PinePhone Pro Setup Guide for Privacy

Everybody should get a Pinephone Pro and use it to hide themselves from the cellphone network.

Your phone broadcasts 2 pieces of info: the IMEI which is tied to the phone's hardware and the IMSI which is tied to the SIM card. To change the IMSI, simply use change your SIM card every so often.

The Pinephone allows you to change this number. Here's a guide to setup the phone for this. You will need a Pinephone, a micro SD card and an adapter for your computer.

Terminology

There are 3 storage types: SPI-NOR, eMMC and the SD card.

The SPI-NOR stores the bootloader. The eMMC is internal memory for the OS. We will use the SD card to load the bootloader into the SPI-NOR.

Setup the Installer Environment

We install the OS to the pinephone using a tool called pmbootstrap, but it needs root access. So I instead made a VM with a USB passthrough and installed Manjaro Linux there.

You can do this with virt-manager, then add a new VM with the Manjaro VM and install it. Then inside Manjaro, you can install spice guest tools for more seemless integration (optional).

For the USB passthrough, I had to edit /etc/libvirt/qemu/manjaro.xml, where I added this code:

    <disk type='block' device='disk'>
      <driver name='qemu' type='raw' cache='none'/>
      <source dev='/dev/sdb'/>
      <target dev='vdb' bus='virtio'/>
      <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x07' slot='0x00' function='0x0'/>
    </disk>

(replace /dev/sdb and the other details with the relevant info you need)

Now when I boot the VM, I see a device called /dev/vdb which corresponds to my host computer's /dev/sdb.

Install pmbootstrap and we're ready to go.

Install PostmarketOS

We will install PostmarketOS with SXMO which is a tiling WM. It's quite easy to learn, just read the userguide. Don't be lazy. But if you're a normie, fine you can use Phosh instead which is just like Android.

Before starting, consult these guides:

• PostmarketOS Pinephone Pro Wiki
• Using pmbootstrap

Now connect the Pinephone Pro to your computer and put it in the mount mode (blue light), and it should appear on your computer with lsblk.

Inside the Manjaro VM, perform the install:

pmbootstrap zap
pmbootstrap init
pmbootstrap install --fde --sdcard=/dev/vdb ----cipher aes-cbc-essiv:sha256

We need the cipher option due to this bug.

Install Bootloader

Now on your normal machine, put the tow-boot installer. Download tow-boot's spi.installer.img and dd to your SD card. Follow the SPI installer instructions.

Now your phone should boot pmOS.

Tweaks

Disable suspend in System Menu -> Config -> Auto-suspend / Auto-screen-off.

Optionally install an Arch Linux chroot for access to more packages you might not have in pmOS.

IMEI Changing

Now for the juicy part of the guide.

SSH is enabled by default, so SSH in. On your phone, open a terminal and type ip a to find your IP. Then just use ssh username@XXXX. Now sudo su as root. Create this file /root/.bashrc.

alias show-imei="echo 'AT+EGMR=0,7' | atinout - /dev/EG25.AT /dev/stdout"

function _set_imei() {
    IMEI=$1
    echo "AT+EGMR=1,7,\"$IMEI\"" | atinout - /dev/EG25.AT /dev/stdout
}
# Vanity, I prefer - to _ for cmds ;)
alias set-imei=_set_imei

Now reload your shell using source ~/.bashrc. You now have the commands show-imei and set-imei XXXXX.

To get the IMEI code, we will impersonate legit devices. I scraped all the TAC code prefixes from public DBs and made a little util for that. Download it here. You simply run ./imeichanger.py and it gives you an IMEI code you can put into set-imei.

Mobile Internet + Wifi Hotspot Tethering

Put your SIM in. Now you have cellular.

To activate mobile internet, you need to add your GSM. Do this in System Menu -> Add a GSM Network. You can find the details online here or if not listed there just on Google. Usually your phone provider will even send you the details via SMS.

OK now you have mobile internet. Making the Wifi hotspot tether is super easy. Just go in System Menu -> Networks -> Add a Wifi Hotspot and enter the hotspot details.

Finally whenever you want to put your phone in "airplane mode", just go to System Menu -> Networks -> Disable GSM.

Final Tips and Tricks

You may want to configure or disable the firewall.

SSH comes preconfigured but you might want to disable password logins.

Received SMS are stored in ~/.local/share/sxmo/modem/ as text files so you can read them comfy from your computer with SSH.

Pipewire is installed native. You can even install a node editor like qpwgraph so you can pipe audio to multiple audio devices simultaneously. Cool af huh?

See the SXMO tips and tricks page on pmOS wiki.