I have this installed & running now. That sure took longer than I expected it to.

The Hardkernel 256GB emmc has some sort of an orange bump on the bottom, opposite the socket, that the Pine64 64GB emmc which it replaced did not.

There was a sticky pad on the PBP mainboard underneath the emmc to help keep it in place while it's being bumped around; I had to scrape it off with a spudger to get the 256 installed. The new emmc still doesn't sit quite level, it angles up slightly due to the bump; I hope it isn't going to come loose.

Using the Pine-branded emmc-to-USB adapter which I got from the Pine store several years ago, the 256 GB emmc consistently gave read errors whenever it was being accessed raw, which greatly slowed down operations like mounting & partitioning. It's not doing that in the emmc slot, and the 64 isn't doing that on the adapter. For example, this sort of command would trigger a read error if it wasn't read from cache, but reading from a filesystem would not:
$ sudo dd if=/dev/sda count=20480 | md5sum
The errors were recoverable and only showed up in dmesg & syslog, but made it slow.

I wanted to partition the new storage myself and rsync over my files, instead of reinstalling. Things I learned in the process:
- gpt's partition table & backup partition table occupy the first 64 and last 64 sectors of the main address space of the medium; thats why the skip=64 when writing bootloaders.
- The emmc boot partitions (mmcblk2boot0 and mmcblk2boot1) are NOT being used. The convention is to leave the first 30 MiB in the main address space unallocated so there's space for bootloaders and start the first partition at 62500 sectors; with alignment to 2048 sectors as parted recommends, the first partition starts at 32*2048 = 65536 sectors.
- Stock uboot can only boot from FAT filesystems. Using ext4 for your /boot partition makes the medium unbootable. I only tested that FAT16 works.
- If you want the root partition on lvm, as I did, you need to rebuild the initramfs with the lvm2 hook included (instructions) and specify the root fs as e.g. root=/dev/VG1/LV1. u-boot doesn't understand lvm by itself; the tools in the initramfs are needed to mount it.
- Boot order is supposed to be USB > SD > eMMC but with the particular boot loader versions I was using, the USB wouldn't boot at all without the internal emmc disabled. Failure to boot off the USB adapter doesn't necessarily mean it won't boot when slotted.
- The last revision of tow-boot before the maintainer bailed doesn't work on my PBP so it's u-boot only.

In principle, lvm should be a great fit for an all-solid state system like the PBP. Logically contiguous blocks on the medium aren't physically contiguous, so a partition table designed for rotating disks that forces you to keep partitions completely contiguous rather than just reasonably unfragmented, as allocation in extents is intended to do, doesn't make sense.

But what about in practice? I had a hard time finding any performance numbers for lvm other than "works for me", some synthetic benchmarks, and an ancient study using lvm1 which found that performance with small files was terrible.

Life on arm means compiling a lot. I don't want it to slow down big builds.

I've been benchmarking by building haveno's git repository, which is a convenient size. It goes from 260M to 5.1G over the course of a build, and takes about 7-10 minutes to do it. 98% Java code, build managed with Gradle.

Testing `make skip-tests` starting with all dependencies resolved & cached on disk, a gradle daemon running, parallel builds enabled & build caching off, and the linux disk cache freshly flushed, it took about 7m 20s to build on the old emmc without lvm, and 7m 3s on the new emmc with lvm2. Still to test is building on the new emmc in the non-lvm partition I left for comparison, and building from heavily fragmented logical volumes.

A pretty simple guide, Mobian Trixie is setup to use wireguard for VPNs.
It is pretty easy to add openVPN client services though.
first install two packages

I'm looking for the os for the original Pine A64 A64+ I have over and over downloaded the android 8.1 
I have also installed on my computer even going back to older systems Phoenix card win 32 disk manager and Etcher 
with 7 zip and i can not find an *.IMG for the life of me can some one please tell me what I'm doing wrong or give me a link to the correct software

Please and thank you

Hi,

Where I can download the Bulleyes version?. I updated to Bookworm and is not working, but with the Bulleyes version worked since day one.

Regards

I'm trying to get my pinebook pro up and running again. What's a good OS to put on it now? Can someone also recommend a video tutorial for how to put a new OS on the pinebook pro?

I'm running Void on my pbp, which currently is working fine, but during installation wifi didn't work, and `ip a` said that wlan0 didn't exist at all, and the privacy switches didn't help. The unbind/bind trick:

Running a PP Beta/kb/Manjaro/box86, life is fine in most categories. But chromium is glacial and links2 has developed issues bringing up news sites such as washingtonpost/reuters/etc (java complaints and so on).

Is there a very-modest browser that I'm missing? Graphics/video unimportant. I suppose links (vs links2) would be the fallback, but wouldn't mind something a little less stark.

Jake

Hi all,

I use postmarketOS v24.06 20241211-0836 version with phosh on pinephone.

If i try to install and use nheko, gnome-keyring is not fully initialized.

How can i do this specially ?

If not, i have an error and cannot use nheko.

Thanks a lot

I would love to see a revision of the Pinetab-V with a newer SoC, more RAM, an ssd slot and external gpio pins like the Dc roma 2

Recently, I’ve noticed that in bright environments, particularly when I’m outside, there are pairs of horizontal lines appearing on the screen. This happens regardless of whether the display is active or not.

The lines seem to be most prominent in the area around the analog watch face, which is also where I tend to touch the screen frequently. It’s quite distracting and affects the overall visual experience, making it difficult to use the device comfortably.

I’ve tried capturing a photo to show you what I’m seeing, but due to the reflective nature of the display glass, it was challenging to get a clear image. However, I hope that my description helps convey the issue.

Here are a few additional details:

This problem has been occurring for some time now, and I can’t pinpoint when it started.
The lines are visible only in bright light conditions; in dimmer environments, the display looks normal.
I’m curious if anyone else has experienced something similar or if this is a known issue with the device.
Could this be a hardware problem, or might it be related to the display technology itself? Any insights or suggestions on how to address this would be greatly appreciated.