Hi All,

I've yet to receive my Pinebook Pro, as I failed to intercept the DHL delivery person before they got to the delivery office on my work site. It's not sat in postal purgatory until Monday.

However, something that I'm interested in is the possibility of running Gnome 3 desktop on the Pinebook Pro. There are already a few Linux builds using the MATE and KDE desktop environments. As far as I'm aware, Gnome 3 looks to be roughly similar to these in terms of system resource usage.

Ben

Just a quick hint for any individuals building or developing Electron-based apps:

If you simply issue npm install electron, the process will fail with a non-specific 404 error as well as an unhandled promise reject during electron's postinstall stage. This is due to, afaik, the electron downloader pulling for the non-existent arm(maybe?) build instead of the more appropriate armv7l build. 

To resolve this, pass the arch flag as such:

So I installed Chromium OS and my PBP eMMC, without realizing that ayufan's uboot puts eMMC before SDs. (Feeling pretty foolish about now...) I unfortunately did not order a USB adapter to flash the eMMC directly.

I've been able to boot to SD again, by opening the case, using the eMMC disable switch and then booting. However, I can't get the eMMC to mount in the SD OS after enabling it again. So now I'm wondering if it's possible to use the uboot that came with the stock Debian install with Chromium OS?  I don't necessarily want to not use Chromium anymore, but I want to retain the original boot order as my current method to boot from SD is very inconvenient and far from ideal.

If there's another way to get the PBP placing the SD higher in boot priority, I'd love to know!

I remember some images floating around of the pinephone having 6 extra pads on the back of it that were supposedly for some sort of communication. Is there any update on what the pinout of those pads is?

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Curious :
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With changing taxes and tariffs,
 Has there been any thought into shipping the parts to a destination country to be assembled and sold in the destination country  ?
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There is at least one cell phone that claims to be made in Florida USA,  but I think it is just assembled here.
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Just a thought.  Could possibly have advantages  ?

Anyone having good or not-so-good luck with USB-C multi-port power adapters and the PBP?
Recommendation, condemnations and reviews...
Maybe a little early, but i think many of us will be interested in this subject soon.

Hi all,

I just wanted to mention a security issue I noticed today when I finally got to play with my new PBP.
It appears that SSH is enabled on startup, and that root access via ssh enabled by default.

With the default un/pw being root/root, this is definitely not recommended.

For those not familiar, you can simply issue this command from another linux machine:
ssh {your PBP ip address here} -l root

Once logged in as root (either remotely or locally) you can modify your ssh config:
vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config

On line 32, you will see:
PermitRootLogin yes

Change to:
PermitRootLogin no

Save the changes to sshd_config

If you are doing this remotely, close the session by issuing:

exit

Open a terminal locally on your PBP and restart the ssh service:
sudo systemctl stop sshd
sudo systemctl start sshd

Now if you try to ssh directly to the root account, you will be denied, however, you can sudo your way to root from a sudoers account.

If you don't use ssh normally, you can disable automatic sshd startup:
sudo systemctl disable sshd

If you have disabled ssh on startup, you will have to start it manually to use it:
sudo service ssh start

I would suggest you change the password for both root and your standard user. Make them strong 
I would also suggest that if you're going to run around with SSH enabled, you create a separate non-sudoer user for use with ssh, and deny ssh access to your sudoer accounts (unless you really need that level of remote control).

I'm really enjoying this little machine so far.

Cheers!

edit-2: Issue resolved by reflashing an image onto eMMC outside of the PBP, via a usb-to-eMMC adapter. So it was a human error after all. 

Attached Files

  boot_01-12.zip (Size: 61.49 KB / Downloads: 553)

Has anyone had any success or failure running this build off an SD card?

https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Pinebo...an_Desktop

I get a login, then the screen goes black, and stays that way.  Any ideas?

Did not boot.  Might try to flash to IT mode.  Serial output: