I purchased a "Pinebook Serial Console" from the Pine Store to use to debug my Pinebook Pro's boot process. It seems to work fine on the USB side, but on the Pinebook side it's got some serious issues.

1. If I try to boot the machine with the cable plugged in, uboot does its thing, says it's starting the kernel, and then nothing ever happens again. No serial output, no video, no network presence. (If I yank the cable, right after making a selection, before it finishes loading the kernel, everything boots fine from there, and I can plug it in after boot completion and hit enter for a login prompt.)
2. If I plug it into a running "default Debian+MATE" system, I get errors on the kernel log about SDIO screwing up, and WiFi dies. (If said system is booted from an SD card, it also loses communication with the card and does what any Linux system does when you yank its root filesystem away.)
3. If I leave the cable plugged in during a reboot (not a cold boot), uboot fails to read the SD card and hangs—with or without an SD card plugged in.
4. Even when things are otherwise working, the connection is very unreliable. If the PBP outputs too quickly, vast quantities of output are dropped. This happens both in Linux and uboot. If I do an ifconfig, for example, I get the first line and a half or so okay, followed by mangled snippets of the remainder. And nmtui is completely unusable.

The wiki does mention that some of these cables render the PBP unbootable, but I didn't see any previous mention of this on the forums. I assume that previous discussion of this problem has happened in other media.


First messages from the kernel log after WiFi dies an untimely death:

I want to use Moeditor. I downloaded its 7z package, installed pk7zip, and unpacked it into its own directory.

How do I now install it? There is an executable Moeditor file in the directory.

Thanks.

Did any other friends receive a PBPordered in early September?
I ordered it on September 3rd and haven't received it yet.
That's the response I got.

Quote:Thanks for your message.
After checked with our production team and dispatch team, they informed us that the shipment date for Pinebook Pro will be delayed due to there was several units of Pinebook Pro are need to rework by the manufacturer.
We will get back to you again when the manufacturer release the new stock.

Quote:Thanks for your message.

We apologize for keep you waiting again, the manufacturer was given the time frame for new stock release is around 2-3 weeks.

Plugged in after receiving PBP and ran updates and then left alone to charge all day. 
Computer reported battery actually draining but charge light is on . 
Used both the original charger and USB-C separately in the last 24hrs. 
now battery is at 0% and PBP wont start on even in main power.
any suggestions?


UPDATE:
Computer finally powered back on after leaving on main for 10min
Back light on screen keeps going out


opened PBP
reset the battery plug
and clicked reset button on mother board.

still no joy. 
Making support ticket.

Here they are

Here is quick chat I had with Marius who called me from a PinePhone.

I've recently spent a little while hacking together a quick 'n dirty Debian installer for the Pinebook Pro.

https://github.com/daniel-thompson/pineb...-installer


It is not a fully fledged installer... just some code that run on the Pinebook Pro itself using an existing Debian (or maybe Ubuntu) distro. It will install an operating system from scratch to an alternative media. Nevertheless it is a "real" installer in that sense that there is no downloadable image, no default password and you get to choose the keyboard layout, locale, timezone and desktop environment for yourself!

It uses upstream Debian packages for everything except the kernel and bootloaders. Actually... on that subject I deserve no credit for the kernel (which is the v5.4 close-to-mainline kernel that @tsys has has been hacking on) or the bootloaders (which are simply the binaries from @Mrfixit2001 's update repo).

So far I have only used it to author SD cards (from a distro running from eMMC) however it has been tested with the eMMC disabled so we can be confident the bootloaders work. That means that, in principle, it is also suitable for installing to eMMC when running from SD card. I've also only tested text mode and the Gnome desktop environment (wayland, panfrost, gnome 3.34).

One interesting feature of this installer is that it is trivial to switch from arm64 (default) and armhf (add ARCH=armhf to the make command line). This allows you to run identical distros with the two different instruction sets... which could make for some interesting benchmarks if someone wants to make them.

Check out the Pine64 wiki for feature status, known issues and workarounds.

I am unfamiliar with architecture that uses two separate and different CPU's this way. Processing wise, what is going on here? Thanks.

 Cortex-A72 (big cluster):

    Dual-core Cortex-A72 up to 2.0GHz CPU
    Superscalar, variable-length, out-of-order pipeline
    L1 cache 48KB Icache and 32KB Dcache for each A72
    L2 cache 1024KB for big cluster

Cortex-A53 (little cluster):

    Quad-core Cortex-A53 up to 1.5GHz CPU
    In-order pipeline with symmetric dual-issue of most instructions
    L1 cache 32KB Icache and 32KB Dcache for each A53
    L2 cache 512KB for little cluster

Dears,

Would anyone know if Pine Phone would work 100% (data, voice, etc) in Brazil. 
My current local courier is Vivo.

Thank you for any insights!

I've been attempting to improve the performance of screensavers on my Pinebook Pro, but I need some help.

OS: Ubuntu Mate Bionic (ayufan)
Screensaver: GLMatrix (xscreensaver-gl)

Default Settings: (/usr/lib/xscreensaver/glmatrix -fps)
8-10 FPS
70-75% CPU

Current Settings: (/usr/bin/gl4es /usr/lib/xscreensaver/gl4matrix -fps)
14-20 FPS
45-55% CPU

I created the following bash script in ~/.local/lib/xscreensaver named "glesmatrix" and made it executable (chmod +x ./glesmatrix)