I’m setting up a small home office in Baton Rouge and need a laser printer that can handle mostly black-and-white documents, occasional envelopes, and a few longer print runs each week. I’ve been looking at Brother models because the toner seems widely available, but I’m not sure whether to prioritize a compact single-function unit or spend more on one with an automatic document feeder and duplex printing.

My main uncertainty is long-term cost and reliability. Some listings mention starter toner that doesn’t last long, and I’d rather avoid a model where replacement toner or drum units get expensive quickly. I also don’t have much desk space, so size matters, but I don’t want to give up paper capacity if it means constant refilling.

For anyone who has used a Brother laser printer in a similar small-office setup, what features ended up mattering most? Did you regret choosing a simpler model or wish you had gone with something larger?

I'm in Nashville and have been tinkering with PinePhone and PineTab projects on and off. I want to build a small companion app for a personal PineTime/PinePhone setup, mostly for logging sensor data and simple reminders, and I keep seeing no-code builders mentioned. FlutterFlow came up in some 2026 pricing discussions I found online, and the free tier plus subscription options are what I'm weighing. My concern is vendor lock-in and whether a no-code tool can handle Bluetooth or background tasks on Linux-based devices, since the PINE64 ecosystem is pretty DIY. I don't need anything fancy, just something maintainable without a full dev team. Has anyone here used FlutterFlow for a PINE64-adjacent project, and did the pricing or platform limits get in the way? I'd appreciate input from people who've actually shipped something small.

Good evening,

would kindly like to investigate if item such as these are compatible with Model-A, since it is advertised with "e-ink" port

https://www.good-display.com/product/682.html


thank you very much.

Hello.

A quick recap of a Saturday last month. Together with two other volunteers, we organized an install party at a hackerspace in Nantes to help locals flash Manjaro or Trisquel onto their PinePhones and Pinebook Pros. On paper, it was simple: three 2-hour time slots throughout the day, with one volunteer per slot. In reality… everyone had their own day jobs and personal commitments, so our schedules never lined up perfectly, and the times we gave participants changed like three times in a week. It was an absolute nightmare for something that was supposed to be just three slots on a calendar. Honestly, we went around in circles on this for quite a while. And in the end, one of the other two volunteers who was co-organizing with me and who hangs out on a discussion forum in his spare time came up with a calendar synchronization tool he’d spotted there, in a thread that was completely off-topic at first. Our three time slots lined up without any overlaps… As a result, the day went off without a hitch in terms of scheduling. We flashed quite a few PinePhones, as well as two Pinebook Pros. If anyone else wants to set up something similar in their area, this might come in handy.

Good morning, I wonder if there is a possibility to connect a antenna to receive satellite signals on a Pine64, to use it as a Route finder. Thanks in advance.

After I posted my article, Will Linux phones become a viable alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly? (see on this forum), quite a few people in other forums (r/linux, Hacker News, etc.) commented that it made no sense to develop mobile Linux, when we already have AOSP, which is a Linux distro. I wrote this article in response:

https://amosbbatto.wordpress.com/2026/10...over-aosp/

Feedback is welcome.

Honestly, I feel a tad stupid.
I ran a packman -Syu yesterday and today I can't log into my PinteTab2 anymore. Well, at least not on the graphic login screen.
My user and password gets rejected and alarm with the standard 123456 gets rejected, too.
BUT I can log into the tty console using alt+tab+f3
Yes, I did change my password using passwd in the tty to a very simple 1234
Yes, I did reboot
No, I still can't log into the graphical console.

WTF?

Hi PINE64 community,
we've been working on a small project to make the Pinecil V2 even more convenient to use.

Using its built-in Bluetooth connectivity, we connected the Pinecil V2 to a Raspberry Pi 5 and created an external touchscreen interface for monitoring and controlling the soldering iron.

The setup works without an internet connection and uses the free CGI Studio Community Edition to create and run the HMI on the Raspberry Pi.

We've documented the project with images, a demo and setup information here:

https://community.candera.eu/t/smart-sol...screen/225

We'd love to hear what the PINE64 community thinks!

Best regards,
Wolfgang
Candera

I wrote in-depth article about whether Linux phones will become a viable alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly:

https://amosbbatto.wordpress.com/2026/10...ternative/

You can also read it as a PDF or ODT document (see the links in the article), which look much better in my opinion. I hate the styling in WordPress.

I'm pretty critical of all the Linux mobile device makers, but I also see a lot of hope for the future.
Feedback is welcome.

On September 26, 2026, I ordered a Pinetab2 8GB/128GB from the Pine Store. A PINETAB-V was delivered as early as September 30, 2026.

When I turned it on, a GNOME desktop appeared; I didn't have to enter a password or make any other inputs. I was automatically logged in as a user named “user” (uid=1000). This user is a member of the ‘sudo’ group (gid 27), but I cannot execute privileged commands because I do not have the password for “user.” There are no other users with uids greater than 1000.

The hostname is “starfive.” The preinstalled distribution is Debian GNU/Linux bookworm/sid. The /etc/apt/sources.list file contains only one entry: https://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debi...25T084846Z unstable main

I’ve tried the following passwords: blank, 1234, 12345, 123456, 1234567, 12345678, 123456789, changeme, ChangeMe, debian, pinetab, pinetab2. None of them work.

So far, I haven’t been able to find anything in the wiki. General web searches haven’t turned up anything useful. What have I overlooked? I’m now turning to this forum for help.

Andreas