For everyone who want to run Chromium browser within Q4OS. Now it's available from Q4OS Software Centre, just do system update:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
and install Chromium from the Software Centre.

This post is here to document a known issue which most likely stems from an odd requirement of the graphical Software Updater tool used in Ubuntu. It's not new, nor is it unique to the pinebook/pine64. It has plagued other SBC communities, even the mighty Raspberry Pi has suffered from it! So, the Software Updater tool runs contently in the background, checking for updates. Or you decide to run it manually... you remember where it is, don't you... it's here:

   

So, either you run it manually, or it suddenly tells you there are updates ready to install. So you dutifully click the 'Update' button, only to be greeted with this nasty error screen. 

   

What did you do wrong? Absolutely nothing. For some bizzare reason, it expects that /boot has at least 48.2M free (this may not always be the case, but it is the typical number). And since the boot partition is 50M in size, with 23M used on my own system at the time of writing... the 28M of free space just doesn't satisfy it. 

So what do you do? Instead, run a terminal, for example, Applications -> System Tools -> MATE Terminal, 

   

and run "sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade" (without the quotes). That's it. This will update your system, and you won't get any nasty unnecessary warnings about /boot not having enough free space!

Addendum (Jul 17): Just as a follow up, I tried resizing the /boot partition on a microSD build to 100MB, and had no issues with letting the GUI Software Updater do it's thing. It did not touch /boot during the update, and didn't change anything, so it appears to simply be an unnecessary free space check since kernel updates, etc are not done through it on the pinebook. There is also this report by another user who was able to both use it to do updates, and also upgrade from 16.04 to 17.04, which I would only recommend if you accept that this is NOT supported, as 17.04 is NOT a LTS ubuntu version.

Hello everybody,
I need a Nano computer with Android OS, correct performance and NFC support.
Pine64 seems good for all my requirement, except NFC.
Does a solution exist to add an NFC reader to the Pine64?

Just some notes on using the 'earphone serial console' on the Pinebook.

You might have seen the reference guide in the Pinebook resources section entitled "Pinebook Earphone Serial Console Developer Guide" (click the link if you haven't seen it yet!).

You'll have then also seen the super user friendly /sys/class/sunxi_dump/write calls that enable and disable this functionality.

Well on all of ayufan's linux desktop environment builds you have the super handy pinebook_enable_uart.sh and pinebook_enable_headphones.sh scripts (you'll need sudo to run them as they're located in /usr/local/sbin  - and need root privleges anyway). You can run them to easily toggle between the two different stages. This will let you see all the boot messages and interact with the serial console on your pinebook, and use the built in serial connection, which is available as /dev/ttyS0 once you boot. 

One gotcha will be that on the pinebook DE (desktop environment builds) there is a pinebook-headphones service that runs during boot, so the UART is disabled part way through the boot process. You can easily change this behaviour using systemctl. Simply issue the command sudo systemctl disable pinebook-headphones at a terminal in order to disable it, and naturally you can also enable it again if you wish the headphones functionally to be automatically made available.

There is a possibility this behaviour will change in the future, and that UART via the headphones jack will only be switchable via an on-board switch, so watch this post to see if this behaviour does indeed change. This switch is already present on most production pinebooks, and is a slide switch (referred to as SW11 on p9 of the mainboard schematic) located on the edge of the main circuit board on the far right side. At the present time it simply overrides the GPIO pin that is toggled by the enable/disable scripts, and forces the UART to be permanently on.

The desktop featured androids are quite fun, I'd love to have my new pinebook setup with one of those, wondering if there have been any whispers about them?

I have heard that Allwinner is coming out with an improved version of the A64, the A63. The only details that I have heard that are different than the A64 is that it is made with a 28nm process (lower power and hopefully faster CPU clock), and a better GPU - Mali-T760MP2. I would be very interested in a new SOPINE board that uses the A63.

Not sure if anyone is tracking issues but I flashed Ubuntu 0.5.5-65 onto my new 64g EMMC last night and have been exploring. 

Very pleased so far - the Pinebook is awesome.

Anyway one thing I did spot was that the 'Software Boutique' which is part of Ubuntu Mate Welcome seems to show no available software and crashes after a few minutes. Having been away from Linux for a bit, I was hoping this would show me the 'best in class' apps rather than have to trawl through everything on one of the many package catalogs and managers.

The reason it crashes, it  seems, is because it doesnt know about ARM builds and since the Pinebook is ARM it shows no available software which then crashes the Boutique.

Can you folks in the Pine community lobby the Ubuntu Mate team to support ARM apps?


Until then: sudo apt-get install ....

Andy

I opened up my Pinebook to fit the larger eMMc and was interested to see how it was all put together z 

One thing I noticed was a very small slide switch on the bottom edge of the main pcb. It wasn't labelled.... curious as to what it does? 

Andy

I am trying to figure out how to disable tap-to-click on the touchpad. Has anyone been able to disable this feature? Currently, I am just disabling the touchpad (fn+f2) while using the keyboard.

Is there a configuration option for /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-pine64-pinebook-touchpad.conf that turns it off?

When I purchased my Pinebook (back at early first quarter of 2017) I also purchased a "MINI HDMI MALE to HDMI FEMALE ADAPTER", I got my Pinebook in several days ago but still have not received the adapter.

What should I do? My email confirmation of the order after the Pinebook was delivered showed the adapter on the order list as part of the completed order. My purchase history for my card also shows the payment as indicated on the order (which includes the HDMI adapter).