I have one other question for the group. I'm finding it difficult to turn the screen off without powering it down. I have changed the settings to use the power button to turn the screen off in while on battery and wired but it appears to do nothing.

Is anyone else having this issue or is it a known issue? I've tried everything but nothing is working. Any advice would be much appreciated. Thank you in advance!

Hello,

Beside the default OS from DanctNix I would like to experiment with other OSes. Documentation states simply said "... put bootable OS on an SD-card and reboot ..." but that aint't gonna work obviously.

So now I try getting grip on the boot procedure. the boot partition (EFI) on the eMMC contains files for the u-boot boot loader. It has a routine (boot.txt) that checks for the presence of a SD and two or more partitions on it. It expects /boot with Image.gz, initramfs-linux.img and .dtb files on the first, and / (root) sits as the OS on the second.

As far as I can understand (I am not familiar with u-boot), without changing things on the eMMC, if I copy the files from the eMMC to a SD-card first partition and a compatible OS to a second partition, the SD-card might be bootable but I suppose Image.gz and initramfs-linux.img will need (Q1) to be altered ?  In this setup, if no SD-card is present, my Pinetab2 boots the default OS, if SD-card is present it will boot the one (and not more than one) OS on the SD-card.

Is there an easy way with u-boot to provide a boot menu and thus possible (Q2) access to multiple OSes ?  Has Tow-Boot something to do with it ?  I found some references but I'm not sure things apply to the Pinetab2 ...

Is it possible to (Q3) let UEFI provide boot options ?  It would need the Rockchip RK3566 and it's chipset to be UEFI aware, I suppose.

If I check the danctnix factory image file, I find multiple partitions. The first two have no mountable filesystem, the third has a extlinux.conf file and the fourth has the OS files. In this post Manuel Traut uses this setup to start from and then adapts partition 3 and 4 to run another OS. But (Q4) what is the function of the first two 'mystery' partitions ?  And (Q5) could there be some risk this setup will overwrite the eMMC as is originally intended ?

Finally, the Pinetab2 ships with a debug UART adapter. Is there (Q6) more information about this adapter than what I find in the Pinetab2 Wiki ?  Can I use this adapter to change the initial boot order where the eMMC has prevalence over the SD-card ?

Anyway, I'm looking forward to the next experiments !

I set up a cron job for user with crontab -e but is does not run. If I set the same job for root then it runs fine.  I do not have cron.allow in /etc and cron.deny is empty.

The other day I received Star64, for the convenience of placing information on RISC-V, it is desirable to have your own section to combine all the information in one place. 
Question.
Are you planning to create (in forum) an independent partition for RISC-V (Star64 etc) ?

I have received a pinetab2 a few days ago.
At first, I was disappointed by the wifi not working and bluetooth neither, then I qwanted a bit and discovered that both need working. I  then decided to order a usb c-to-c cable to tether (I have plenty of a-to-c cables, but no c-to-c). I don't mind waiting a couple more days.
While I'm waiting for the cable to be delivered, I wanted to try to connect the pinetab to my pc, so I can transfer some files and start using it.
Unfortunately, when I plug the cable nothing happens. Sometimes I hear a sound from the pinetab, but nothing more than that. I'm surely missing something.
The cable is the red one that was in the box, while the pc is a very very old laptop running Debian. Do I need to install some drivers?
Thanks anyone who will point me in the right direction.

I've created a Frankenstein image for Star64 based on Fishwaldo's plasma 1.2 image and the root partition of StarFive's GPU-accelerated image, which was demo'd on Reddit by Slammernanners.

Some context:
On Reddit, Slammernanners showed off a Debian image with StarFive's closed-source drivers and an older Mesa, which only works on the VisionFive 2 board. That board uses the same SoC and GPU as the Star64.

See the video he uploaded here: https://www.reddit.com/r/RISCV/comments/...able_as_a/

I inquired about getting this Debian image and Slammernanners gave me this direct link:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1...2KCQjJ8JI5

I took Fishwaldo's 1.2 plasma image and tried two experiments:

Experiment 1. Clear out his root partition and rsync over StarFive' files and boot it up: This failed. Systemd complained about some files.

Experiment 2. Use dd to copy over the StarFive' root partition verbatim, as it is location independent of course, overwriting Fishwaldo's. This worked. It booted up to the Gnome login screen of Debian and I logged in.

You can download my 4GB Frankenstein image here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u7qiCJv...sp=sharing

There's not a lot of free space in the root partition (#4), so on Linux you'll need to dd it to a larger microSD, and resize the partition and run resize2fs on it.
I'll upload a larger image in a few days with some updates etc.

The login in user/starfive. You can sudo to install packages.
Never do an apt update, as that'll destroy the GPU acceleration.

Watch the boot up of the image on Star64:
https://youtu.be/qzg7ZwHwU5k

Hi all,

I was very happy today to receive my Pinetab2. Naturally, the beta state of the device means that bugs are to be expected and that some patience is needed before the product is fully functional. I have no problem with that.

Now my problem is that one of the USB-C ports, the lower one (the farthest away from the power button, on the lower side when used with the keyboard) can only be used to charge the device. When plugging any peripheral (usb flashdrive, mouse etc.) it's not working while the other is working correctly.

My question is, is that normal (a bug) ? I restarted multiple times and the behaviour is consistent. 

While, as said, I'm OK with bugs for the time it takes to iron out everything, I would like to know if I have an actual hardware defect here.

Thanks for any help.

Just received my PineTab2 and am having some difficulty getting logged in. It boots up to the login screen OK.  In the lower-left it is defaulted to "Desktop Session: Plasma (Wayland)". When I entered the correct password for user "alarm", the screen locked up. I waited a few minutes, but nothing, so I hard power-cycled it. If I enter the incorrect password it does its little head shake thing and says Login Failed, but the correct password always results in locking up. So I tried switching it to "Desktop Session: Plasma (X11)". A little more success this time. I get the black & white chevron and three circles logo. The first time I tried X11 I then got the little KDE info wizard.  Step through that OK, but when I hit [Finish] the screen goes black and unresponsive.  Subsequent attempts to login it skips the info wizard and goes straight to blackscreen.

Is there anything I can try short of reflashing the image? This is my first Pine product and I am a little nervous about doing something wrong and bricking it. Particularly since this is a product I am not yet at all familiar with. Is that even a possibility that doing something wrong when reflashing could result in some sort of unrecoverable failure?

Thanks

Hi,
I will be using PineTab2 mainly as tablet, so the keyboard is of little use and only gets in the way. And because this is my first tablet, so I'm not familiar with the sizes of the tablets with similar size, but is there a case without keyboard that fits the PineTab2? And if not will Pine64 offer one in the near future?

Over on Mastodon, @manut is running Debian (Mobian-Phosh) on his #pinetab2 !

He provides instructions and if I had a day or two just to play, I'd be tempted to give it a swing. Maybe somebody more experienced will provide an image we can just install. I wonder how challenging it will be to pull in kernel/driver updates as the rest of our device is brought online (wifi, camera, suspend). 

I'm long-time comfortable in Debian, though I was very grateful when the Linux kernel became robust enough (and hardware standardized enough) that I no longer had to compile kernels to get the drivers I needed.

I'm wondering what would happen if I installed aur/phosh . Would I be able to choose between it and plasma on the login screen (so as to have a known-working fallback)? Should I worry that it is tagged "Flagged out-of-date"? Better to use aur/phosh-git ?