I am pre-sales  order # 102224538.  Ordered in Feb.  Just plane $19 1 gig board, no extras.  When can I expect shipment?

Not a rant post, just an information post and hopefully Pine team can revamp the adapter design.

So, I bought the adapter along with the board.
I'm still exploring, but I find that the audio port on the VGA adapter is on the wrong side.
The awkward position resulted in the audio connector pushing on the ethernet and power cables.

 

Yes there's the onboard 3.5mm audio jack but for some applications (or OS), it seems to only want to output via the HDMI connector.

For example: on xubuntu image by long sleep updated by Pine (20160502), it only lists 1 output device: sndhdmi Analog Stereo, and that's via HDMI, so I'm left with no choice but to connect via the adapter. If only the port was on the other side (plus the markings on the adapter)...

Xposed Framework lets you fiddle with Android and change how things work by installing modules. It requires that you install a framework. Normally you do this with CWM or TWRP recovery but you can also do it by hand. Doing it by hand requires a Linux machine. You could do it on your Pine running Linux, on a PC running Linux, with a virtual machine running Linux... but you're gonna need Linux. You might actually be able to just do it with Android, but I haven't tried.

This is how I just installed Xposed on my Pine running Android 20160428.

Step 0, READ ENTIRE POST BEFORE DOING ANYTHING PLEASE THANK YOU
Step 1, visit XDA forum thread http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthre...?t=3034811
Step 2, download XposedInstaller_3.0-alpha4.apk from the thread and also for Android 5.1.1 on pine64, the latest sdk from http://dl-xda.xposed.info/framework/sdk22/arm64/ (currently xposed-v84-sdk22-arm64.zip)
Step 3, put your microsd card into a Linux machine. Windows can't read ext4 so you need Linux. If you don't have a linux machine, use a linux livecd with vmware player and connect the card reader to the virtual machine. Doing this is outside the scope of this howto, but I am actually going to use a debian livecd for my examples. The short, SHORT form is that you download the livecd ISO and vmware player, install vmware player, then create a new virtual machine using the iso. You don't need to install, just run live.
Step 4, get a root shell. e.g. sudo bash
Step 5, mount the partitions if this hasn't happened already. you can either just try to mount every partition on the microsd card until you find some ext4 parts, or use this handy-dandy code snip to locate them. First do something like "dmesg|grep sd" to find your devices, it will look like this

[ 1690.123504]  sdb: sdb1 sdb2 sdb3 < sdb5 sdb6 sdb7 sdb8 sdb9 sdb10 sdb11 sdb12 sdb13 >
[ 1690.158498] sd 4:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable disk

OK, so you want to look at /dev/sdb, so now do this:

( for i in /dev/sdb*; do echo -n "$i " ; head $i | file - ; done ) | grep ext

That will show you which partitions are formatted ext-something. now mount 'em.

for i in 1 10 13 7; do mkdir /mnt/sdb$i; mount /dev/sdb$i /mnt/sdb$i; done

Now you can see their contents. To figure out which is /system:

ls /mnt/sdb*/build.prop

which here returns /mnt/sdb7/build.prop, so sdb7 is /system. To simplify your life, make a symlink in the root

ln -sf /mnt/sdb7 /system

At this point you need the unpacked zip file for the framework. Just unzip it anywhere.

unzip xposed-v84-sdk22-arm64.zip

This will give you a META-INF and a system directory. Deep in the META-INF directory is a script, we will need to carve it up before we can use it. So we will make a copy.

cp META-INF/com/google/android/flash-script.sh .

Now we have to edit the script and make a change. I use vi, you might use nano, whatever. edit flash-script.sh

nano flash-script.sh

and remove these lines about halfway through:

echo "- Mounting /system and /vendor read-write"
mount /system >/dev/null 2>&1
mount /vendor >/dev/null 2>&1
mount -o remount,rw /system
mount -o remount,rw /vendor >/dev/null 2>&1

and these lines near the bottom:

if [ "$API" -ge "22" ]; then
  find /system /vendor -type f -name '*.odex.gz' 2>/dev/null | while read f; do mv "$f" "$f.xposed"; done
fi

Now you can just run the script to install!

sh flash-script.sh

Here's what it spit out for me

******************************
Xposed framework installer zip
******************************
- Checking environment
  Xposed version: 84
- Placing files
- Done

Now umount all the /dev/sdb stuff that you mounted:

for i in /mnt/sdb*; do umount $i; done

And you can take out the sd card, put it back in your pine, and reboot.

WHAT CAN GO WRONG

You could forget any step
You could get the wrong platform file

What happens next?

When you boot, Android will have to optimize all your apps all over again. It will do this automatically. There is no need to clear the cache. Android is smart enough to figure out that the old stuff in the cache is worthless.

The next thing you do is install the Xposed Installer APK. This is what actually lets you do stuff with the Xposed Framework. You can use the installer to get some modules. Then you have to reboot before you can use them.

My favorite modules are App Settings and GravityBox. iFont is also nifty. After downloading and installing modules under download, you must also activate them under modules.

I am using Reboot menu [no ads] by KitKelly for rebooting... good luck finding it. There's lots of similar apps though. The Xposed Installer should also offer to reboot for you.

If You Are Smart

You will do a test on a fresh install on a spare SD card before messing with an install you care about.

What You Should Know

Stuff may not work. I am having pretty mixed results. Still encouraged by getting it to install.

My annoying friends won't stop putting their grubby little fingerprints all over the acrylic case.

Any ideas to fend them off? Bug Zapper? Duct Tape? Duck Tape...?!? And no, I can't do what every 'Murican would do: Sue them or pull out the shotgun, too Canadian to do that... Maybe if I said sorry after...

Hi,

I did a quick search of the forum but didn't find anything that touched directly on this topic, but if I missed it, point me to the existing posts. 

I know the Pine64 has a built-in battery charging circuit and if I read the specs correctly, should be able to run off the battery, at least for a short amount of time.  I'm looking at developing a system where occasionally the power will flicker, and I want to have battery backup to keep it running through the bumps but if the power shuts down for longer than a certain amount of time I'd like to shut the unit down cleanly, and then when power is restored boot back up again.  For the Raspberry Pi, modmypi sells a little integrated UPS unit that about does what I want.  Could something similar be set up for the Pine64?  At the moment I'm just looking at the options and the Pine64 is a very attractive.

thanks.

Michael

it's my understanding that the general Android image is "official", but what does that mean?  just that Pine64 people are making it, or is Allwinner supporting it, or at least supporting the people doing the build?

why is the camera app installed when there's no camera option?  why isn't something to access clean reboot and power off installed since there's no buttons?  how does one accidentally disable bluetooth, and why didn't that info get put on the wiki immediately?

when I told people I was getting a pine64 some said "allwinner's are slower than their specs suggest, and their support is terrible" and I'm starting to see that too. So far I am quite unimpressed.  the Pi Zero feels faster than this thing.  I'm getting a ton of not responding messages.  I have a class10 card that passes the tests, and while it's a slow one at 6MB/s writes, the operations I'm doing here don't need any writes.  I can't think of any good reason why things should lag this much when navigating settings, or loading the home screen.  it's terrible.

I'm frustrated, and the lack of attention to detail and lack of communication is getting to me.  

I don't want to dev on the android OS itself, so should I just put this in a box for a couple months and hope it gets better?  is it actually going to get better?

I got Dokuwiki running on PHP7 and Nginx, and it rocks.  I have my main wiki running on a RasPi2 and page loads take a second or two and page saves take 2-3.  On the Pine64 2GB it is under a second.  What a difference!

If anyone is interested, I can post the instructions.

twice now the lay store says I need to authenticate when I try to install something, and then it doesn't.  all other google sign in stuff seems to work fine, just the play store.  only a reboot fixes it and then the thing installs fine.

Does the reset pin on the EXP connector (2x5 pins) need to be high or low to reset the board?

I ran the Stagefright Detector app against my Android install and I got back vulnerable to CVE-2015-3876, CVE-2015-3864, and CVE-2015-6602. CVE-2015-6602 in particular makes the system vulnerable to malicious MP3 and MP4 files!

Stagefright patches are freely and publicly available. Not applying them is dangerous. Will these vulnerabilities be addressed any time soon?