question you have as well.

Actually it's only Ubuntu Touch. The by UBports is used only to call attention to the broader community that does more than just Ubuntu Touch, we also have other projects around it that where craeted to serve our user and developer community.

I have been using UBports on my primary phone (Nexus 5) for the past year. It has been mostly great. All the expected things such as phone calls, text and web browsing work just fine. They have an app store with a fair number of apps, although obviously nowhere near to what is available for Android. Updates for the OS have been quite regular every few months. I have previously been using LineageOS on Nexus 5x, but personally I find UBports better. It is much closer to a real Linux distribution than Android, while still being a pretty usable mobile OS.

Apps are just webapps though and most of them are very poorly made. This has been my experience on mako.

Not all of them are webapps see https://open-store.io/?type=app

Yes but 99 percents are.

Not really. If you filter by the "App" category on OpenStore you get 18 pages of results and if you filter by "WebApp" you also get 18 pages of results. So, about 50% are webapps.

Because the filter you use includes all kind of crappy games. if you focus on other categories, the percentage is much higher.

Aren't most "apps" redundant considering you can install a program the way you would for a Linux distro? There are resources going back ages. I suppose they aren't designed for mobile, but could be tweaked.

I used ubports for a week once. I liked it. The only drawback is it lacked a handful of apps I needed (signal, authy, and anki I think)

A few years ago I heard they were working towards android app emulation. Might have been called Halium?

Halium 'is the collaborative project to unify the Hardware Abstraction Layer for projects which run GNU/Linux on mobile devices with pre-installed Android' (https://halium.org/). The project to support Android apps is called Anbox but it's mostly on hold for now.

There's a signal text messaging application, there're a few 2 factor authentication applications, I don't know what anki is.

Hallium is an hardware enablement abstraction layer. We use it to port Ubuntu Touch and other OS, to devices that where built to run android.

We are not working towards android app emulation, we are working for running apps natively. We're doing this by using anbox, which basically is an minimal android image, with just enough to run apps, and that image is running inside an lxc container. However that is very hard to put it to work fully (access to sensors is one of the problems), and we have been asking for help with that.

anki appears to have a Linux version on the website. Wouldn't that work? Even if it's not built for mobile.

I have been using it on my primary phone since ubuntu touch was discontinued (the phone is old and originally ran Ubuntu touch).

It is has always been pretty horrible, but in a nice simple way. The bugs in it are pretty blatant (e.g. on screen keyboard covering up pictures in picture messages) and some of the design decisions seem to have been wrong (the memory management seems so much worse than just doing nothing and letting things swap to disk ).

But I prefer predictable obviois bugs over things where the system oscar overly complicated (like an ipad which refuses to install updates and constantly asks for apple id confirmation codes that never appear).

Maybe other is better woth better hardware (Aquaris E5), but I am comparing it to the nokia n9 and find ot lacking overall.

Also, the autocorrect is horrible and I typed this message on the phone. So forgive any weirdness.

I'll forgive you if you explain who oscar is ;) I gave up trying to guess.

Haha, oscar = is = os with autocorrect.

another classic is abdicate = and = abd with autocorrect

Until recently, 22nd was 2nd = 2nd with autocorrect which was pretty bad.

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