First impressions
#61
Ow, my eyes! Is there a dark mode for this forum?

- Is that the actual screen or a screen cover? If it's the screen, gee that scratches easily! I have no idea how it got to that state! I'm scared to attempt to peel it off, just in case it's the screen. I already peeled off the plastic film, which I realised may have been a bad move. Any phone cases in the works?

- It says Cheese is installed, yet it's not appearing on my Home screen and when I attempt to launch it via the Software centre, nothing happens. So I can't use the camera?

- Is there a torch for this phone?

- Is there a better distro to PostMarketOS? (Yeah, subjective...what are you happy with?)

- Does anyone else get a high pitched noise for about ten seconds upon starting up the phone?


I'm sure a lot of these niggles will be addressed very quickly. Tired of the Android/ iOS duopoly.
#62
(09-20-2020, 09:35 AM)eaglecup Wrote: I bought the HI10x before the PTAB was a GO and have been vastly underwhelmed

Which device are you talking about?
Before I knew the pinetab was a definite go, I got tied be of not finding what I needed in any sane price range
I did a months research and found everyone saying the chuwi hi 10x was the second coming  to folks wanting a daily driver  under $500 so I bought one, and the keyboard and the pen

And was horribly disappointed.

My pinebook pro is my daily laptop driver, I've been in IT for 20 years so know something of advertising promise vs reality, just disappointed in the hi10x
#63
My Pinetab was waiting when I got home from work yesterday. Did the menu updates last night, but did not do a lot of exploring except to insert a USB flash drive and a 64G SDcard. Both are recognized but not mounted. still trying to figure that out.

Got R/W going on the eMMC this morning and updated UBports via apt. Also installed htop, cmus and gparted. Gparted won't start due to some display config error.

Overall pretty happy. Looking to go to Mobian or Arch for a more linux-like, less android appearance. If the SDcard is fast enough I will probably keep UBports on the eMMc as backup for awhile.

8>D
de KL7JKC
#64
Received mine today!!!!

yaaay!


now to update everything, and try her out.

I hope the terrible fonts will be better after the update, currently the fonts are horrible.

Nope, fonts are horrible!

https://photos.app.goo.gl/SazUzx15jWeEft8R8

Time to do some research.
#65
Unboxing was very nice. I was very pleasantly surprised by the shipping conditions and quality of the packaging.

Out of the box I like the feel and weight of it. I think for some people the weight is a bit of an issue.

I'm still a bit confused as to if I'm fully on-boarded or not. I did try and update and it did some minimal updates to some basic apps, but when I tried running
Code:
sudo apt update
it didn't like it. I realize its a special version of ubuntu and yadayada, so.. maybe I did it wrong.

The good:

I think the look, the weight, and the overall quality are better than I expected. It feels nice in my hands. Also, I was over the moon for a linux tablet. I can't stand advertising and have wanted a tablet for years, but hate the idea of being branded/ force fed ads. Very excited for this project.

The not quite as great:
The random bacon sizzle during startup were a bit, well, exciting. I don't know if any one else got those, but it sounded like a short. Maybe mine isn't long for the world?

There is a periodic popping noise (not super loud) that I think might be the camera turning on and off? 

Well, thanks for reading. I'm excited to be in this community and even though I don't have a lot to offer (like I can't write drivers), I'm still happy to help where I can.
#66
OK, after a frustrating couple of hours, I have to ask.


How do you do anything with this machine?

Can't sign in to google with the only available browser. (wtf)
filesystem is mounted ro, so apt update doesn't work? (I did update everything via the ubuntu updates)
constantly hangs and becomes unresponsive.
things open in top left corner only, keyboard mouse works 'sometimes' and sometimes not.

doesn't rotate.
wifi is terribly weak, keeps losing signal when I'm only twenty feet from my router, not that it matters, since i CAN'T DO ANYTHING.

Sorry for yelling, but frustrating isn't the right word for this device.

The Pinebook, and Pinebook Pro were far, FAR superior devices to this one at this moment, with this software.
The PB pro worked reasonably well with the stock software, I installed Debian unstable on it following instructions over in the Pine book pro forum. Now it's my default away from home machine. (I really love my PBpro)

I'm not a linux noob by any stretch.

Can someone walk me through putting a different OS on this thing? I have micro sd cards, i have more then one linux machine to connect to if necessary, but I'd prefer to do it all/mostly on the device itself, if possible.

I'd also prefer a debian based os, if it's at all possible.

I read all the 'very few' threads about the pinetab in this forum, but there's really not much info at all.

This is so damn frustrating.

Thanks.

(edit to add)
found the wiki entry for the pinetab, I'll give mobian a try.
(end edit)

(edit to add)
Following the wiki instructions, I sucessefully installed mobian.
Things work much better now then on the 'stock' ubuntu touch.
I'm sure I'll have a million questions, I'll keep them in their specific threads, rather then this thread in the future.
does xfce4 work with mobian? I hate gnome. (not because it's this machine, I have always hated gnome)

Thanks all!

(final edit, I swear!)
I've been using the pinetab for the last few hours for what I intended it to do, firefox with ublock origin and noscript. and I must say, with the caveat that noscript doesn't show me what scripts are being allowed or blocked in the drop down menu(pita, but workable), I'm happy. Web browsing works, which is really one of the two things i want it to do. The other thing I want it for is to read ebooks. I haven't messed with it yet, but being how well firefox works on mobian, I'll bet ebooks, (usually epub) will be just fine.

Now I won't be stuck with a dead device because google, (or asus, or ....) decides it's too old to receive updates to the os. I've got three android tablets that work just fine, except they don't get updates any longer, so they're useless....

I do plan on doing more with it, but this is a great start!

Thanks!
#67
First impressions:

[hw] looks pretty decent (for the price)
[kbd] didn't order the keyboard
[ps] i was expecting a Plug in Power supply? My unit only arrived with a RED USB Type-A to barrel adapter cable?

[sw] didn't really like UBPorts (default) much - as others have noted Camera(s) don't work, WiFi is weak, Sound doesn't work and file system is RO (so you can't update packages using sudo apt update/install by default)

so I tried + got Mobian booting off the SDCard Smile overall I like this distro much better (Cameras work, Sound works but is quiet (low volume), Browser can log into Google) but as others have noted the rotation is manual (but at least can do both Portait & Landscape) and the keyboard is phone sized (so difficult to press the correct on-screen keys on a tablet like PineTab.  But my hope is that Mobian will replace UBPorts as the primary default distro once these minor annoyances get fixed.

Still booting Mobian off the SDCard but will try loading it on the eMMC to see if performance increases next...

-Lennie
#68
battery life is impressive!

fully charged, on standby, after 8 hours laptop still has 97% charge.  That's a LOT better then my PBpro (my one major gripe with the pinebook pro)  after another 14 hours of standby,  battery is still at 90%

So standby really does work.  excellent.
#69
You know seeing the one amilar thing through almost every post makes me ask any of the actual developers, one question?

WHY chooses UBtouch (or whatever its called) as your initial out of the box experience for your backers?

NOW I admit why i bought this, and so far its been great fun.and an awesome learning experience.

but almost everyone dumps UBU 1st thing? I knew it was going before the tablet even arrived (I wish I knew why but I have never gotten along with ANY straight up UBU versions, and Ive tried most)

Working w/ manjaro now, same as on my PbookPro and am liking things

so really? what was the line of thinking?
#70
I would assume that UBtouch was chosen as a default OS so that that bugs can be worked out now, leaving a 'simple' and 'just works' OS for non power users once pinetab is out of dev status. Invariably I see new linux users start with some kind of 'it just works' ubuntu variants, while power users can easily flash their OS of choice regardless of what a device ships with. Given my time in customer support and IT, anything you can do to make a device usable out of the box (in the future iteration) will remove thousands of repeat "how do I do XYZ" from the kind of individuals that will start opening support tickets without even trying to read the FAQs/manual first.


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