PinePhone image 2023-04-06 (wifi, software-add tab, Jitsi preset)

[Norman Feske]

Hi John,

thank you for the report.

> - Wi-Fi does work most of the time.  Sometimes it gets stuck scanning, 
> but most of the time it's OK, and I can connect fine with password.

If you observe this situation the next time, may you try restarting the 
wifi driver in the runtime view? Should you be able to recover 
connectivity that way, it will make sense to automate its health 
monitoring and restart (in addition to investigating the error).

> - I love the on-screen keyboard - for my tastes it's better than Apple's 
> or Google's!

Wow, that's a compliment I haven't seen coming. :)

> - I had some initial problems with the Storage functionality - basically 
> it was unable to write (e.g, the Default button and expanding didn't 
> work).  This may have been my fault, since I wrote over the previous 
> image without writing zeros first.  When I mounted the SD card in Linux, 
> it complained about the partition table, and offered to fix it.  Once I 
> did that, the Default button worked, but Expand still locks up.

That sounds like a low-level block-storage problem. It may be worth 
trying another SD card. When writing the image to the SD-card, please 
always make sure to use the 'dd' argument 'conv=fsync'.

> - In the Software section, in the "Add" and "Update" tabs, there is a 
> message saying "missing public key for verification".  I wonder if there 
> is still a write problem, which might cause cascading problems like this.

The message indicates that Sculpt can find a 'download' file for the 
selected depot user but no 'pubkey' file. In this case, one can still 
download packages but you cannot put trust in the integrity of the 
downloaded content. This situation should only occur when manually 
adding a download URL using the "Edit" button in the depot-user 
selection. For the depot users known by the image, the pubkey files 
should always be available. Hence, this also hints at a storage issue.

> - Sometimes after booting, the phone goes into a mode where everything 
> is very sluggish (i.e. unusable), and the screen flickers.  The screen 
> looks like it is flipping between two framebuffers, for example, one 
> with all sections closed and one with the Devices section open.  The 
> current mode is predominant, but the other one is faintly visible behind 
> it.

I sporadically observed this weird flickering issue when booting my 
PinePhone w/o AC, using only the battery. Interestingly, the flickering 
disappears after a minute or so. Is this the same for you? When using AC 
+ battery, I could not observe it so far. Since it happens quite 
sporadically, I have not yet found a good way to reproduce it, 
unfortunately, which makes the investigation quite hard.

> One quick thought - is it possible to add a scrollable Log view in 
> Leitzentrale, since getting log data off the device is challenging?

That is certainly a good idea that will be implemented for sure. In the 
meanwhile, you may try accessing the log under /report/log in the system 
shell using vim. I usually press 'G' to go to the very end and the arrow 
keys to go up (key repeat would be nice but doesn't exist yet), or I use 
'/' search for a specific string - like "wifi" - and repeatedly press 'n'.

Cheers
Norman

-- 
Dr.-Ing. Norman Feske
Genode Labs

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