A Linux Failure and a Success

[Frank Hilliard]

Hi All,

I confess I finally gave up on resurrecting my personal Wordpress site 
and opted to pay webnames.ca to do the same thing. I've started posting 
there, if you're interested, at https://westernreflections.ca/

My success was when my new Linux pinephone arrived from 
https://pine64.com . This booted up, when the tab was removed from the 
battery, straight into Ubuntu Touch, which was great because I run 
KUbuntu on my dual boot main computer. Unfortunately, the update 
function (in the app "Discover") immediately cashed citing missing 
dependencies. I tried the command line, but this crashed for the same 
reason.

The workaround is to boot from a MicroSD card, so I got a 64GB card and 
a Logiix adapter and looked up what I needed next. This turned out to be 
a boot loader called "Tow-Boot" without which Ubuntu Touch will not boot 
on the Pinephone. To flash that, I needed another program, 
"balenaEtcher" and a third program "Disks" which was already in my app 
list.

Tow-Boot flashed easily and booted itself on the Pinephone on startup. 
It has an great graphical interface and installed itself on the main 
memory in a few seconds. I then reformatted the MicroSD card to get rid 
of the self-booting Tow-Boot and tried the same process with at least 
three Ubuntu Touch images. Nothing worked. One gave me a blank screen, 
another put the red light on and kept it on. So I tried another OS, 
Mobian. This WAS a success, but several of its apps didn't work, 
including the update function, which had a manual option with no controls.

Next was postmarketOS which not only worked immediately, but greeted me 
with an animated welcome message before showing me the login page. Here, 
every app available worked and was able to add the Brave and Falkon 
<https://www.falkon.org/> browsers, and Telegraph. Telegraph needed 
verification via a QT code, and this worked, and its internal video 
worked! Very impressive.

Are there downsides, yes. The battery life isn't good. You have to turn 
on WiFi every time and navigation between pages is confusing (at least 
to me). Still, it's just at the start of things, and fun to watch Linux 
phones develop.

Frank Hilliard

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