Day three of daily driving my PinePhone Pro – 20/07/2026
Today was the big day and I had a lot of things to do. This time, I used my PinePhone Pro to navigate, which went very well. I noticed that the navigation of the GPS kept up quite well. It wasn't immediate, like you'd find on something like Google Maps on an Android phone, but it was more than usable and I was happy with it. While I was waiting at the doctors I was texting my friend using SMS. I had no issues with this and I had a decent uptime with no modem issues until later in the day (keep reading to find out more!).
Unfortunately, I did end up running into some issues today. My haptic feedback, and my sensors for proximity and light detection did not work correctly. I tried to diagnose this issue, but I did not have any luck at all. The best thing that I could do was check I2C and IIO devices in sysfs but I couldn't find anything. I ended up just rebooting device, and that ended up working. So, I'm not sure why that happened. It was quite frustrating to diagnose, and I never actually got to a conclusion.
My second big issue today was when my modem just completely stopped being able to make or receive calls. I didn't really know what to do, so I started flashing various ADSP firmwares to no avail. But, after reading many issues and forum posts online, I realized that this is a known issue with later PinePhone Pro models. What I ended up doing was finding a recovery guide for EFS on the modem distro website, which I followed and I had to put in my IMEI number back into the modem. Apparently part of this issue is that your IMEI number just straight up disappears. This took most of my afternoon to diagnose and figure out, I was swapping between a few operating systems on SD cards to make sure things were working again. I think it would be pretty rude of me to leave out what actually fixed my issue in the end in this post. Here’s the link:
https://themodemdistro.com/efs_recovery
Overall, I would consider this a pretty successful day, albeit with a lot of annoyances. I'm currently still running Mobian/Debian, but I'm also switching between Arch Linux now too. This is going pretty well, I helped Danct12 out with a callaudiod segfaulting issue, a patch has been submitted upstream to hopefully fix this issue. So far, I'm learning that not a lot of things are going to go right for me. I'm hoping that not too many other issues will plague my journey. But, it's only day 3, and I've already been plagued with some tough issues that would deter normal folk or even people with a bit of experience. So, I'm getting a bit worried now as to how many problems I will face.
It’s like 3am right now so I’m going to bed. See you on day four!
#pine64 #pinephone #pinephonepro #mobilelinux #linuxmobile #danctNIX #mobian
MDNI 
