Greetings, 

The Pinebook Linux Power-Down Procedure that has been found to be most effective (although not 100% reliable) is to use the "power button" to pull up the shutdown dialogue !

Just received the Pinebook.

First impressions and thoughts.

At first all seemed well.

The battery was 95% charged upon delivery so that was an improvement on many people's experience (flat due to not shutting down properly after testing).

Then I spotted a stuck LCD panel pixel - just a single pixel off to the upper left screen permanently green. Poor QA. Should never have left the factory in that condition.

More concerning is quite serious keyboard faults. For some reason I can't fathom, the '-' (minus) key (between '0' (zero) and '+' (plus) produces multiple key presses on a single quick touch, and then sticks causing repeat characters until I hit another key. Disabling the key repeat in the Mate operating system helps, but why the fault?

I've checked the seating of the ribbon cable. It is fine. I've even lifted off the key cap. No difference with the key cap off and no change when I pop it back on either.

Additionally, I later found that the combination left Shift and 'm' does not produce a capital 'M'. It doesn't produce any key press. The right Shift combined with 'm' correctly produces 'M'.

I can't work out how, if or whether this could be a physical hardware problem or a software scan problem.

Finally, there is no video output to the mini HDMI port on the left hand side on the Pinebook. Should this work yet or do I need to wait for a driver update?

I also have a Rock64, 4GB RAM with 64GB eMMC, which I am very impressed with. I even managed to flash the eMMC without faffing about with a console cable. Just used a jumper cable (actually a GPIO wire from my several Raspberry Pi models!), waited for a few seconds so both eMMC and microSD card were visible to the system, booted off the SD and then wrote an image to /dev/mmcblk0 (the eMMC)

On the whole I am quite disappointed with the Pinebook and regret buying it.  I am pleasantly surprised with the Rock64 which seems to hold much promise. I'm glad I didn't suffer the dreadful experiences with the original Pine64. But I feel I've been stung with the Pinebook. Should have just stuck with the order for the Rock. Oh well!

Any advice and comments would be welcome.

Hi ,

I have noticed the 90% of the times when I turn on the pinebook the wifi does not work. If I check the settings it seems to be active and  stuck at looking for hotspots. No amount of starting /stopping the wifi works.  The only way to fix this is to  activate Flight Mode and then deactivate it after a few seconds. Any idea? Any suggestion for a permanent fix ? Thanks

Greetings, 

Please see this reference link:

The uart(0) enable slider switch on the Pinebook main board (while working) disables the left-hand usb port !

In this mode the left-hand USB port is completely disabled on my Pinebook;  I am interested in knowing if others have seen this, or if this is an anomaly on my unit.

Thanks

 


Note:  when the slider switch is restored, the left-hand port becomes active again !

( solidly reproducible on my unit )

Any reason I can't select a resolution past 1080p@60fps on my 1440p Dell U2515H monitor on ayufans android TV image? (android-7.1-rock-64-rock64_atv-v0.2.15-r77-update.zip)

If I have an existing Rock64 eMMC Android load running how do I update to the newly released Android image without wiping out any changes I'd made to the load (apps installed, Google account signed in, settings tweaked, etc.)? Do I pull the "update" zip package, unpack it and then run the update.img using the Androidtool? If so, will that write over the my existing Android image on the eMMC module or just update it?  I've looked on the forum and github but haven't found much yet. By the way, the instructions for flashing the eMMC image worked flawlessly once I located a USB A to A cable. Nice work.

hey,
does someone know how to check the temeprature on the pinebook in real time? i have tried "lm-sensors" but it didn't work because the pinebook doesn't have any sensors. 
i would appreciate any help.

When using my Rock64 with Gigabit link, network connections are unstable (I even cannot get the dmesg output via ssh connection), no problem when using 100Mbit.

dmesg doesn't indicate any problem (retrieved after set port to 100 MBit)
eth0: Link is Up - 1Gbps/Full - flow control rx/tx
eth0: Link is Up - 100Mbps/Full - flow control rx/tx

Did a sudo apt-get update/upgrade which updated a couple of things but issue persist

Current setup:
Rock64 
4GB 
official debian image on SD card
emmc plugged in but not used yet.
Router/Switch: Fritzbox 6360

When using the same FritzBox port (configured as Gigabit port) with my laptop, no issue is seen.

Any ideas?

Thank you
Reinhard

So straight out of the case the pinebook wouldn't show any man pages.  It would say page ?/? like it didn't have any data for anything.  

I tried loading or re-loading man-db (sudo apt install man-db) with no difference.  Even a "sudo mandb -c" looked promising with 6000+ pages added but nothing would display.  Finally a "sudo apt --reinstall install groff groff-base" fixed it.  

I was close when I tried to install nroff and troff.  I kept getting a troff failed message sometime after I did a man.  When I went into console mode it would say man ended with code 2 and nroff would be at the end of the long string of commands above it.

I guess I need to do that kernel upgrade to get rid of the flickering and flashing/tearing of the screen.  I thought apt upgrade would do that but I read somewhere here that it doesn't update boot or kernel.

Hi,

I had a few minutes last night to test out my new Rock64 with the Debian Stretch minimal (0.5.1-89).  The results were not stellar; however, I only had a few minutes to play with it and so have not dug into the situation.  To provide some brief background, I have a bunch of pine64s and RPi and so am reasonably experienced with this stuff, but I am not expert like many here.

1. I created the image on a known good card and the process was flawless.
   
2. The system booted up well and threw a filesystem error requiring an fsck.  This did not impact the initial boot and everything came up including SSH.  Nice.
   
3. I was able to login via SSH over the LAN.  Extra nice. :-)
   
4. My first step was to run "sudo apt-get update", and it failed with a "size mismatch" error.  I think that this is a known issue
   
5. I was curious that the SDcard was formatted with many more partitions than my pine64
   
6. I tried to fix the disk issues with fsck, but both fdisk and gparted were unhappy and failed.  I am trying to understand if this is an SDcard issue or a issue with software image.  I will test with another card next week. (I would post the error message, but it was getting late and I did not have a chance to capture it.)
   
7. The process got me thinking about expanding the volume.  Do we have a script to automate this like we originally had with Debian or Armbian on the Pine64?