Sorry, no pics at the moment, but I decided to take my pinebook to work so I could spend a little more time getting to know it, and when I pulled it from my bag, I found a heavy rub/damaged area on the surface of the lid, while the pinebook was in a backpack, with only a few other items inside, I was surprised the device was scarred up that easily?

The damage appears to have been caused by the power adapter jostling around while I walked. Also noted some red color rubbed off the empty water bottle I keep in my bag as well, and that wiped off easily enough with a touch of 409 and a paper towel, but I'm a bit concerned about the durability of this device.

Hi,

I have been using Pine A64 2GB version for a year and absolutely love it.
I updated the os from Android 5 to the latest Android 6.0.1 (Android 6.0.1 (LCD Panel Video Output) [20170209]) and i noticed that everything works prefectly as long as you don't  shut the system down.
I have reimaged the memory card and after that everything works just fine until i reboot the system. I do it by holding the power button that is soldered down for ~3 seconds and selecting the shutdown or reboot option. Ether of theese gives the same result, a black screen after initial power on cyckle. Apparantly it's not getting any boot directions from the memory card. 
I ran the verify option from the ethcer program and it was successfull and i can see the partitions on the memory card are the same before i initially start the Pine from the memory card and after i shut it down and it does not boot anymore.

I have tried to install this with the Etcher program as well as the new Pine Insaller and i have only used the images provided from wiki.pine64.org or the Pine Installer options.

This did not happen with the Android 5 LCD version and i plan on dowgrading to it to test the boot procedures.
I have changed the memory card to see if the old card had become corrupted. Didn't help.
I'll test this with the non LCD version allso to see if it does the same or not.

Has anyone else noticed this kind of behaviour?

LS,

I just inserted a USB DVB-T dongle (in holland DVB-T is wide spread in use) it9135 in the pinebook. after downloading the firmware and copying the file to /lib/firmware the dongle was recognised in both lsusb and in dmesg.

However if I start vlc to watch TV (on 722MHz with 8MHz bandwidth in my region) it states there is no DVB device present. The same error occures when I start w_scan to see what is beeing broadcasted. The dongle/antenne works on other equipment using linux so in theory....

Erik.
Delft
using Mate on a PineBook.

LS,

I just received my pinebook and I think it's great. Just a small obversation:
java and anything which uses it causes a segmentation fault and core dump. I did an apt install scilab to see if I could use the pinebook to do some calculations. I was 'treated' by aformentioned error. Running java or javac  gives a similar result. I then got a fresh jdk from www.java.com and unpacked it in /opt; this seemed to work except that I still have /usr/lib/jvm/jdk1.8.0.----- installed and scilab still crashes.

Any ideas on this (apart from changing $PATH so the /opt/jdk is used before the 'other' one)?

I am only half familiar with the workings of alternative, I noticed a /etc/alternative/ directory where there was a java link present.

Any help would be help-full on this one.

Erik Ulijn
Delft.

Hi,

I just received my PineBook and noticed the speaker don't get very loud.. there is noise coming out from them, but it's very faint. I have to put my ear a few inches away to hear it clearly. I tried turning up the volume on the system and the audio application to full. Has anyone had a similar experience? Does anyone know what might be happening?

Thanks,

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?