Hello, everyone.

I have two questions. I am using the Android Image 7.1.2 but it has only the patchlevel April 2017, is it planned to be updated?

Second question. I've seen that there's a linux kernel here:

https://github.com/ayufan-rock64

Do I have to install the firmware, as with the raspberry pi? If so, how?
Or is it enough to just take the current image?

Thank you very much!

So I've played with Ubuntu, I've played with Android and I've played with Bliss, and I'm just not feeling the value in my pinebook, I know it's a tinker device, I love the look and feel (Keyboard excluded...ugh) but the more I plug away at it, the more I think "Damn, This thing needs ChromeOS/ChromiumOS" Having run a Samsung ARM Chromebook for a while, I know the feel of ChromeOS on ARM, and I think it could be a good match for the Pinebook.

I had high hopes for Bliss though, while I was hoping for a good RemixOS port, with that dead in the water, Bliss is my only hope for a desktop based Android.

But yeah, A Chromium build on this beast would be awesome.

Hello everyone,

I just ordered a rock64 and I want to use the spdif port for audio out. As I have no need for the DAC or the 2nd eth port I don't want to use the DAC board.
Can I wire an fiber optic transmitter (like TOTX147) directly or do I need some buffer/driver like the inverters used
on the DAC board?

Thanks!

I've been toying around with my Pinebook now for a few weeks, off and on.

What I'm concerned about is the low level of activity on this forum. Unless I am missing something, this is the obvious hub for Pinebook news and discussion, yet it is not very popular.

I've tried most of the OS images available for Pinebook, including Android, Q4OS as well as the Ubuntu Mate and Armbian distros - various versions of each.

None have yet worked well enough to provide a reasonable desktop experience  - i.e. no GPU accelerated compositor... unless the very slow performance I was seeing when I did enable GPU composition was just how slow the Mali GPU really is??

I expected at or near RPi 3 performance - perhaps that was optimistic of me.

Maybe Pinebook is not for me. I'm not a hardcore Linux user, but I think I'm a step or two ahead of an average Ubuntu newbie. I've used Linux, if infrequently, for around 20 years. I don't get down an dirty with core OS development though.

I thought having an expectation of a well performing desktop environment would be easily met. Rough edges I'm used to - there's not been a Linux distro I've used that hasn't had a lot of rough edges, but 3D acceleration and fast 2D desktop composition have been reliable keystones for many years.

Am I really missing something that I should be doing? I must have read through 80% of all the forum posts.

Hi,
thanks to the great Q4os developers I now have a quite decent Debian Stretch system running.  After I managed to flash the eMMC with Q4os I simply editet sources.list to point to Stretch instead of Jessie and did a dist-upgrade.   I needed to fiddle a bit with the graphics since X was lost but rebuilding libump and xf86-video-fbturbo under Stretch did the trick.  (I'm a Debian developer and might consider creating at least an official libump package - need to check the license of fbturbo whether it is acceptable in Debian.)
I installed XFCE4 which I prefer over the desktop choice of the Q4os developers.  So far my desktop now looks quite similar to my Intel based laptop. :-)
However, I came across two problems:

1. Xfce4-battery plugin always shows an empty battery even if onscreen notification says "battery full" when plugging in power adapter (I tried do fix this by an acpi dkms kernel module which unfortunately does not build with the current kernel)
   
2. I wanted to use cryptmount which issues an error that lets me assume that loading a certain kernel module is a problem (sorry, I do not have my pinebook at hand to be more precise)
   

Not sure where this should go. Searched old posts. There was one from 11/2016 referring to writing one SD card's contents to another but didn't go very far. I didn't find much more info.

Step 1: Customize a mainline Debian Stretch build (or any build of choice).
Step 2. Save that customized build to an image on an external USB drive (or HDD)
Step 3. Test software installation, performance, try and break it.
Step 4: If build gets broken, restore the saved image without having to re-customize the mainline build.
Step 5: Rinse, repeat.

What I gather so far.
1. Can't use Clonezilla - it's for AMD64 or i386 and can't boot the Rock64 board to usb like a conventional "PC." Bummer but understandable.
2. Use partclone.dd (with extreme caution)?
3. Will partclone.dd image all 7 of the base Rock64 partitions? (I don't see an option for loader1, loader2 in the partclone usage info.
4. Do I need to retain all 7 of the base Rock64 partitions? Just partclone the fat16 boot partition and the ext4 root partition?

I'm guessing there are others that have spent many hours tweaking builds only to make a mistake and have to start over. I'm looking to be able to save time by getting back to a car that already has the engine humming before I soup it up, so to speak.
I don't have the serial cable (yet) so can't write the SD to an EMMC chip. Will eventually do that, from what I gather, the performance gain & longevity compared to SD is worth the price of the EMMC.
Thanks

Hi all,

I've submitted requests on the BTO booking for the 14" Pinebook twice now (once about three weeks ago and again last week) but haven't received any email instructions on how to place the order.

Is there someone who can check on this? Am I just that far on the end of the queue?

Thanks,
Dane

Hello forum community!

My problem:
Using Longsleep headless Ubuntu image.
Connected Hard drive spins down instantly, when no job, and spin up time causes annoying pauses.
This makes even movie watching problematic, when the bitrate is low, i mean not mutch reading.

Tried to use hdparm, but no effect. Settings seems accepted, but no change.
Because headless, only ssh.

HELP, Anybody!
Thanks

Couple questions on multiarch support. Been trying to get JRiver MediaCenter23 to run on the Rock64. They don't have an arm64 version so suggested adding armhf architecture. I think I got the architecture added correctly, supposedly no libraries missing. Problem is that I get a "segmentation fault" error when starting the app. I've checked old posts on their forum. In 2016 there were posts from a user wanting to get multiarch support added so they could load the app on a Pine64.
1. Is it possible to run a 32bit armhf app on Ayufan's Stretch minimal build?
2. Anyone have some ideas on what to look for regarding the segmentation fault? Evidently the pertinent line in the kern log I posted on the JRiver forum is;
mediacenter23 (1585) unhandled level 3 translation fault (11) at 0x00000000

Any info would be appreciated. Thanks

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/ker...6a3a425944