Greetings, Piners!  I've been intrigued by the Pinebook Pro for a few months, and I decided to take the plunge when the latest order window opened up at the start of this month.  I was glad to see from the mid-month update post that Pine64 would receive them on Aug. 24; I figured it might take a week to check them out or do whatever, and then a few weeks to receive it from Europe.  I was pleasantly surprised to get the DHL notification saying it should arrive by Aug. 31.  Imagine how I felt when it got delivered today (four days early)!  I don't know how you guys pulled that off, but I am extremely pleased!

Initial impressions are very good; it looks great when unboxing, and is deceptively light looking—it definitely feels solid, not cheap at all.  Once I got it configured and rebooted, I thought the taskbar icons looked very sharp; the resolution is definitely nice.  Loading the desktop environment was slower than I was expecting; that's because the machine looks and feels so good, I forgot it wasn't a $1000+ Intel laptop.     I like that Manjaro comes installed, because I'm a fan of Arch Linux; I've never been a KDE fan, though, so I don't feel at home in the default environment and am planning to install one or more alternatives.

So far, I'm loving the new toy!!  Thanks to the Pine64 team for such a great and inexpensive design!

--
Michael Hill

Just got my pinebook pro. Turned it on, disliked it used manjaro, went to install KDE neon.

I read on here you can't boot from USB and great. The micro sd card refuses to stay inserted.

I can push it in with force and get to computer to recognize it, but when i take my finger off of it and it just springs right back out.

No matter how hard I push it in, it never clicks and stays in.

I remember reading something along the lines of they don't take refunds.

That's would've been fine for something small like a dead pixel, but not being able to install the OS i wanted completely kills the entire reason I bought it from the ground up.

Not sure what I can do at this point but buy a new pinebook pro laptop? Or am I doing something wrong that I'm oblivious to?

Thank you!
Samuel

Hey All,  Spent ages trying to solve this one and still no closer to getting it solved.

Bought PinebookPro, ansi keyboard at the end of 2019. This problem has been happening for ages. Due to covid etc I haven't gotten to looking at this for ages.

Would appreciate if anyone knows what's going on, or if the keyboard is faulty.


* On boot using an external keyboard everything is fine
* As soon as any key is pressed on the internal keyboard, it goes to uppercase and gets stuck there. Numbers only type the shifted items (!@#$% etc)
* Running showkey (https://linux.die.net/man/1/showkey) and pressing left shift once keeps saying that 'keycode 42 press', which is left shift key. It's not physically stuck though and pressing it shows press and release for it as well.


Pressing any other key stops the constant stream of 'keycode 42 press', but still behaves as if it's stuck.

Only a reboot fixes it and lets me type normally on the external kb again.

I've updated using jackhumbert firmware updater from github, tried this several times and still no joy. In desperation I tried the ISO keyboard version, that doesn't show the shift stuck behaviour. Going back to ansi and it reverts to the shift stuck behaviour.

Would really appreciate any tips on how to solve this, or even if it's possible.

Hi

I want to know from people who have used google fi on the pine phone (if any).

What is your experience?

thanks!

I first thought there was some problem with my Pinephone's screen or its driver since it turns off randomly, e.g. while web browsing. After a while I realised that this happens when I have my fingers close to the top front of the phone - i.e. this is caused by the proximity sensor.

Has anyone else noticed this? Shouldn't the proximity sensor only be active during a phone call?

Hi, first post here!

My big project this summer was to build a NAS with a RockPro64 at its heart, making use of its PCIe connector to connect an LSI SAS HBA and a SAS expander to connect much more than 4 drives. On top of that, I was able to install ZFS quite easily and use it as a remote backup server for my main NAS. I don't thinks there's many other SBCs than can handle all of that.

After a lot of reading around here and Github, I only tried installing ayufan's pre-release from April, because it added the neccessary support for the LSI card. I chose the OMV version buster-openmediavault-rockpro64-0.10.12-1184-arm64.img.xz and things have been more or less smooth (my gripes are about OMV more than the RP64).


Now, the problem is that I'm trying to send backups between my servers and I'm hitting a strange 300 KByte/s bottleneck when sending from the remote RP64 to my local proxmox Ryzen server. The same test in the other direction achieves about 30 MByte/s (both locations have 300 Mbit fiber internet connections).

Next I've tried with iperf and a Mac Mini that is in the same location as the RockPro64 and the results stump me again:

just not from my RockPro64

Hi there! I am trying to set up communication between an Attiny85 and my RockPro64 over UART (running Armbian, kernel `Linux rockpro64 5.7.15-rockchip64 #20.08 SMP PREEMPT Mon Aug 17 00:26:28 CEST 2020 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux`). The issue is that I can't connect to the serial port:

• Battery positive - Attiny85 pin 8
  
• Battery negative - Attiny85 pin 4 - RockPro64 ground on GPIO pin 6
  
• Attiny85 pin 6 (PB1) - RockPro64 UART4_RX on GPIO pin 21 (connected through a 1K current-limiting resistor)
  
• UART4_TX is not connected because currently I only need unidirectional communication
  

I'm interested in supporting braille input on a PinePhone.  The datasheet contains a lot of useful-looking information on the hardware, but (of course) it says nothing about software APIs for the touch screen. Assuming that I'm running Linux (e.g., Mobian, pmOS), where should I look for this information?

Be aware, these tests are being executed using an out-of-box testing methodology. All tests are preformed with minimal interaction/setup of devices outside of: OS imaging/updating,  SIM installation, Wifi Configuration,  and Power Cycling the devices.

Results: mobian/2020-08-27-Verizon.html
              mobian/2020-08-27-TMobile.html

[b]Conclusion: OS is not Ready for pinephone to be daily driver.

Notes: Today was an interesting testing day. MMS is still not working. The camera is still lagging. Call quality varied between TMobile and Verizon. Call quality of the microphone on TMobile was great. Clear, no echo, no problems. Call quality of the microphone on Verizon is very sensitive. Louder then necessary. It made the call experience very poor.

Now that I have recruited some help with Mobain from @AmazingNutria I am considering beginning some daily manual QA on this OS.

First I have a few questions:

1. Is this OS ready to even consider for a Release Candidate yet?
   
2. Has anyone seen any progress on this OS since they started tinkering with it?
   
3. How many features are available on the dev builds? 
   
4. Is this something people might look forward to?