I recieved my 3 gig Convergence postmarketOS Community Edition on September 1st, 2020.
I decided to start keeping a log of what I've done with it on September 6th.
As an ongoing log, I'm going to keep the most recent log at the top of this page.
Whenever I write something long enough to turn into an explainer, I'll pull it into it's own file.
2020.09.06
Went to set up my password manager, gpg and email, all of which I use command line tools for.
Thought it would be a pretty simple set up, if a bit type-y
I got ssh working, had to download openssh-server, but that was the only thing out of the usual. ***note to self; write up how to for mobian***
pulled in my ssh keys from my laptop and shut down ssh using passwords, since the password is stuck being numeric.
I used scp to send over my (stripped) .gnupg folder, completely replacing the automatic one. (not a problem since I hadn't done anything with it)
I use syncthing to keep my .password-store synced between devices, so that was next.
apt-get install syncthing, then use the handy-dandy icons "start syncthing" and "syncthing web ui"
it started, and then I used the webgui to send over my existing "syncphone" folder where I have stored my .password-store in the past.
Syncthing doesn't actually let you keep . files in it though, so it's just a file passwordstore there, and then I symlink that to where pass is expecting .password-store to be.
so symlink that, download pass, and I expected to be off to the races!
....but unfortunately, pinentry-gnome3 doesn't play well at all with the keyboard. I'm not sure whether it ever passed my keyphrase correctly, but every time I entered it, which I may or may not have done correctly (it's a long phrase, and it's a touch keyboard) but on a failed attempt, I couldn't even access the keyboard to try again.
after some research, (thank you Russ!) I downloaded pinentry-curses and then added the following line to ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf:
pinentry-program /usr/bin/pinentry-curses
which pulled up a pinentry program that ran on the command line, as expected, which means that (at least for now) I've limited myself to only running pass in and from the command line, but I'm feeling pretty comfortable with that.
playing catch up on logging:
2020.09.04
Realized that the jumpdrive program had me download a file that was nameoffile.img.xz ..which I hadn't known was a compressed format, ran unxz and it's good to go!
As mobian had gotten caught up with the fix for the 3G phones, I pulled down the nightly image of that and pulled it up on an sd card to check it out.
Sad as it may be, when I realized that I had apt and it came pre-loaded with 2048, I knew I was home. I won a game of 2048 while on the sd card, then went and put jumpdrive on my sd card, and used that to put mobian onto the phone itself.
I know I'll go play with other OSes again, but I highly doubt I'll end up running anything that isn't debian based. I'm just too comforatable in this enviornment.
Downloaded vim immediately, though I did try their build of gedit, which for some reason works fine. None of the problems I had on mpOS.
Tried out sms immediately, chat seems to work fine. Started joining in on chats on the mobian matrix room. apparently mms still doesn't work with chats, and can end up clogging the sms channel somehow, there's a noted workaround, but it's not clean yet.
Chat also worked quite well with unencrypted xmpp, but doesn't support omemo encryption, so that doesn't work for my use case at all.
Also attempted to get Fractal up and running, as I typically use Matrix for most of my communication.
Unfortunately, Fractal doesn't support E2E encryption. So, I attempted to use Pantalaimon as a workaround.
I'm not at a place where I'm comfortable using the sid repo, or flatpac, so I chose to use pip to install it.
I failed the install several times; and ended up having to use apt-get install to grab both python3-olm for the encryption package, and python3-cffi for the translation layer for C. Following the instructions on the mobian project wiki, I got the config page set up like this:
[Default] # LogLevel = Debug SSL = True [local-matrix] Homeserver = https://matrix.org ListenAddress = localhost ListenPort = 8009 SSL = False # UseKeyring = True # IgnoreVerification = True
and then started it with the command pantalaimon, then set my homeserver to localhost:8009 when I opened fractal
I could recieve incoming encrypted messages, couldn't see any of my pre-existing messages
(as verification didn't really work, though I forced it via the element webclient on my laptop)
but I couldn't send any outgoing messages.
Eventually I decided to try something else.
I knew that the gomuks terminal matrix client had encryption working, as Russ is using it from his laptop,
so I figured I'd see how it scaled.
I was pleasantly surprised!
I downloaded the v 0.2.0 release from github, and added it to my bin.
Added my bin to my PATH, and I was good to go!
The native set up didn't really fit in the profile view, but once I ran /toggle rooms and /toggle users I could read everything that I needed to.
And when I want to check whether there's anything new in any rooms I can always /toggle rooms again.
when I did a quick apt-get libnotify-bin I even got it to give me notifications!
I also had to do the forced verification dance with element from my laptop, and I only got new messages decrypted, not the history.
But it works!
I downloaded tmux, started a session, then left gomuks running in the background, so I didn't have to leave it as an 'open' app.
That was more than enough fighting with phones for a day, so I left it at that :)
2020.09.01
I recieved the pinephone, pulled it out of the box, removed the screen cover and the plastic covering the battery.
The pmOS set up was super easy and pleasant to use,
but as it offered a alphanumeric keyboard when asking for an encryption key,
I used an alphanumeric key, and was promptly locked out of my phone.
The Pinephone forums were an awesome tool to discover that I was *not* the only one who had been locked out that way.
I looked up how to put pmOS on my phone again, and got to play with pmbootstrap
It's a very nifty little python program that allows you to select the pieces of pmOS you'd like, for the device you have.
It then builds you an image that you can run from on the phone.
I did that, and ran it off a sd card.
I'm completely unfamiliar with Alpine though, so I felt like I had no access to any additional apps, which was very frustrating.
Their build of g-edit seemed like it worked ok, but if I tried to open or save a file, the pop up window didn't scale, and I didn't have access to buttons I needed.
I looked into how to get it onto the emmc on the phone itself, and found that I would need to use the newest (alpha) edition of jumpdrive,
Apparently, the 3G phone needed a tweek to get *anything* everyone had built for the 2G phone. I couldn't get that working, so I gave up for the evening, having explored a bit in both the phosh build and the kde build of pmOS