Hi there,

I'm new here, and I've some background on Linux, Debian in particular, but I'm not a programmer but I still dare to try something special. I would like to know how the Pinebook Pro compares to the Pinetab2 in general use ? what is/are working/not working ?

Thanks all and wish you a great day !

Is there an easy way to encrypt the home directory on any of the pinephone linux distros? And is there a way to disable using USB to access files?

I love the Pinecil, but the wire I use to connect it to my [big] power supply is so large that it frequently pops out of the power connector.  How are the rest of you managing to get enough power to the Pinecil without having it disconnect all the time?

Thanks!

Jon

Hi folks.

I'm afraid to say that I've been finding owning a PPP a... cr*ppy experience.

I had expected to receive a device that, whilst the software was incomplete, at least had the basics covered - reliable booting, diagnostic ports, etc.

Well, I got lucky, and when I bought it (I think it was about a year ago) I managed to get it to work eventually after muddling my way through the assorted guides out there. I'd boot mobian, and then basically nothing was finished (fair enough, its a dev phone).

I didnt have time to play with it then (I planned to have a look at camera stuff), and it crashed on suspend so it got thrown in the "expensive paperweight" bucket.

Move on 12 months... I got some time to play, and I'd clearly forgotten / suppressed the trauma (at least my wallet had)...

After about 8 or nine attempts at getting it to power up, I managed, and... it still booted.

I thought to myself "I'll just update this debian device, and maybe it will install all that lovely fixed software and nice new toys" - I am used to Debian being reliable in this regard.

Irrationally, then, I executed

apt update
apt upgrade

And it worked!

Although a little red flag there - it now produced a deb12, not mobian boot splash...

whatever - how bad can it be?

apt dist-upgrade

oh dear... now it doesn't boot anymore...

No worry, I thought - its an open device, with OSS on it, and of course with everything being open, the instructions to fix it will be concise and easy to follow.

Nope.

I mean, this is tragic.

There is *not one* place I can find that *really* details how a PPP boots. I did find a couple of pages, but nothing on them was any use.

I mean, what, literally, is supposed to happen? theres a $£%£$^ huge LCD on the thing, but no, it just sits there blankly, or if I'm lucky, the one LED on it might change colour or it might buzz a bit.

but WHERE is any of this documented? what does the 4 buzzes mean when it occasionally does that? why does the LED go blue in some modes?

seriously - android and fastboot is better documented.

I build small devices for a living, and have worked on getting ARM devices booted for years, but this takes the cake into a whole new dimension. I'd have been utterly embarrased both personally and professionally to have released such a pile of junk.

-10 out of 10. Pathetic.

This is almost as insanely dumb as my RockPro64, which comes FROM THE FACTORY with the serial port running at 1.5Mbaud. Who the h*** wants that, ever? utterly useless, unexpected, and I had to spend AGES hunting through my serial adapters until I found one that would tolerate such a stupid speed.

WHY?

This is OPEN HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE. There is literally no excuse for this.

Any hardware on sale should come with:
1) A list of instructions on how to FULLY RESTORE IT TO FACTORY SETTINGS
2) All specs, for all versions
3) A guide that INCLUDES METHODS TO IDENTIFY  *ALL VARIANTS* of the phone - "purchased before XYth of XXX" is not good enough. I have no idea when mine was purchased at this point.
4) A bootloader that either speaks serial 8n115200 and/or (preferably) also can display status on screen / interact enough with the user to perform a self test or indiate why it's sulking.


So. Now what?

I have a useless Pine Phone Pro, that I was once enthusiatic about getting to use, that does nothing but bootloop and try to kill its battery now.

There are no instructions on restoring the phone to any sort of factory settings.

I've tried following this guide on installing tow boot, https://tow-boot.org/devices/pine64-pinephonePro.html

it doesn't actually give a link to the file it refers to, but I'm guessing its the spi-installer.img located in here:

https://github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/rel...006.tar.xz

I've tried following this on the pine64 site:
https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_P...emporarily

it SEEMS like I have the version where pressing vol_down makes it do er... something? but all it does is turn the LED blue.

this isnt documented AFAICT. Is it meant to go blue? I read that the *screen* is supposed to go blue, but that isn't happening either.

This is over a year later now - what is the excuse? EVERY SINGLE issue above should have been solved at release, and *certainly* should have been by now.

Does anybody ACTUALLY know how to make my expensive brick into a phone again?

I found that it was easy to download and install Manjaro images to my SD card using Etcher. However, after fighting Manjaro XFCE I have been pleasantly surprised by changing to Manjaro Mate. Using XFCE I tried to upgrade without success. The package manager was impossible. I tried to download/install Libre Office without success. After trying to download/install Abiword I then tried to use the terminal and the command "sudo pacman -Sy abiword". Everything appeared to work. However, When I rebooted the SD card was corrupted and the system locked up. So I reformatted the SD card and installed the Mate version of Manjaro. What a difference. The layout was more like what I was used to from working with my Raspberry Pi's. Icons on the taskbar were handy and made sense. I was able to install Libre Office without any difficulty. The download/install was slow but I could easily follow everything by watching the Package Manager screen. My Pinebook Pro is sooo much fun using Manjaro Mate.

Might have bricked my modem? Tried flashing the modem sdk. It failed so I flashed the recovery and tried again. Network Manager says modem is disabled, mmcli -L shows the modem, and mmcli -m any -e gives the following

I purchased a Pinebook Pro nVME adapter on eBay. I then installed a Samsung PM981 256 Gb card. I realize this card was not on the list of approved cards. However, the PM980 was and I thought I would give it a try. Everything worked great. Took special care during the installation to make sure all cables were moved to be clear of any cabling, speaker housings and battery plugs. Thanks to all who post. My next project will be to install Manjaro, so the drive will be bootable and remove the SSD.

What are the options for bootloaders diectly loaded onto the SPI of the pinebook PRO.
The goal of this thread is to get a comprehensive list of the options avaliable as the information for this is spread far and wide after 4 years.
Please list the name and version number of the bootloader and its advantages and disadvatages.
Personal experiences welcome.

Hi,

I wanted to dust off my PinePhone (developer edition, I think)(not the Pro, for sure), but I think I "locked" it.

What I did :
- I flashed "Jump Drive" on SD card, 
- booted on SD card, 
- plugged it to my PC
- runned `dd if=<postmarketos-image.iso> of="sdc`.

Now, I have PostmarketOS loading screen, but it never loads.
I think PostmaketOS does not load because I never installed TwoBoot. (did not know, too bad)
Right ?

I can't boot on SD card anymore.
Is it because of my ` dd` ? The boot order was replaced ?
Am I missing something ?

How can I recover my phone ?


Thx for ideas,
LeNouveau

I was working on https://github.com/yogo1212/arch-linux-star64 when I realized I was no longer getting any UART activity from my Star64.
I've tried multiple adapters but had no success.
It was working when I tested my OpenSBI build.

Is there anything that might disable the UART functionality?
Fishwaldo's image still boots and works - just no UART output.

regards :-)