PostmarketOS on the Oneplus 6
Somehow i always find ways to make life a bit more ... ehm ... "challenging", so after the battery on my Oneplus One running Ubuntu Touch starts now to severly degrade and only lasts for about 2 - 3 hours i had the opportunity to grab a discarded Oneplus 6.
Of course i could not simply run it with its stock android system or even Ubuntu Touch... nah, it has to be something more special. In this case: PostmarketOS, a real, complete Linux system running on a phone, this was a thought i simply could not escape ;-)
Preparation and installation
There are some options for the user interface avaiable, the most user friendly i guess would be Phosh or Plasma mobile... but hey, we are not here for the userfriendlyness, are we? We are here for engineerfriendlyness! So the obvious choice was to go with SXMO (a tiling window manager).
Following the (really good) guide in the PostmarketOS wiki i prepared the installation, unlocked the bootloader with fastboot and flashed the appropiate images. Against my inital fears everything went completely smooth and about 30 minutes after the start i was greeted by a couple of penguins, followed shortly after by the SXMO desktop.
So, what now? I connected the phone via the system menu to my wifi, added the nececcary APN info for mobile data and began to install the tools i normally have in my desktop Linux installations.
Now the little problems began
I was only able to get extremly quiet, garbled sound playing back from the build in speakers or a bit less quiet but as much garbled sound from the headphone jack whatever i tried with alsa. So what to do? I had lying around a pair of bluetooth headphones... why not try those?
Bluetooth
First i enabled the bluetooth service ("service bluetooth start"), after that i could find and pair the device via the system menu. So, but still no audio playback... after a bit of reading i found out that i had to install BlueALSA, i did so and started the regarding service ("service bluealsa start") now i tried playing back a wav file i grabbed from the net and... voila, i get audio output! Ok, now i set up the deamons to start at boot-time ("rc-update add bluetooth" "rc-update add bluealsa"). But a problem remains: The settings are not system wide... a thing i have to investigate further...
At least i could get youtube playback working by adding the bluetooth device as the default output for mpv by adding the following to my mpv.conf:
volume=20
audio-device=alsa/bluealsa
Now i was able to get good audio quality with the supplied user scripts for youtube playback.
Further problems
While mobile data works flawlessly i for now could not get audio calls to work. I did knew beforhand that this is a known issue with the Oneplus 6 but after i have read on Github that there was recent progress on this issue i have hope that this will be a solved problem soon. If not... now then there is still the option of getting a SIP client to work and use that.
Conclusion so far
Now i have a quiet powerfull Linux workstation in my pocket (the installed tools will be described in a future post when i can say if they work out for me) and a new project to tinker with. So far i am quiet happy and will at least try to get everything to work.
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