etbe - Russell Coker

Furilabs FLX1s

The Aim

I have just got a Furilabs FLX1s [1] which is a phone running a modified version of Debian. I want to have a phone that runs all apps that I control and can observe and debug. Android is very good for what it does and there are security focused forks of Android which have a lot of potential, but for my use a Debian phone is what I want.

The FLX1s is not going to be my ideal phone, I am evaluating it for use as a daily-driver until a phone that meets my ideal criteria is built. In this post I aim to provide information to potential users about what it can do, how it does it, and how to get the basic functions working. I also evaluate how well it meets my usage criteria.

I am not anywhere near an average user. I don’t think an average user would ever even see one unless a more technical relative showed one to them. So while this phone could be used by an average user I am not evaluating it on that basis. But of course the features of the GUI that make a phone usable for an average user will allow a developer to rapidly get past the beginning stages and into more complex stuff.

Features

The Furilabs FLX1s [1] is a phone that is designed to run FuriOS which is a slightly modified version of Debian. The purpose of this is to run Debian instead of Android on a phone. It has switches to disable camera, phone communication, and microphone (similar to the Librem 5) but the one to disable phone communication doesn’t turn off Wifi, the only other phone I know of with such switches is the Purism Librem 5.

It has a 720*1600 display which is only slightly better than the 720*1440 display in the Librem 5 and PinePhone Pro. This doesn’t compare well to the OnePlus 6 from early 2018 with 2280*1080 or the Note9 from late 2018 with 2960*1440 – which are both phones that I’ve run Debian on. The current price is $US499 which isn’t that good when compared to the latest Google Pixel series, a Pixel 10 costs $US649 and has a 2424*1080 display and it also has 12G of RAM while the FLX1s only has 8G. Another annoying thing is how rounded the corners are, it seems that round corners that cut off the content are a standard practice nowadays, in my collection of phones the latest one I found with hard right angles on the display was a Huawei Mate 10 Pro which was released in 2017. The corners are rounder than the Note 9, this annoys me because the screen is not high resolution by today’s standards so losing the corners matters.

The default installation is Phosh (the GNOME shell for phones) and it is very well configured. Based on my experience with older phone users I think I could give a phone with this configuration to a relative in the 70+ age range who has minimal computer knowledge and they would be happy with it. Additionally I could set it up to allow ssh login and instead of going through the phone support thing of trying to describe every GUI setting to click on based on a web page describing menus for the version of Android they are running I could just ssh in and run diff on the .config directory to find out what they changed. Furilabs have done a very good job of setting up the default configuration, while Debian developers deserve a lot of credit for packaging the apps the Furilabs people have chosen a good set of default apps to install to get it going and appear to have made some noteworthy changes to some of them.

Droidian

The OS is based on Android drivers (using the same techniques as Droidian [2]) and the storage device has the huge number of partitions you expect from Android as well as a 110G Ext4 filesystem for the main OS.

The first issue with the Droidian approach of using an Android kernel and containers for user space code to deal with drivers is that it doesn’t work that well. There are 3 D state processes (uninterrupteable sleep – which usually means a kernel bug if the process remains in that state) after booting and doing nothing special. My tests running Droidian on the Note 9 also had D state processes, in this case they are D state kernel threads (I can’t remember if the Note 9 had regular processes or kernel threads stuck in D state). It is possible for a system to have full functionality in spite of some kernel threads in D state but generally it’s a symptom of things not working as well as you would hope.

The design of Droidian is inherently fragile. You use a kernel and user space code from Android and then use Debian for the rest. You can’t do everything the Android way (with the full OS updates etc) and you also can’t do everything the Debian way. The TOW Boot functionality in the PinePhone Pro is really handy for recovery [3], it allows the internal storage to be accessed as a USB mass storage device. The full Android setup with ADB has some OK options for recovery, but part Android and part Debian has less options. While it probably is technically possible to do the same things in regard to OS repair and reinstall the fact that it’s different from most other devices means that fixes can’t be done in the same way.

Applications

GUI

The system uses Phosh and Phoc, the GNOME system for handheld devices. It’s a very different UI from Android, I prefer Android but it is usable with Phosh.

IM

Chatty works well for Jabber (XMPP) in my tests. It supports Matrix which I didn’t test because I don’t desire the same program doing Matrix and Jabber and because Matrix is a heavy protocol which establishes new security keys for each login so I don’t want to keep logging in on new applications.

Chatty also does SMS but I couldn’t test that without the SIM caddy.

I use Nheko for Matrix which has worked very well for me on desktops and laptops running Debian.

Email

I am currently using Geary for email. It works reasonably well but is lacking proper management of folders, so I can’t just subscribe to the important email on my phone so that bandwidth isn’t wasted on less important email (there is a GNOME gitlab issue about this – see the Debian Wiki page about Mobile apps [4]).

Music

Music playing isn’t a noteworthy thing for a desktop or laptop, but a good music player is important for phone use. The Lollypop music player generally does everything you expect along with support for all the encoding formats including FLAC0 – a major limitation of most Android music players seems to be lack of support for some of the common encoding formats. Lollypop has it’s controls for pause/play and going forward and backward one track on the lock screen.

Maps

The installed map program is gnome-maps which works reasonably well. It gets directions via the Graphhopper API [5]. One thing we really need is a FOSS replacement for Graphhopper in GNOME Maps.

Delivery and Unboxing

I received my FLX1s on the 13th of Jan [1]. I had paid for it on the 16th of Oct but hadn’t received the email with the confirmation link so the order had been put on hold. But after I contacted support about that on the 5th of Jan they rapidly got it to me which was good. They also gave me a free case and screen protector to apologise, I don’t usually use screen protectors but in this case it might be useful as the edges of the case don’t even extend 0.5mm above the screen. So if it falls face down the case won’t help much.

When I got it there was an open space at the bottom where the caddy for SIMs is supposed to be. So I couldn’t immediately test VoLTE functionality. The contact form on their web site wasn’t working when I tried to report that and the email for support was bouncing.

Bluetooth

As a test of Bluetooth I connected it to my Nissan LEAF which worked well for playing music and I connected it to several Bluetooth headphones. My Thinkpad running Debian/Trixie doesn’t connect to the LEAF and to headphones which have worked on previous laptops running Debian and Ubuntu. A friend’s laptop running Debian/Trixie also wouldn’t connect to the LEAF so I suspect a bug in Trixie, I need to spend more time investigating this.

Wifi

Currently 5GHz wifi doesn’t work, this is a software bug that the Furilabs people are working on. 2.4GHz wifi works fine. I haven’t tested running a hotspot due to being unable to get 4G working as they haven’t yet shipped me the SIM caddy.

Docking

This phone doesn’t support DP Alt-mode or Thunderbolt docking so it can’t drive an external monitor. This is disappointing, Samsung phones and tablets have supported such things since long before USB-C was invented. Samsung DeX is quite handy for Android devices and that type feature is much more useful on a device running Debian than on an Android device.

Camera

The camera works reasonably well on the FLX1s. Until recently for the Librem 5 the camera didn’t work and the camera on my PinePhone Pro currently doesn’t work. Here are samples of the regular camera and the selfie camera on the FLX1s and the Note 9. I think this shows that the camera is pretty decent. The selfie looks better and the front camera is worse for the relatively close photo of a laptop screen – taking photos of computer screens is an important part of my work but I can probably work around that.

I wasn’t assessing this camera t find out if it’s great, just to find out if I have the sorts of problems I had before and it just worked. The Samsung Galaxy Note series of phones has always had decent specs including good cameras. Even though the Note 9 is old comparing to it is a respectable performance. The lighting was poor for all photos.

FLX1s

Note 9

Power Use

In 93 minutes having the PinePhone Pro, Librem 5, and FLX1s online with open ssh sessions from my workstation the PinePhone Pro went from 100% battery to 26%, the Librem 5 went from 95% to 69%, and the FLX1s went from 100% to 99%. The battery discharge rate of them was reported as 3.0W, 2.6W, and 0.39W respectively. Based on having a 16.7Wh battery 93 minutes of use should have been close to 4% battery use, but in any case all measurements make it clear that the FLX1s will have a much longer battery life. Including the measurement of just putting my fingers on the phones and feeling the temperature (FLX1s felt cool and the others felt hot).

The PinePhone Pro and the Librem 5 have an optional “Caffeine mode” which I enabled for this test, without that enabled the phone goes into a sleep state and disconnects from Wifi. So those phones would use much less power with caffeine mode enabled, but they also couldn’t get fast response to notifications etc. I found the option to enable a Caffeine mode switch on the FLX1s but the power use was reported as being the same both with and without it.

Charging

One problem I found with my phone is that in every case it takes 22 seconds to negotiate power. Even when using straight USB charging (no BC or PD) it doesn’t draw any current for 22 seconds. When I connect it it will stay at 5V and varying between 0W and 0.1W (current rounded off to zero) for 22 seconds or so and then start charging. After the 22 second display the phone will make the tick sound indicating that it’s charging and the power meter will measure that it’s drawing some current.

I added the table from my previous post about phone charging speed [6] with an extra row for the FLX1s. For charging from my PC USB ports the results were the worst ever, the port that does BC did not work at all it was looping trying to negotiate after a 22 second negotiation delay the port would turn off. The non-BC port gave only 2.4W which matches the 2.5W given by the spec for a “High-power device” which is what that port is designed to give. In a discussion on the Purism forum about the Librem5 charging speed one of their engineers told me that the reason why their phone would draw 2A from that port was because the cable was identifying itself as a USB-C port not a “High-power device” port. But for some reason out of the 7 phones I tested the FLX1s and the One Plus 6 are the only ones to limit themselves to what the port is apparently supposed to do. Also the One Plus 6 charges slowly on every power supply so I don’t know if it is obeying the spec or just sucking.

On a cheap AliExpress charger the FLX1s gets 5.9V and on a USB battery it gets 5.8V. Out of all 42 combinations of device and charger I tested these were the only ones to involve more than 5.1V but less than 9V. I welcome comments suggesting an explanation.

The case that I received has a hole for the USB-C connector that isn’t wide enough for the plastic surrounds on most of my USB-C cables (including the Dell dock). Also to make a connection requires a fairly deep insertion (deeper than the One Plus 6 or the Note 9). So without adjustment I have to take the case off to charge it. It’s no big deal to adjust the hole (I have done it with other cases) but it’s an annoyance.

Phone	Top z640	Bottom Z640	Monitor	Ali Charger	Dell Dock	Battery	Best	Worst
FLX1s	FAIL	5.0V 0.49A 2.4W	4.8V 1.9A 9.0W	5.9V 1.8A 11W	4.8V 2.1A 10W	5.8V 2.1A 12W	5.8V 2.1A 12W	5.0V 0.49A 2.4W
Note9	4.8V 1.0A 5.2W	4.8V 1.6A 7.5W	4.9V 2.0A 9.5W	5.1V 1.9A 9.7W	4.8V 2.1A 10W	5.1V 2.1A 10W	5.1V 2.1A 10W	4.8V 1.0A 5.2W
Pixel 7 pro	4.9V 0.80A 4.2W	4.8V 1.2A 5.9W	9.1V 1.3A 12W	9.1V 1.2A 11W	4.9V 1.8A 8.7W	9.0V 1.3A 12W	9.1V 1.3A 12W	4.9V 0.80A 4.2W
Pixel 8	4.7V 1.2A 5.4W	4.7V 1.5A 7.2W	8.9V 2.1A 19W	9.1V 2.7A 24W	4.8V 2.3A 11.0W	9.1V 2.6A 24W	9.1V 2.7A 24W	4.7V 1.2A 5.4W
PPP	4.7V 1.2A 6.0W	4.8V 1.3A 6.8W	4.9V 1.4A 6.6W	5.0V 1.2A 5.8W	4.9V 1.4A 5.9W	5.1V 1.2A 6.3W	4.8V 1.3A 6.8W	5.0V 1.2A 5.8W
Librem 5	4.4V 1.5A 6.7W	4.6V 2.0A 9.2W	4.8V 2.4A 11.2W	12V 0.48A 5.8W	5.0V 0.56A 2.7W	5.1V 2.0A 10W	4.8V 2.4A 11.2W	5.0V 0.56A 2.7W
OnePlus6	5.0V 0.51A 2.5W	5.0V 0.50A 2.5W	5.0V 0.81A 4.0W	5.0V 0.75A 3.7W	5.0V 0.77A 3.7W	5.0V 0.77A 3.9W	5.0V 0.81A 4.0W	5.0V 0.50A 2.5W
Best	4.4V 1.5A 6.7W	4.6V 2.0A 9.2W	8.9V 2.1A 19W	9.1V 2.7A 24W	4.8V 2.3A 11.0W	9.1V 2.6A 24W

Conclusion

The Furilabs support people are friendly and enthusiastic but my customer experience wasn’t ideal. It was good that they could quickly respond to my missing order status and the missing SIM caddy (which I still haven’t received but believe is in the mail) but it would be better if such things just didn’t happen.

The phone is quite user friendly and could be used by a novice.

I paid $US577 for the FLX1s which is $AU863 by today’s exchange rates. For comparison I could get a refurbished Pixel 9 Pro Fold for $891 from Kogan (the major Australian mail-order company for technology) or a refurbished Pixel 9 Pro XL for $842. The Pixel 9 series has security support until 2031 which is probably longer than you can expect a phone to be used without being broken. So a phone with a much higher resolution screen that’s only one generation behind the latest high end phones and is refurbished will cost less. For a brand new phone a Pixel 8 Pro which has security updates until 2030 costs $874 and a Pixel 9A which has security updates until 2032 costs $861.

Doing what the Furilabs people have done is not a small project. It’s a significant amount of work and the prices of their products need to cover that. I’m not saying that the prices are bad, just that economies of scale and the large quantity of older stock makes the older Google products quite good value for money. The new Pixel phones of the latest models are unreasonably expensive. The Pixel 10 is selling new from Google for $AU1,149 which I consider a ridiculous price that I would not pay given the market for used phones etc. If I had a choice of $1,149 or a “feature phone” I’d pay $1,149. But the FLX1s for $863 is a much better option for me. If all I had to choose from was a new Pixel 10 or a FLX1s for my parents I’d get them the FLX1s.

For a FOSS developer a FLX1s could be a mobile test and development system which could be lent to a relative when their main phone breaks and the replacement is on order. It seems to be fit for use as a commodity phone. Note that I give this review on the assumption that SMS and VoLTE will just work, I haven’t tested them yet.

The UI on the FLX1s is functional and easy enough for a new user while allowing an advanced user to do the things they desire. I prefer the Android style and the Plasma Mobile style is closer to Android than Phosh is, but changing it is something I can do later. Generally I think that the differences between UIs matter more when on a desktop environment that could be used for more complex tasks than on a phone which limits what can be done by the size of the screen.

I am comparing the FLX1s to Android phones on the basis of what technology is available. But most people who would consider buying this phone will compare it to the PinePhone Pro and the Librem 5 as they have similar uses. The FLX1s beats both those phones handily in terms of battery life and of having everything just work. But it has the most non free software of the three and the people who want the $2000 Librem 5 that’s entirely made in the US won’t want the FLX1s.

This isn’t the destination for Debian based phones, but it’s a good step on the way to it and I don’t think I’ll regret this purchase.

Terminal Emulator Security

I just read this informative article on ANSI terminal security [1]. The author has written a tool named vt-houdini for testing for these issues [2]. They used to host an instance on their server but appear to have stopped it. When you run that tool you can ssh to the system in question and without needing a password you are connected and the server probes your terminal emulator for vulnerabilities. The versions of Kitty and Konsole in Debian/Trixie have just passed those tests on my system.

This will always be a potential security problem due to the purpose of a terminal emulator. A terminal emulator will often display untrusted data and often data which is known to come from hostile sources (EG logs of attempted attacks). So what could be done in this regard?

Memory Protection

Due to the complexity of terminal emulation there is the possibility of buffer overflows and other memory management issues that could be used to compromise the emulator.

The Fil-C compiler is an interesting project [3], it compiles existing C/C++ code with memory checks. It is reported to have no noticeable impact on the performance of the bash shell which sounds like a useful option to address some of these issues as shell security issues are connected to terminal security issues. The performance impact on a terminal emulator would be likely to be more noticeable. Also note that Fil-C compilation apparently requires compiling all libraries with it, this isn’t a problem for bash as the only libraries it uses nowadays are libtinfo and libc. The kitty terminal emulator doesn’t have many libraries but libpython is one of them, it’s an essential part of Kitty and it is a complex library to compile in a different way. Konsole has about 160 libraries and it isn’t plausible to recompile so many libraries at this time.

Choosing a terminal emulator that has a simpler design might help in this regard. Emulators that call libraries for 3D effects etc and native support for displaying in-line graphics have a much greater attack surface.

Access Control

A terminal emulator could be run in a container to prevent it from doing any damage if it is compromised. But the terminal emulator will have full control over the shell it runs and if the shell has access needed to allow commands like scp/rsync to do what is expected of them then that means that no useful level of containment is possible.

It would be possible to run a terminal emulator in a container for the purpose of connecting to an insecure or hostile system and not allow scp/rsync to/from any directory other than /tmp (or other directories to use for sharing files). You could run “exec ssh $SERVER” so the terminal emulator session ends when the ssh connection ends.

Conclusion

There aren’t good solutions to the problems of terminal emulation security. But testing every terminal emulator with vt-houdini and fuzzing the popular ones would be a good start.

Qubes level isolation will help things in some situations, but if you need to connect to a server with privileged access to read log files containing potentially hostile data (which is a common sysadmin use case) then there aren’t good options.

LEAF ZE1 After 6 Months

About 6 months ago I got a Nissan LEAF ZE1 (2019 model) [1]. Generally it’s going well and I’m happy with most things about it.

One issue is that as there isn’t a lot of weight in the front with the batteries in the centre of the car the front wheels slip easily when accelerating. It’s a minor thing but a good reason for wanting AWD in an electric car.

When I got the car I got two charging devices, the one to charge from a regular 240V 10A power point (often referred to as a “granny charger”) and a cable with a special EV charging connector on each end. The cable with an EV connector on each end is designed for charging that’s faster than the “granny charger” but not as fast as the rapid chargers which have the cable connected to the supply so the cable temperature can be monitored and/or controlled. That cable can be used if you get a fast charger setup at your home (which I never plan to do) and apparently at some small hotels and other places with home-style EV charging. I’m considering just selling that cable on ebay as I don’t think I have any need to personally own a cable other than the “granny charger”.

The key fob for the LEAF has a battery installed, it’s either CR2032 or CR2025 – mine has CR2025. Some reports on the Internet suggest that you can stuff a CR2032 battery in anyway but that didn’t work for me as the thickness of the battery stopped some of the contacts from making a good connection. I think I could have got it going by putting some metal in between but the batteries aren’t expensive enough to make it worth the effort and risk. It would be nice if I could use batteries from my stockpile of CR2032 batteries that came from old PCs but I can afford to spend a few dollars on it.

My driveway is short and if I left the charger out it would be visible from the street and at risk of being stolen. I’m thinking of chaining the charger to a tree and having some sort of waterproof enclosure for it so I don’t have to go to the effort of taking it out of the boot every time I use it. Then I could also configure the car to only charge during the peak sunlight hours when the solar power my home feeds into the grid has a negative price (we have so much solar power that it’s causing grid problems).

The cruise control is a pain to use, so much so that I haven’t yet got it to work usefully ever. The features look good in the documentation but in practice it’s not as good as the Kia one I’ve used previously where I could just press one button to turn it on, another button to set the current speed as the cruise control speed, and then just have it work.

The electronic compass built in to the dash turned out to be surprisingly useful. I regret not gluing a compass to the dash of previous cars. One example is when I start google navigation for a journey and it says “go South on street X” and I need to know which direction is South so I don’t start in the wrong direction. Another example is when I know that I’m North of a major road that I need to take to get to my destination so I just need to go roughly South and that is enough to get me to a road I recognise.

In the past when there is a bird in the way I don’t do anything different, I keep driving at the same speed and rely on the bird to see me and move out of the way. Birds have faster reactions than humans and have evolved to move at the speeds cars travel on all roads other than freeways, also birds that are on roads are usually ones that have an eye in each side of their head so they can’t not see my car approaching. For decades this has worked, but recently a bird just stood on the road and got squashed. So I guess that I should honk when there’s birds on the road.

Generally everything about the car is fine and I’m happy to keep driving it.

[1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2025/05/27/leaf-ze1/

Phone Charging Speeds With Debian/Trixie

One of the problems I encountered with the PinePhone Pro (PPP) when I tried using it as a daily driver [1] was the charge speed, both slow charging and a bad ratio of charge speed to discharge speed. I also tried using a One Plus 6 (OP6) which had a better charge speed and battery life but I never got VoLTE to work [2] and VoLTE is a requirement for use in Australia and an increasing number of other countries. In my tests with the Librem 5 from Purism I had similar issues with charge speed [3].

What I want to do is get an acceptable ratio of charge time to use time for a free software phone. I don’t necessarily object to a phone that can’t last an 8 hour day on a charge, but I can’t use a phone that needs to be on charge for 4 hours during the day. For this part I’m testing the charge speed and will test the discharge speed when I have solved some issues with excessive CPU use.

I tested with a cheap USB power monitoring device that is inline between the power cable and the phone. The device has no method of export so I just watched it and when the numbers fluctuated I tried to estimate the average. I only give the results to two significant digits which is about all the accuracy that is available, as I copied the numbers separately the V*A might not exactly equal the W. I idly considered rounding off Voltages to the nearest Volt and current to the half amp but the way the PC USB ports have voltage drop at higher currents is interesting.

This post should be useful for people who want to try out FOSS phones but don’t want to buy the range of phones and chargers that I have bought.

Phones Tested

I have seen claims about improvements with charging speed on the Librem 5 with recent updates so I decided to compare a number of phones running Debian/Trixie as well as some Android phones. I’m comparing an old Samsung phone (which I tried running Droidian on but is now on Android) and a couple of Pixel phones with the three phones that I currently have running Debian for charging.

Chargers Tested

HP Z640

The Librem 5 had problems with charging on a port on the HP ML110 Gen9 I was using as a workstation. I have sold the ML110 and can’t repeat that exact test but I tested on the HP z640 that I use now. The z640 is a much better workstation (quieter and better support for audio and other desktop features) and is also sold as a workstation.

The z640 documentation says that of the front USB ports the top one can do “fast charge (up to 1.5A)” with “USB Battery Charging Specification 1.2”. The only phone that would draw 1.5A on that port was the Librem 5 but the computer would only supply 4.4V at that current which is poor. For every phone I tested the bottom port on the front (which apparently doesn’t have USB-BC or USB-PD) charged at least as fast as the top port and every phone other than the OP6 charged faster on the bottom port. The Librem 5 also had the fastest charge rate on the bottom port. So the rumours about the Librem 5 being updated to address the charge speed on PC ports seem to be correct.

The Wikipedia page about USB Hardware says that the only way to get more than 1.5A from a USB port while operating within specifications is via USB-PD so as USB 3.0 ports the bottom 3 ports should be limited to 5V at 0.9A for 4.5W. The Librem 5 takes 2.0A and the voltage drops to 4.6V so that gives 9.2W. This shows that the z640 doesn’t correctly limit power output and the Librem 5 will also take considerably more power than the specs allow. It would be really interesting to get a powerful PSU and see how much power a Librem 5 will take without negotiating USB-PD and it would also be interesting to see what happens when you short circuit a USB port in a HP z640. But I recommend not doing such tests on hardware you plan to keep using!

Of the phones I tested the only one that was within specifications on the bottom port of the z640 was the OP6. I think that is more about it just charging slowly in every test than conforming to specs.

Monitor

The next test target is my 5120*2160 Kogan monitor with a USB-C port [4]. This worked quite well and apart from being a few percent slower on the PPP it outperformed the PC ports for every device due to using USB-PD (the only way to get more than 5V) and due to just having a more powerful PSU that doesn’t have a voltage drop when more than 1A is drawn.

Ali Charger

The Ali Charger is a device that I bought from AliExpress is a 240W GaN charger supporting multiple USB-PD devices. I tested with the top USB-C port that can supply 100W to laptops.

The Librem 5 has charging going off repeatedly on the Ali charger and doesn’t charge properly. It’s also the only charger for which the Librem 5 requests a higher voltage than 5V, so it seems that the Librem 5 has some issues with USB-PD. It would be interesting to know why this problem happens, but I expect that a USB signal debugger is needed to find that out. On AliExpress USB 2.0 sniffers go for about $50 each and with a quick search I couldn’t see a USB 3.x or USB-C sniffer. So I’m not going to spend my own money on a sniffer, but if anyone in Melbourne Australia owns a sniffer and wants to visit me and try it out then let me know. I’ll also bring it to Everything Open 2026.

Generally the Ali charger was about the best charger from my collection apart from the case of the Librem 5.

Dell Dock

I got a number of free Dell WD15 (aka K17A) USB-C powered docks as they are obsolete. They have VGA ports among other connections and for the HDMI and DisplayPort ports it doesn’t support resolutions higher than FullHD if both ports are in use or 4K if a single port is in use. The resolutions aren’t directly relevant to the charging but it does indicate the age of the design.

The Dell dock seems to not support any voltages other than 5V for phones and 19V (20V requested) for laptops. Certainly not the 9V requested by the Pixel 7 Pro and Pixel 8 phones. I wonder if not supporting most fast charging speeds for phones was part of the reason why other people didn’t want those docks and I got some for free. I hope that the newer Dell docks support 9V, a phone running Samsung Dex will display 4K output on a Dell dock and can productively use a keyboard and mouse. Getting equivalent functionality to Dex working properly on Debian phones is something I’m interested in.

Battery

The “Battery” I tested with is a Chinese battery for charging phones and laptops, it’s allegedly capable of 67W USB-PD supply but so far all I’ve seen it supply is 20V 2.5A for my laptop. I bought the 67W battery just in case I need it for other laptops in future, the Thinkpad X1 Carbon I’m using now will charge from a 30W battery.

There seems to be an overall trend of the most shonky devices giving the best charging speeds. Dell and HP make quality gear although my tests show that some HP ports exceed specs. Kogan doesn’t make monitors, they just put their brand on something cheap. Buying one of the cheapest chargers from AliExpress and one of the cheaper batteries from China I don’t expect the highest quality and I am slightly relieved to have done enough tests with both of those that a fire now seems extremely unlikely. But it seems that the battery is one of the fastest charging devices I own and with the exception of the Librem 5 (which charges slowly on all ports and unreliably on several ports) the Ali charger is also one of the fastest ones. The Kogan monitor isn’t far behind.

Conclusion

Voltage and Age

The Samsung Galaxy Note 9 was released in 2018 as was the OP6. The PPP was first released in 2022 and the Librem 5 was first released in 2020, but I think they are both at a similar technology level to the Note 9 and OP6 as the companies that specialise in phones have a pipeline for bringing new features to market.

The Pixel phones are newer and support USB-PD voltage selection while the other phones either don’t support USB-PD or support it but only want 5V. Apart from the Librem 5 which wants a higher voltage but runs it at a low current and repeatedly disconnects.

Idle Power

One of the major problems I had in the past which prevented me from using a Debian phone as my daily driver is the ratio of idle power use to charging power. Now that the phones seem to charge faster if I can get the idle power use under control then it will be usable.

Currently the Librem 5 running Trixie is using 6% CPU time (24% of a core) while idle and the screen is off (but “Caffeine” mode is enabled so no deep sleep). On the PPP the CPU use varies from about 2% and 20% (12% to 120% of one core), this was mainly plasmashell and kwin_wayland. The OP6 has idle CPU use a bit under 1% CPU time which means a bit under 8% of one core.

The Librem 5 and PPP seem to have configuration issues with KDE Mobile and Pipewire that result in needless CPU use. With those issues addressed I might be able to make a Librem 5 or PPP a usable phone if I have a battery to charge it.

The OP6 is an interesting point of comparison as a Debian phone but is not a viable option as a daily driver due to problems with VoLTE and also some instability – it sometimes crashes or drops off Wifi.

The Librem 5 charges at 9.2W from a a PC that doesn’t obey specs and 10W from a battery. That’s a reasonable charge rate and the fact that it can request 12V (unsuccessfully) opens the possibility to potential higher charge rates in future. That could allow a reasonable ratio of charge time to use time.

The PPP has lower charging speeds then the Librem 5 but works more consistently as there was no charger I found that wouldn’t work well with it. This is useful for the common case of charging from a random device in the office. But the fact that the Librem 5 takes 10W from the battery while the PPP only takes 6.3W would be an issue if using the phone while charging.

Now I know the charge rates for different scenarios I can work on getting the phones to use significantly less power than that on average.

Specifics for a Usable Phone

The 57W battery or something equivalent is something I think I will always need to have around when using a PPP or Librem 5 as a daily driver.

The ability to charge fast while at a desk is also an important criteria. The charge speed of my home PC is good in that regard and the charge speed of my monitor is even better. Getting something equivalent at a desktop of an office I work in is a possibility.

Improving the Debian distribution for phones is necessary. That’s something I plan to work on although the code is complex and in many cases I’ll have to just file upstream bug reports.

I have also ordered a FuriLabs FLX1s [5] which I believe will be better in some ways. I will blog about it when it arrives.

Phone	Top z640	Bottom Z640	Monitor	Ali Charger	Dell Dock	Battery	Best	Worst
Note9	4.8V 1.0A 5.2W	4.8V 1.6A 7.5W	4.9V 2.0A 9.5W	5.1V 1.9A 9.7W	4.8V 2.1A 10W	5.1V 2.1A 10W	5.1V 2.1A 10W	4.8V 1.0A 5.2W
Pixel 7 pro	4.9V 0.80A 4.2W	4.8V 1.2A 5.9W	9.1V 1.3A 12W	9.1V 1.2A 11W	4.9V 1.8A 8.7W	9.0V 1.3A 12W	9.1V 1.3A 12W	4.9V 0.80A 4.2W
Pixel 8	4.7V 1.2A 5.4W	4.7V 1.5A 7.2W	8.9V 2.1A 19W	9.1V 2.7A 24W	4.8V 2.3A 11.0W	9.1V 2.6A 24W	9.1V 2.7A 24W	4.7V 1.2A 5.4W
PPP	4.7V 1.2A 6.0W	4.8V 1.3A 6.8W	4.9V 1.4A 6.6W	5.0V 1.2A 5.8W	4.9V 1.4A 5.9W	5.1V 1.2A 6.3W	4.8V 1.3A 6.8W	5.0V 1.2A 5.8W
Librem 5	4.4V 1.5A 6.7W	4.6V 2.0A 9.2W	4.8V 2.4A 11.2W	12V 0.48A 5.8W	5.0V 0.56A 2.7W	5.1V 2.0A 10W	4.8V 2.4A 11.2W	5.0V 0.56A 2.7W
OnePlus6	5.0V 0.51A 2.5W	5.0V 0.50A 2.5W	5.0V 0.81A 4.0W	5.0V 0.75A 3.7W	5.0V 0.77A 3.7W	5.0V 0.77A 3.9W	5.0V 0.81A 4.0W	5.0V 0.50A 2.5W
Best	4.4V 1.5A 6.7W	4.6V 2.0A 9.2W	8.9V 2.1A 19W	9.1V 2.7A 24W	4.8V 2.3A 11.0W	9.1V 2.6A 24W

Samsung 65″ QN900C 8K TV

As a follow up from my last post about my 8K TV [1] I tested out a Samsung 65″ QN900C Neo QLED 8K that’s on sale in JB Hifi. According to the JB employee I spoke to they are running out the last 8K TVs and have no plans to get more.

In my testing of that 8K TV YouTube had a 3840*2160 viewport which is better than the 1920*1080 of my Hisense TV. When running a web browser the codeshack page reported it as 1920*1080 with a 1.25* pixel density (presumably a configuration option) that gave a usable resolution of 1536*749.

The JB Hifi employee wouldn’t let me connect my own device via HDMI but said that it would work at 8K. I said “so if I buy it I can return it if it doesn’t do 8K HDMI?” and then he looked up the specs and found that it would only do 4K input on HDMI. It seems that actual 8K resolution might work on a Samsung streaming device but that’s not very useful particularly as there probably isn’t much 8K content on any streaming service.

Basically that Samsung allegedly 8K TV only works at 4K at best.

It seems to be impossible to buy an 8K TV or monitor in Australia that will actually display 8K content. ASUS has a 6K 32″ monitor with 6016*3384 resolution for $2016 [2]. When counting for inflation $2016 wouldn’t be the most expensive monitor I’ve ever bought and hopefully prices will continue to drop.

Rumour has it that there are 8K TVs available in China that actually take 8K input. Getting one to Australia might not be easy but it’s something that I will investigate.

Also I’m trying to sell my allegedly 8K TV.

Links December 2025

Russ Allbery wrote an interesting review of Politics on the Edge, by Rory Stewart who sems like one of the few conservative politicians I could respect and possibly even like [1]. It has some good insights about the problems with our current political environment.

The NY Times has an amusing article about the attempt to sell the solution to the CIA’s encrypted artwork [2].

Wired has an interesting article about computer face recognition systems failing on people with facial disabilities or scars [3]. This is a major accessibility issue potentially violating disability legislation and a demonstration of the problems of fully automating systems when there should be a human in the loop.

The October 2025 report from the Debian Reproducible Builds team is particularly interesting [4]. “kpcyrd forwarded a fascinating tidbit regarding so-called ninja and samurai build ordering, that uses data structures in which the pointer values returned from malloc are used to determine some order of execution” LOL

Louis Rossmann made an insightful youtube video about the moral case for piracy of software and media [5].

Louis Rossman made an insightful video about the way that Hyundai is circumventing Right to Repair laws to make repairs needlessly expensive [6]. Korean cars aren’t much good nowadays. Their prices keep increasing and the quality doesn’t.

Brian Krebs wrote an interesting article about how Google is taking legal action against SMS phishing crime groups [7]. We need more of this!

Josh Griffiths wrote an informative blog post about how YouTube is awful [8]. I really should investigate Peertube.

Louis Rossman made an informative YouTube video about Right to Repair and the US military, if even the US military is getting ripped off by this it’s a bigger problem than most people realise [9]. He also asks the rhetorical question of whether politicians are bought or whether it’s a “subscription model”.

Brian Krebs wrote an informative article about the US plans to ban TP Link devices, OpenWRT seems like a good option [10].

Brian Krebs wrote an informative article about “free streaming” Android TV boxes that act as hidden residential VPN proxies [11]. Also the “free streaming” violates copyright law.

Bruce Schneier and Nathan E. Sanders wrote an interesting article about ways that AI is being used to strengthen democracy [12].

Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article about the incentives for making shitty goods and services and why we need legislation to protect consumers [13].

Linus Tech Tips has an interesting interview with Linus Torvalds [14].

Interesting video about the Kowloon Walled City [15]. It would be nice if a government deliberately created a hive city like that, the only example I know of is the Alaskan town in a single building.

David Brin wrote an insightful set of 3 blog posts about a Democratic American deal that could improve the situation there [16].

[1] https://tinyurl.com/2czzxp77
[2] https://tinyurl.com/22k6yo6s
[3] https://tinyurl.com/29fg9ses
[4] https://reproducible-builds.org/reports/2025-10/
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAx3yCNomkg
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv9jAQ_MiK0
[7] https://tinyurl.com/276qmbuh
[8] https://tinyurl.com/2bhp6sa2
[9] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0LmjzXV7IA
[10] https://tinyurl.com/22pgz36h
[11] https://tinyurl.com/2xveozvd
[12] https://tinyurl.com/2bjs4g2j
[13] https://tinyurl.com/2bsh3wbt
[14] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfv0V1SxbNA
[15] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoNclh1K_zY
[16] https://tinyurl.com/29opfj43

10gbit and 40gbit Home Networking

Aliexpress has a 4 port 2.5gbit switch with 2*SFP+ sockets for $34.35 delivered [1]. 4 ports isn’t very good for the more common use cases (if daisy chaining them then it’s only
2 available for devices) so this is really a device for use with 10Gbit uplink.

Aliexpress has a pair of SFP+ 10Gbit devices with 1M of copper between them for $15.79 delivered [2]. That page also offers a pair of QSFP+ 40Gbit devices with 1M of copper between them for $27.79 delivered.

They have a dual port SFP+ card for a server with two of the pairs of SFP+ 10gbit devices with copper between them for $32.51 delivered [3].

So you can get a 2.5gbit switch with two 10gbit uplink cables to nearby servers for $66.86 including postage. I don’t need this but it is tempting. I spent $93.78 to get 2.5gbit networking [4] so spending $66.86 to get part of my network to 10gbit isn’t much.

It is $99.81 including postage for a Mellanox 2*40Gbit QSFP+ card and two QSFP+ adaptors with 3M of copper between them [5]. It is $55.81 including postage for the Mellanox card without the cable. So that’s $155.62 for a point to point 40gbit link between systems that are less than 3M apart, that’s affordable for a home lab. As an aside the only NVMe I’ve tested which can deliver such speeds was in a Thinkpad and the Thinkpad entered a thermal throttling state after a few seconds of doing that.

The best price I could see for a 40Gbit switch is $1280 for a L3 Managed switch with 2*40G QSFP+ slot ports, 4*10G SFP+ ports, and 48*2.5G RJ45 ports [6]. That’s quite affordable for the SME market but a bit expensive for home users (although I’m sure that someone on r/homelab has one).

I’m not going to get 40Gbit, that’s well above what I need and while a point to point link is quite affordable I don’t have servers in that range. But I am seriously considering 10Gbit, I get paid to do enough networking stuff that having some hands on experience with 10Gbit could be useful.

For a laptop a 5gbit ethernet USB device is $29.48 including delivery which isn’t too expensive [7]. The faster ones seem to be all Thunderbolt and well over $100, which is disappointing as USB 3.2 can do up to 20Gbit. If I start doing 10gbit over ethernet I’ll get one of those USB devices for testing.

For a single server it’s cheaper and easier to get a 4 port 2.5Gbit ethernet for $55.61 [8].

PineTime Band

I’ve had a Pine Time for just over 2 years [1]. About a year ago I had a band break and replaced it from a spare PineTime and now I just had another break. Having the band only last one year isn’t that great, but it’s fortunate that the break only affects the inner layer of plastic so there is no risk of the watch suddenly falling off and being broken or lost. The Pine64 web site has a page about this with bad options, one broken link and a few Amazon items that are have ridiculous postage [2].

I started writing this post while using the band from a Colmi P80 [3]. I bought one for a relative who wanted the metal band and the way the Aliexpress seller does it is to sell the package with the plastic band and include the metal band in the package so I had a spare band. It fits quite well and none of the reported problems of the PineTime having insufficient space between the spring bar and the watch. The Colmi band in question is described as “rose gold” but is more like “pinkish beige” and doesn’t match the style of the black PineTime.

I ordered a couple of cheap bands from AliExpress which cost $9.77 and $13.55 including postage while the ones that Pine64 recommend have over $15 postage from Amazon!

The 20mm Silicone Magnetic Buckle Watch Strap Band For Huawei GT2 Smart Watch Connected Bracelet Black Watchband Man [4] cost $13.55 including postage. It has a magnetic unfold mechanism which I find a bit annoying and it doesn’t allow easily changing the length. I don’t think I’ll choose that again. But it basically works and is comfortable.

The 20mm Metal Strap for Huawei Watch GT2 3 Quick Release Stainless Steel Watch Band for Samsung Galaxy Watch Bracelet [5] cost $9.77 including postage. I found this unreasonably difficult to put on and not particularly comfortable. But opinion will vary on that, it is cheap and will appeal to some people’s style.

Conclusion

There are claims that getting a replacement band for a PineTime is difficult. My experience is that every band with a 20mm attachment works as long as it’s designed for a square watch, some of the bands are designed to partly go around a round face and wouldn’t fit. I expect that some bands won’t fit, but I don’t think that it’s enough of a problem to be worried about buying a random band from AliExpress. The incidence of bands not fitting will probably be lower than the incidence of other AliExpress products not doing quite what you want (while meeting the legal criteria of doing what they are claimed to do) and not being used.

I’m now wearing the PineTime with the “Magnetic Buckle Watch Strap Band” and plan to wear it for the next year or so.

EDID and my 8K TV

I previously blogged about buying a refurbished Hisense 65u80g 8K TV with the aim of making it a large monitor [1] and about searching for a suitable video card for 8k [2]. After writing the second post I bought an Intel Arc B580 which also did a maximum of 4096*2160 resolution.

This post covers many attempts to try and get the TV to work correctly and it doesn’t have good answers. The best answer might be to not buy Hisense devices but I still lack data.

Attempts to Force 8K

I posted on Lemmy again about this [3] and got a single response, which is OK as it was a good response. They didn’t give me the answer on a silver platter but pointed me in the right direction of EDID [4].

I installed the Debian packages read-edid, wxedid, and edid-decode.

The command “get-edid > out.edid” saves the binary form of the edid to a file. The command “wxedid out.edid” allows graphical analysis of the EDID data. The command “edid-decode out.edid” dumps a plain text representation of the output, the command “edid-decode out.edid|grep VIC|cut -d: -f2|sort -n” shows an ordered list of video modes, in my case the highest resolution is 4096×2160 which is the highest that Linux had allowed me to set with two different video cards and a selection of different cables (both HDMI and DisplayPort).

xrandr --newmode 7680x4320 1042.63  7680 7984 7760 7824  4320 4353 4323 4328
xrandr --addmode HDMI-3 7680x4320
xrandr --output HDMI-3 --mode 7680x4320

I ran the above commands and got the below error:

xrandr: Configure crtc 0 failed

At this time I don’t know how much of this is due to the video card and how much is due to the TV. The parameters for xrandr came from a LLM because I couldn’t find any Google results on what 8K parameters to use. As an aside if you have a working 8K TV or monitor connected to a computer please publish the EDID data, xrandr, and everything else you can think of.

I found a Github repository for EDID data [5] but that didn’t have an entry for my TV and didn’t appear to have any other entry for an 8K device I could use.

Resolution for Web Browsing

I installed a browser on the TV, Chrome and Firefox aren’t available for a TV and the Play Store program tells you that (but without providing a reason) when you search for them. I tried the site CodeShack What is my Screen Resolution [6] which said that my laptop is 2460*1353 while the laptop display is actually 2560*1440. So apparently I have 100 pixels used for the KDE panel at the left of the screen and 87 pixels used by the Chrome tabs and URL bar – which seems about right. My Note 9 phone reports 384*661 out of it’s 2960*1440 display so it seems that Chrome on my phone is running web sites at 4/15 of the native resolution and about 16% of the height of the screen is used by the system notification bar, the back/home/tasklist buttons (I choose buttons instead of swipe for navigation in system settings), and the URL bar when I have “Screen zoom” in system settings at 1/4. When I changed “Screen zoom” to 0/4 the claimed resolution changed to 411*717 (2/7 of the native resolution). Font size changes didn’t change the claimed resolution. The claimed “Browser Viewport Size” by CodeShack is 1280*720 which is 1/6 of the real horizontal resolution and slightly more than 1/6 of the vertical resolution, it claims that the Pixel Density is 2* and a screen resolution of 970*540 which means to imply that the browser is only working at 1920*1080 resolution!

Netflix

When I view Netflix shows using the Netflix app running on the TV is reports “4K” which doesn’t happen on Linux PCs (as they restrict 4K content to platforms with DRM) and in the “Device” setting it reports “Device Model” as “Hisense_SmartTV 8K FFM” so the Netflix app knows all about 4K content and knows the text string “8K”.

YouTube

When I view a YouTube video that’s described as being 8K I don’t get a request for paying for YouTube Premium which is apparently what happens nowadays when you try to play actual 8K video. I turn on “State for Nerds” and one line has “Viewport / Frames 1920×1080*2.00” and another has “Current / Optimal Res 3840×2160@60 / 3840×2160@60” so it seems that the YouTube app is seeing the screen as 4K but choosing to only display FullHD even when I have Quality set to “2160p60 HDR”. It declares the network speed to be over 100mbit most of the time and the lowest it gets is 60mbit while 50mbit is allegedly what’s required for 8K.

I installed a few Android apps to report hardware capabilities and they reported the screen resolution to be 1920*1080.

Have I Been Ripped Off?

It looks like I might have been ripped off by this. I can’t get any app other than Netflix to display 4K content. My PC will only connect to it at 4K. Android apps (including YouTube) regard it as 1920*1080.

The “AI Upscaling” isn’t really that great and in most ways it seems at best equivalent to a 4K TV and less than a 4K TV that runs Android apps with an actual 4K display buffer.

Next Steps

The next things I plan to do are to continue attempts to get the TV to do what it’s claimed to be capable of, either an Android app that can display 8K content or a HDMI input of 8K content will do. Running a VNC client on the TV would be an acceptable way of getting an 8K display from a Linux PC.

I need to get a somewhat portable device that can give 8K signal output. Maybe a mini PC with a powerful GPU or maybe one of those ARM boards that’s designed to drive an 8K sign. Then I can hunt for stores that have 8K TVs on display.

It would be nice if someone made a USB device that does 8K video output – NOT a USB-C DisplayPort alternative mode that uses the video hardware on the laptop. Then I could take a laptop to any place that has an 8K display to show and connect my laptop to it.

The one thing I haven’t done yet is testing 8K MP4 files on a USB stick. That’s mainly due to a lack of content and the fact that none of the phone cameras I have access to can do 8K video. I will try displaying 8K PNG and JPEG files from a USB stick.

Most people would give up about now. But I am determined to solve this and buying another large TV isn’t out of the question.

AMD Video Driver Issues

I have had some graphics hangs on my HP z640 workstation which seem to always be after about 4 days of uptime, in one instance running Debian kernel 6.16.12+deb14+1 I got the following kernel error:

kernel: amdgpu 0000:02:00.0: [drm] *ERROR* [CRTC:58:crtc-0] flip_done timed out

Then I got the following errors from kwin_wayland:

kwin_wayland_wrapper[19598]: kwin_wayland_drm: Pageflip timed out! This is a bug in the amdgpu kernel driver
kwin_wayland_wrapper[19598]: kwin_wayland_drm: Please report this at https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/amd/-/issues
kwin_wayland_wrapper[19598]: kwin_wayland_drm: With the output of 'sudo dmesg' and 'journalctl --user-unit plasma-kwin_wayland --boot 0'

In another instance running Debian kernel 6.12.48+deb13 I got the kernel errors at the bottom of the post (not in the RSS feed).

A google result suggested putting the following on the kernel command line which has the downside of increasing the idle power, but given that it’s a low power GPU (that I selected when I was using a system without a PCIe power cable) a bit of extra power use shouldn’t matter much. But it didn’t seem to change anything.

amdgpu.runpm=0 amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x10

I had tried out the Debian/Unstable kernel 6.16.12-2 which didn’t work with my USB speakers and had problems with the HDMI sound through my monitor but still had AMD GPU issues.

This all seemed to start with the PCIe errors being reported on this system [1]. So I’m now wondering if the PCIe errors were from the GPU not the socket/motherboard. The GPU in question is a Radeon RX560 4G which cost $246.75 back in about 2021 [2]. I could buy a new one of those on ebay for $149 or one of the faster AMD cards like Radeon RX570 that are around the same price. I probably have a Radeon R7 260X in my collection of spare parts that would do the job too (2G of VRAM is more than sufficient for my desktop computing needs).

Any suggestions on how I should proceed from here?

Continue reading AMD Video Driver Issues

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