!!! Major Update !!! See Below


This could possibly be a really dumb question since I am almost Pre-N00B to mobile. I've been gear lusting for a Pine64 phone and it looks like the new-ish PinePhonePro finally has hardware capable of a decent experience. It seems however that software is fairly pre-Alpha at this point since from all the reviews and videos I've seen some hardware doesn't work well or even at all with some currently available mobile distros but does work better or at all on others.

So I have a project going on now where I've bought a RockPro64 SBC to test out a lot of software with an eye towards 2 things 1) the state of distros for mobile usage and 2) an eye toward ending up as a NAS after I decide on what softwarte I want on a PinePhonePro

Having done some trials with NAS systems on an old Z77 system I quickly learned I had a LOT to learn about NAS and initially just fell back on Slackware and NFS. Fortunately that system while now allowing for networked backup to a RAID, can boot several systems so I can take my sweet 'ol time learning NAS.

So... what is, if any, people's experience with Slackware as a base for something like KDE Neon? or any other mobile DE on top?

I haven't, but there is 1 existing thread about the PinePhone:

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ne-4175695133/

I'm considering getting a PinePhone Pro. I ordered a Librem5 (back in 2018) ... ... ... ... and am still waiting on it.

Drumz beat me to it regarding the PinePhone Pro. My recommendation as well. It has a RK3399S chipset and is fairly close to the RK3399 chipset shipped with the RockPro64. My only concern would be modem (LTE) support.

As far as NAS and RockPro64's go: I use mine as a NAS to store all my files with RAID1 on two WD Black 500G disks. I also use it as my main system. I plan to get a second one that will house some SSD's using the PCIe port. I serve stuff over NFS (like you) or HTTP to my LAN, and through SSH on a OpenVPN connection to the WAN for when I am away from home.

There are issues outside the scope of slackware when it comes to mobile usage. As a base, Slack works fine assuming you can get it installed but you will run into problems of the UI/UX variety. on an x86 tablet I've run into problems adjusting the backlight and an insane amount of small bugs related to touchscreen input, OSK, and display scaling. There's a bunch of stuff in KDE that pretends to be touch ready, but really isn't.


As for KDE Neon, remember that KDE Neon is actually an ubuntu-based distribution specifically for KDE. You are probably more interested in Plasma Mobile, which is the project focusing on support for mobile platforms. There is a build of KDE Neon with plasma-mobile built in but last I checked it was completely broken.

I gave up trying to package Plasma Mobile for slackware since configuring regular plasma is suitable for my needs.

Thanks all. It looks like I should probably abandon the idea of using Slackware as a base and that's a shame. It means a steeper learning curve since, even after running quite a few systemd distros (and even rather enjoying 1 or 2) I just constantly run up against translation problems even as basic as naming conventions... same with BSD. It doesn't stop me, but it surely slows me WAY down. I guess I'm in for the long haul just trying stuff. Thanks again.

Hi enorbert,
i got a pinephone (not pro) a while ago, so i can give no insight in software/hardware state on the pro one. Mine came with Manjaro arm preinstalled with plasma-mobile as UI. At that point Plasma-Mobile was unusable for me because it used ofono instead of modemmanager for Mobile-data and that didn't work on the pinephone. So i tried Phosh with Manjaro and Mobian (Debian for Mobile) which also has Phosh as UI, and i tried PostmarketOS, on which i ended.

I don't like Phosh for estetic reasons, and for how you control it, but that's purely my taste. So i used SXMO, also on postmarketOS, for a while and now that plasma-mobile switched to modemmanager which makes it usefull xD i use it together with PostmarketOS.
SXMO is fine and snapy for the pinephone, the others aren't unbearably slow, but less glitter on SXMO makes it faster. Sadly i need Waydroid on my Phone to run Signal and Whatsapp and there's currently a bug so it's not running on sway wich is SXMO's windowmanager.
Plasma-mobile is quite nice i use it quite a while now (waydroid runs here), it once in a while hangs, but thats probably of the weak hardware. And Plasma offers a ton of really usable applications which integrate well on PostmarketOS as far as i can tell.

PostmarketOS is based on alpine linux, so it's systemd free (as to your fear you have to learn it) it uses openrc which is pretty simple i find. And PostmarketOS is a stable Release which i like more, especially for a device i rely on, than a rolling.

Also in my experience PostmarketOS was the fastest, i haven't done benchmarks, so it's pure feeling. I don't know if it's due to systemd processes running which are missing on postmarketos or if it's just an impression, but it seems PostmarketOS is pretty mature on mobile. It has not as much programms as Manjaro with the AUR, i think Mobian also offers more, but it's ok, flatpak works so no problem. And after all it's linux you can compile it the build scripts for the packages are also not to hard to get into.

greetings sunzu

Someone posted a comment on one of the Slackware ARM podcasts the other day, asking for Slackware AArch64 (ARM64) to support an android phone, and you've nicely explained why Slackware AArch64 isn't targeting such devices. I don't know if this is widely known but smart phones that run Android have heavily cutomised stack: typically a fork of the Linux kernels (often initially with no or little driver support in the mainline Kernel, and/or it takes years to upstream, and in some cases it never is), and ranging into the user space.

One of the mainline all-purpose distributions such as Slackware (Debian, Fedora, et al) tend to work more with the upstream open source versions, which in theory should absorb any hardware support over time (but even then you still may need >1 version of specific applications).

Additionally, I don't see how Slackware would be a good fit for a mobile phone - at some point you'll probably need to fsck a file system or something. Wouldn't you rather stare at an Apple logo appearing over and over as the device reboots, every time thinking to yourself: "No, it'll boot. It will. I can't fix it or pull anything off it if it doesn't, and I didn't entrust any backups to apple cloud storage. It'll boot."
Or would you rather be fumbling with your phone virtual keyboard (if even that's possible without the OS having booted - I have no idea how that'd work) trying to fsck.

It's far better IMO to use a distribution that's suited to the hardware's practical presentation (i.e. no keyboard) if you want to use the phone for real life things.
If you want to put Slackware on it because it should be there, that's a whole different thing: post a photo of Slackware running on it :-)

Thanks sunzu. I am committed to getting hardware at least as advanced as the PinePhonePro is and I'm intending to try out many operating systems and desktops on the RockPro64 before I get the phone. It would be great if Slackware was developed for mobile but it's looking like it may not for quite some time. PostMarket is on my list but I'm also interested in opensuse mobile. I'm not fond of Arch-based distros. They break too easily in my experience, and afaik, every review I've read or watched with any Arch-based distro has serious faults for some reason right in kernel drivers. For example, in every Manjaro PinePhone I've seen, the camera does not work but it does on both the original PinePhone and the Pro. Apparently Megapixels still must be stopped and re-started to get the colors right but it works on OpenSuse.

Since this is the Slackware sub-section and it looks like Slackware won't be mobile anytime soon, I'll mark this thread "solved" since wre now beginning deviation more suited to the Linux - Mobile subsection.

!!! Major Update !!! I just found a Slackware image on the Pine64 site. Will report back soon!

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Yay! Maybe the ARM subthread would be a good place to chronicle this journey.

It would be interesting if that work was contributed back toward the official Slackware Aarch64 port. Seems like more people would benefit overall.

Yup. I will be doing that fo sho. I'm already amazed at the capability of the RockPro64 at all, let alone considering size, price, and power draw. It took me awhile to figure out ARM, or at least the RockPro64, doesn't have an analog of a BIOS, at least like x86 does. I worried I had a DOA board for over a week until I got an eMMC flashed. The CPU fan didn't even spin until it had a bootable image. What was that ancient unit that loaded what passed for BIOS from floppy?... the Vic 20? Been too long... can't recall for certain.

Probably ( definitely ) off-topic but here I go anyway:

Garrett: The Freedom Phone is not great at privacy

Especially interesting is Matthew's Analysis: The Freedom Phone is not great at privacy

Anyhow ...

Just for fun.

-- kjh

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Elon Musk should start a smartphone company and give Pat a giant bag of cash so it can run Slackware. This is better than trying to buy Twitter. If this happens and kills Android during my lifetime, I'll cry a river.

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So far it doesn't appear that SLARM is only slightly mobile, in the sense that it can be installed on ARM-based tablets and laptops, but as of yet I don't see much support for Touchscreen which is important to most Mobile Phone type usage. Ultimately I intend to get the PinePhone Pro with the keyboard case so I may sidestep such issues.

I'm exploring this in 2 ways. I have an old T61P Thinkpad which has a SIM card reader and a WWAN device so apparently it can make phone calls once the SIM is activated. Activation requires Windows and obviously incurs a regular charge so that's a bit of a PITA but it just means I'll wait until all my ducks are in a row before I activate. Much of my exploration will be done on the Thinkpad because I'm more familiar with it than ARM. Then I'll try to use what I learn translated for ARM.

I'm exploring ARM on my new RockPro64 which is really great but learning what will boot and how is a bit slow so far. Currently I'm booting off eMMC but apparently that's not reliable for a lot of re-flashing, reads and writes, so I'm learning handoff booting to MicroSD first, and then SATA after. The RockPro64 has a PCIe slot and I bought an SATA card for it, so I'm gettin' there.

I'll report here briefly with SLARM experience (RockPro64 makes for a really decent SOHO Desktop system as well as NAS) but the progress, if any, with Phone application I'll keep to the Linux-Mobile sub forum.