Hey Guys - what are you running?

[bapound]

While I wouldn't mind trying Android, I definitely would rather be able to run a version of regular Linux (or BSD) - I could live with headless CLI or a GUI-based machine.

bapound, how is Android on the H64? I already have a Fire TV that is reasonably well put together but I'd still be up for trying an Android on my TV. Will probably get a Pinetab so I'll have a tablet option - though if I could cobble together a better performing Android build on the H64 and 3d print a case, that could be cool as well.

I mean, it was fine ... I guess what I was hoping (ok, my wife was hoping) for was an Android experience like a phone, but it was not nearly as seamless on the h64. You have to put the playstore on yourself, which was difficult, and even then you can't put on some apps because the pine h64 isn't "google approved" or whatever the terminology is. You can sideload most apps using apkmirror.com ... sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. We couldn't get Facebook Messenger working, so the whole prospect was kind of a no go for her

As an aside, while I had problems before with pretty much every OS out there, I realized that a) I wasn't waiting long enough, b) sometimes you need to press enter to help get past weird boot loops, and c) for some reason the pine wasn't recognizing that particular monitor that I was using. It might be because it is an old monitor so I had to use a VGA to HDMI adapter. Anyhow, everything works swimmingly on my TV. So I have successfully used Armbian, Manjaro images built myself and downloaded, as well as Android. Now if I could just figure out the audio issues everything would be golden!

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Could you perhaps elaborate on the "tweaking" that you needed to do to get Arch Linux Arm working? I have been having a lot of trouble with the "supported" operating systems, ie haven't gotten any to work except Android, and was thinking about trying Arch Linux Arm. I'm new to all this, so maybe that's where the issues have been coming as well ...

Since Arch does not support the H64B directly, you start with an minimal Manjaro image (Kernel 5.7.8 is the last known working) and remove the Manjaro bootsplash, add alarm and aur to pacman.conf, replace Manjaro mirrorlist with Arch mirrorlist, create missing hooks, generate new keys for pacman, remove lsb-release and then do system update and you will end up with a minimal Arch install and go from there.
And if you need eMMC support replace the dtb file with this one --> https://sourceforge.net/projects/manjaro-arm-pineh64/

Awesome, thanks for the reply!