Simple question, how to backup OS installed on eMMC?

Any plans for Debian Jessie image?

Hi All,

happy new owner of a 14'' Pinebook. So far, everything is going swimmingly. Only bugbear: I am trying to switch from MATE to LXDE. I have successfully installed LXDE via apt-get, but for some reason, the log-in screen won't give me LXDE as a choice of sessions, only MATE. Any ideas how to remedy this?

Otherwise, lovely machine.

FB

I just got the 14" version, a day ago. Had to pay $30+ shipping, then $41 brokers fee. I'm in Canada, a partly communist country I guess. I saw the same laptop on another site selling with "epacket" scam, which never has brokers fee.

Anyway, rather happy overall. There was a bottom screw missing from the laptop. Also, touchpad seemed lifted in the front. One USB (right one) seemed to have some red glue in it, and nothing would fit in it. It seemed broken and glued on.

I opened it up, changed the 16 GB eMMC for a 64 GB eMMC. I saw that the right usb port had a metal piece with glue stuck in that wasn't part of the main board. Was able to remove it with a flathead screwdriver and a bit of skill. Seems to be a piece they use to position the usb port. When removed, now had a nice right usb port that works.

The touchpad has three little plastic "hooks" that hold it on the bottom. The center one was above it's supposed position, and this is why the touchpad wasn't properly seated. I just pushed the plastic and snapped the hook into place, solved that problem.

The 16GB eMMC that came with it had some type of Linux on it. The 64 GB eMMC has Android. I see no way to change the 64 GB eMMC to Linux. I would like to install Debian from USB, but have not figured out how to get into the BIOS or the boot loader.

Can anyone help me on this last part? Open up the boot loader so I can play with the laptop and Debian, FreeBSD, and a few other fun things? I don't have a eMMC flasher, otherwise I would go that way. I don't need much help, just the ability to start.

The laptop is surprisingly a good build, despite the lack of QC. Also, the battery seems like the flexible type that likes to explode, but so far so good.

So, I've run into what I consider a concerning amount of CPU hogging due to kswap and running out of physical RAM/loading up the swap in the default Ubuntu MATE install.

2 gigs + 1 gig swap is a bit light to multitask anything in a GUI, especially if one of those tasks is Chromium.

So...

Anyone done anything to mitigate this?

It doesn't appear to be too terribly easy to fix this stuff live, which is not shocking as the default root fs is the one I would need to shrink.

I'm leaning toward grabbing a low-profile USB flash drive and using it as a lower priority swap than the default zram (which seems pretty zippy as it is supposed to be but is too small IMO for many things), but if anyone has a simple or elegant solution, I might try it.

Anyone try to use resize2fs from an SD card? Anyone try that+swap on the eMMC vs a USB drive and compared performance?

Howdy folks,
  I was one of the early kickstarter folks last year to order a 2GB PINE A64(+?), and received my board over a year ago. At the time, I didn't have a wired LAN to test it on, but had no luck getting it to boot with the Android or Linux versions I had tried. Have tried a couple of newer builds now that I have an ethernet LAN link handy so even if the HDMI doesn't fire up, I can ssh in, take a look, and run or modify it in a headless state.

I picked up one of those 2.5A CanaKit power adapters that are popular with RPi folks and have been mentioned on these forums somewhat, but I still have had no luck. The LED comes on as long as I don't try to cycle it quickly, but no HDMI and no network connectivity - so I figure it is not booting.

I'm not especially heartbroken about this, as I feel good supporting the project and I love my 14" Pinebook, but I'd really like to confirm whether this thing is faulty or whether I had just had poor luck with some less stable builds.

So is there any kind of consensus as to what image is the most likely to boot reliably on these boards? I have the PINE64 installer and have had reliable success on the Pinebook using the same MicroSD hardware that failed on the PINE standalone board.

Any suggestions would be helpful and I would be quite likely to try them.

I am considering looking into other PINE64 offerings but I'd really like to get this thing running first, or be able to fairly reliably write it off as DOA and move on.

Please advise.

Hello.
I'm trying to get Teamviewer on Pinebook with Ubuntu Mate 0.5.5-65. It's a nice and popular app for remote control PC's (for pc installed and access to your another pcs).
In teamviewer site has deb, rpm: https://www.teamviewer.com/es/download/linux/.
Deb is 32-Bit / 64-Bit Multiarch, so no ARM.
There is a "tar.xz" version, but "can't execute the binary. Incorrect format..." so I assume that is not for ARM.

Anyway to run Teamviewer on Pinebook? Not the web access (for control PCs) also the server side for Ubuntu Pinebook.

Thanks!

Hi,

I purchased a pinebook with additional 64GB eMMC and a 2m extension cable but when it arrived the shipment only came with the pinebook alone. 
The packaging was 100% intact. The invoice showed all items (and I had to pay customs for it).

I wrote a mail to support several days ago -> no answer  answer just took almost one week, so be patient.

So running out of options now... 

Maik

UPDATE: After some days I got an answer from support that the issue was forwarded internally and it is handled now.

Hi, I can't use the microphone with Linux and I do not know if this is normal for other users, how could I activate it from Alsamixer?

Hi, After testing Pinebook for a few days, I realized that the touchpad does not respond as well as I want (I know that I could use a usb mouse) the problem is that when using two fingers sometimes the system thinks I want to zoom and not Scroll, the temporary solution I have found for Firefox and Chrome is to edit the value of mousewheel.with_control.action in about: config and use some plugin to disable zoom using the touchpad respectively. I still think it would be more convenient to configure the touchpad to scroll from edges instead of using two fingers, but I cann't do it from dconf or xorg.conf