Hi,
does anyone know how to setup ANSI pinebook pro keyboard on ubuntu? i have appeared to have lost the keyboard setting and have it currently set to US keyboard. Though one half will be numbers and other letters. I currently have to use a wireless keyboard. Any help would be appreciated.

Hi!

Again, a lot has happened under the hood, but there were also quite a few user-visible changes this time

• The kernel was upgraded to version 5.8 and HDMI output was re-enabled
  
• Mobian metapackages have been reworked to use "softer" dependency relationships; this way, users can choose to uninstall most bundled apps without removing the metapackages, and therefore, without risking losing essential packages later
  
• Some important apps have been updated:
  • Firefox ESR is now version 78, and it now uses the mobile config tweaks from our friends at pmOS
    
  • GNOME Maps 3.38 has been released and now has a (mostly) adaptive UI
    
  • GTK, the underlying foundation to every GNOME software, has been updated to version 3.24.22
    
• We also added a couple apps in the default build:
  • GNOME Weather is patched for adaptive UI, and therefore finally usable on the PinePhone
    
  • Thanks to Martijn Braam's fantastic work, Megapixels is the new default camera app. We still hold great hopes for Pinhole, but it just isn't the best option for now.
    

I've been having pretty good luck getting my Pinetab set up as a laptop-like device with the keyboard cover. However, one lingering pain point is the fact that the display always wants to be in vertical mode, and rotating it has to be done manually using various configuration handles. Is there a better way, e.g. some bootloader configuration option, that would set the default screen orientation to be horizontal? It would be really nice to be able to use the device as a plain and simple laptop-like, especially in the bare TTY, without needing to manually change the screen orientation every time.

With nemo it is possible to access a Samba server and navigate along it's file tree.

However, when trying to look at a specific photo or play a video, the appropriate application does not understand the special smb:/... protocol used by nemo.

Is there a trick to force nemo mounting a cifs share in ~home or is there annother file viewer which can solve that problem?

Hello! 

I was wondering if anyone had a solution to this issue.  My PBP is running Manjaro 20.08 and when I reboot the machine I get vertical gray bars in the center of the screen. I've seen a couple posts that mention this issue, but I have not seen a solution.  If anyone knows of a solution, please point me in that direction.  Thanks a bunch.

/Michael Biel

Hello,
Thought I would share this in case it helps someone else.

Had a keyboard issue pop up, multiple Enter key presses would register somewhat randomly. Sometimes it would get worse after I closed and opened the lid, sometimes from just sitting a while, and sometimes as soon as the system boots up. Pressing Esc would stop it for a few moments, then it would continue. Tried multiple distros and kernel versions, did not make a difference. Updated keyboard firmware, still nothing. 
Finally, when I was looking at showkey output I noticed that the Enter key was very touchy. It only took the slightest bit of pressure to get it to register a press, and then 50 afterwards in rapid succession.
So I popped the key out, cleaned out the grit and noticed that when the actual switch was pressed, only a single crisp press was registered. Put it back together and everything is working fine.
I have an ANSI keyboard, so the enter key is long, like the shift key. I've read of people having issues with their shift keys, so maybe the longer key makes it more likely that the dirt that gets under wold interfere with the key mechanically.

Apologies for the long winded explanation, this thing drove me nuts for weeks.

Hope this helps!

I started with Ayufan's 0.9 image (Ubuntu 18.04) - the minimal server variant. I then apt-installed ubuntu-gnome-desktop, and then upgraded the Ubuntu version through the graphical software updater to 20.04. So far so great, but I'm curious about upgrading the kernel.

Hi Folks,

I'm trying to understand the performance of the PBP webcam on linux. Here's a related thread from the hardware forum:

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=11460

The tldr is that `v4l2-ctl --list-formats-ext` makes it look like the camera ought to support 20fps at 1600x1200. And indeed, you can even set the camera to that, using v4l2-ctl or guvcview. But the results are clearly not 20fps. The picture quality (motion is blurred) suggests that the trouble is a long exposure time on the camera, even in bright light conditions. The bottleneck isn't the processing power of the PBP, since you can get perfectly good framerates at comparable resolutions with an external webcam.

Is there a v4l2 guru in the house who might have any idea of what's going on here?

Hi folks, 

I am a total noob when it comes to soldering, but after successfully removing the VCONN switches on my Braveheart edition, I got a little more confident. 

Alas the confidence was misplaced. I tried following @megous tutorial to avoid the battery drain when the phone is off. I managed to remove U1301 ok, but as I could not get the solder to cooperate to short R1309. To make matters worse, when I removed the paper tape protecting the other components, I noticed that the capacitor (C1307?) was gone. It came off with the tape. 

So my phone is in a bad state. My question is, is there any solution? Is it repairable? (Obviously we've learned that this tiny soldering jobs are not my forte). 

Should I try to turn it on as is? Any risk of major issue? Or just likely to fail?

Can I buy a new "brain" for the phone, or should I just plan to get a whole new phone down the road. 

Thanks for your advice. I've been enjoying my pinephone and I just wish I was more skilled so that my "repair" didn't cause more problems.

Hello friends,

I realize this is my first post, but reading this forum has been extremely helpful in addressing issues with my Pinebook Pro (ANSI) so I thought I should write my experiences here to help others. Let me first say that I genuinely support what Pine64 is doing, I bought my Pinebook Pro to mess around with Linux on ARM, I bought it to tinker. I'm a technologist and developer so I didn't have concerns about getting a product that I would need to support myself. 

Before I go on, here is the TLDR; I have a Pinebook Pro that I'm giving away in Seattle for parts. Here are some key things I learned.
1. If you need to return your Pinebook from the US, you must ship it to Hong Kong. The least expensive way I found to do this was $125
2. There can be issues from the factory. Watch this video from LinuxTechShow
      a. No boot? - There is a switch on the system board to disables the eMMC
      b. No WiFi? - There is a key combination to disable the WiFi card for privacy. Press PineButton+F11 then REBOOT
      b. No sound through the headphone port? -There is a switch on the system board to send serial out through the headphone jack
3. Get an external Keyboard/Mouse. From day one you will need to update the firmware for the keyboard and trackpad
      a. If the firmware update says "no device found" try connecting to power with the barrel type power adapter. 
4. Installing a new OS to the eMMC (without taking apart your Pinebook) means booting from USB/SD then running scripts to install the OS of your choice. Watch this YouTube video from LivingLinux before you try to install.

My Pinebook Pro is dead, as in will not turn on, and the case next to the display has melted for some reason. The unit is less than a week old. Yesterday I finally managed to get my keyboard/trackpad working and install Manjaro with XFCE. I was so happy after figuring out that using the barrel connector seemed to energize something in the USB bus so the keyboard and trackpad could be recognized by the firmware update utility. KDE with Plasma was a bit to flashy for my taste, so I learned how to install to the eMMC and got XFCE up and running. Everything looked great. I had rescued my Pinebook Pro. Then I left it plugged in with the lid closed to charge up the battery over night. 

When I opened up the Pinebook it wouldn't wake from sleep. So I disconnected power, let it sit, then reconnected and I got the power light to go red, the flash green, then it went out. I disassembled the unit and disconnected the battery, connected the jumpers then powered off the barrel connector, same issue. Then I found this post talking about uBoot issues and since I had just updated the operating system I thought that could be the issue. I disconnected the power jumpers, reconnected the battery and tried to boot off the SD card. The power LED went from red to green and stayed green but there was nothing on the display. On battery power only, I grabbed my USB-C monitor (which also supplies power) and plugged it in to check for video. Nothing, but I did smell burning electronics, the pixies were trying to escape. Looking at the base of the display by the system board the plastics were warping. I unplugged everything, quickly flipped over the unit, removed the 10 screws and disconnected the battery. At this point I'm calling the unit dead. I'm not sure what happened, my theory is there was a power fault in the USB circuit somewhere, that was made stable when using the barrel connector power supply and eventually just degraded to a short. No idea.

Long story short, I have a dead Pinebook Pro here in Seattle and it will cost $125 to ship it back to China, and I'm not willing to pay that. So, if anyone in the community is here in Seattle and would like this unit for parts or to try and resurrect it, I'm happy to give it to you. I want this community to thrive, and I'm not willing to put more money into this right now. I also have the NVME adapter, new, uninstalled if anyone local wants it.

I hope the Pine64 crew can get back to the factory and improve their quality issues. This project has a ton of promise.