Satellites and gnss-share PureOS and Mobian

Hardware Librem 5
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I have two relative old Librem 5’s. On the oldest one (referred to as L5-A from now), I always had difficulties getting a GPS fix. On the less old one (referred to as L5-B from now), I do sometimes get a GPS fix.

On L5-A I installed Mobian. On L5-B is PureOS Byzantium installed.
Mobian has gnss-share version: 0.8.1-1
PureOS Byzantium has gnss-share version: 0.7.1-2pureos1~byz1.1

I also installed the Satellite flatpak on both phones.

To get the Satellite flatpak working (in an rather insecure way) I did some tweaks:

On L5-A:

sudo usermod -a -G geoclue mobian

On L5-B:

sudo usermod -a -G geoclue purism

And on both phones I change in the /var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/applications/page.codeberg.tpikonen.satellite.desktop file this line:

Exec=/usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=aarch64 --command=satellite page.codeberg.tpikonen.satellite

to

Exec=/usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=aarch64 --command=satellite page.codeberg.tpikonen.satellite -s gnss-share

Here are now some screenshots:

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Left: L5-A (Mobian), right: L5-B (PureOS)

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Left: L5-A (Mobian), right: L5-B (PureOS)

Note how the L5-A, has Exxx and Cxxx statellites.

I guess that the new gnss-share provides support for Galileo and Glonass.

I’m very interested in the GNSS performance of (different hardware revisions) of the Librem 5. So I would appreciate to hear about your experiences with GNSS on the Librem 5 in relation to the L5 hardware revisions. See here and here for more information about the hardware revisions.

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See Librem 5 - Teseo-LIV3 GNSS Module reports weak carrier to noise ratio - probably HW/design problem (#252) · Issues · Librem5 / OS-issues · GitLab

and threads Librem 5 GPS/Location Tracking

where I have invested considerable time to collect information and even found who can do HW design fix and tried it. I have even negotiated with friend working at that time at ESA ESTEC that if basic information is provided we would try to use Galileo research lab equipment to help Purism. But Purism company people in charge shown misbehave and hiding information.

So I would like to have confirmed that actual models Librem-5 GNSS antenna design is performing well. I have lots hope for decent usability of my older piece and unwillingness of Purism to share real data and information turned me to consider my investment to Librem-5 project as donation which has been of value for Gnome ecosystem extension to be smoothly usable on mobile phones and interesting proof of concept for other companies but my hopes and feeling to Purism as the real community player has dropped.

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No.

  1. What you’re seeing is GPS, Galileo and BeiDou, there are no GLONASS satellites shown.

  2. The instructions at Assisted GNSS ($1207) · Snippets · GitLab enable Galileo and BeiDou and disable GLONASS. The configuration is persistent on the GNSS module, so it’s most likely that you have configured that in the past on one of the devices.

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Ah, yes, I did this once. Thanks!

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@janvlug Possibly of interest: List of Apps that fit and function well [Post them here.] - #396 by amarok

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Does this work to fix PureMaps?

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Not sure how, but I am getting Satellite coverage now…

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Didn’t do this part, but I randomly have my GPS coverage back

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Is there a viable way to get Satellite working without adding mobian user to geoclue group? There is an entry for satellite in geoclue.conf but I’ve never managed to get a GPS fix in that app. Even when it looks like I’ve received some sort of GNSS fix for Organic Maps (Only LTE/GPS, no wifi).

Also running Mobian Trixie.

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Not (yet), I think: #14 - Use polkit in the gnss-share backend - tpikonen/satellite - Codeberg.org

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For the record…

For a year I’ve been having an issue where GPS would always return that I have 7 satellites fixed and that I was apparently in the mountains in Slovakia ever since, no matter how many restarts, software upgrades, and hours spent waving my phone at the heavens and continents I’ve been with my Librem 5.

It was driving me nuts, because even if I would read straight from the GPS device (I forgot the path - but not the gnss sock file), I’d still get a perfect fix message and it would never change.

Today I am going for a drive and would really appreciate GPS working, so I decided to look into this and manually load the almanac via script on step 2, and voila, it worked!

edit: typo

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It is incredible!
I tried one more time to enable additional satellites (beidou or glonass), and now it worked! The one difference - I’m keeping PureMaps open. Looks like both flags combination work as expected :slight_smile:

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