I was deleting something from the computer and accidentally deleted an important folder in root.  When I tried restarting, the computer turns on but the screen is black.  I want to reflash the laptop with the Manjaro OS again so I can start over but don't know how to do that.  Any guide?

Hi , is there a way to replace the display panel on Pinebook 11.6'' and if there is the possibility where can I buy it?

Thanks.

So to preface, I originally thought this device was amazing. Decent build quality and other than the factory somehow defaulting wifi to off, I thought it was good!

My first mistake was trying to install anything other than what was on the emmc already. I tried manjaro-xfce and the wifi wasn't detected - at all. When I plugged in a usb wifi adapter to update the installation, it refused to boot after the update. I went through the process twice, same result.

After that, it was an endless slog. Did I mention that there's no eject on the sdcard reader? Is that intentional? Am I supposed to have to find a flat screwdriver to get my sdcard out every time? I did try USB (since I think I read that's supported), but it wouldn't boot from that on either port.

I tried again, with the original KDE manjaro "supported release". I tried three different sdcards, two computers and four different programs/methods to write the images. Every time, it either wouldn't boot, booted into read-only mode or I got endless loops of "authentication failure" when trying to boot and start the installer. I tried mrfixit's version and then used manjaro-arm-installer too. I even tried dd-ing from the SD card when I could actually convince it to start. No go.

After a while I managed to get the manjaro i3 version to install AND have wifi (victory), but I don't WANT to use i3, so I updated and installed XFCE. Fine. Then I rebooted, or tried to. Wouldn't power on. Read up on the wiki, and figured the emmc was loose. Checked. Reseated. Tried the reset button. Finally had no choice but to disable emmc. Fine. Boots again, but seems to corrupt the sdcard too. Bought a new sdcard in case this was the problem. Nope.

So I have a $200 paperweight and nothing to show for it. It won't reliably boot from sdcard (again, why is there no eject functionality?) and the emmc is seemingly useless. I cannot express how disappointed I am.

I tried to install Debian on my Pinebook Pro, because I don't really like Manjaro. I made the bootable SD with the Pinebook Pro build of Debian, booted into debian, and tried to write the debian disk image to the eMMC with gnome-disk-utility. I cleared all of the partitions before doing this, including the boot-manjaro partition. Perhaps that was my mistake, as now I can't boot at all, even with the SD card.

Is there any way to fix this?

Thanks!

Just received my Pinebook Pro last Thursday, like it a lot so far. Wondering if anybody knows how much vertical clearance there is between the CPU/WiFi/eMMC and the bottom panel. I've been looking around here for the last few days and I've seen some people talking about adding thermal pads to those parts of the board to help with performance (I've heard the WiFi module in particular can get toasty). I don't even know how I would go about measuring the clearance.

Hy there, today the Pinebook Pro arrived. Beautiful !!
I'm now in the process to install and configure the laptop (with Fedora 32) on the emmc. I've forgotten to order the NVMe SSD Interface Adapter.
How do get one? On Amazon it's not listed.  Do I have to order it at store.pine64.org ?

Thanks for Pinebook Pro
andreas

Hi,

It's my first post so a hello and words of appreciation are in order. I've dreamt of a FOSS-friendly phone ever since I realized mobile phones are actually computers, back when we had Symbian S60 and the like, and the PinePhone (along with the Librem 5) seem the first devices promising to fulfill that dream.

To the point, PinePhone is listed as out of stock in the store, are they going to become available again anytime soon?

Cheers

Greetings

My girlfriend and I both got our PBPs in last week. Out of the box I had issues with mine not booting properly.

I got the Manjaro setup process then on reboot, I got the orange to green led sequence but no back light on the screen. After a few power cycles I was able to boot into Manjaro. Every other power cycle the issue returns though. I can do a hard poweroff and power back up and it fixes the issue; though, it sometimes takes 3 or 4 power cycles to fix the issue. There seems to be no relation between power connectivity across boots as I have read in other posts on this forum. I have also tried switching ttys and trying to reboot through the serial console, as if the screen were just blanked, which was also fruitless.

I'm running the PBP as shipped from the factory; though I did allow Manjaro to do a system update once it finally booted.

My girlfriend's PBP, on the other hand, is behaving quite nicely. 

I'm not sure where to start with debugging this. It looks like a hardware issue given that its not happening on both PBPs; but, I don't want to rule out the possibility that the Manjaro setup script botched something. Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

[Solution]

The solution as mentioned by @khanku is that there are bugs in Manjaro's build of UBoot.

There is a uboot build in this git repo: https://github.com/mrfixit2001/updates_repo/tree/v2.0 The v2.0 branch targets PBP. There is a script in the directory pinebook/filesystem called mrfixit_update.sh. The script is smart enough to determine the target drive for writing the uboot image. I didn't want to install the kernel and other stuff, so I borrowed the script and made some redactions to fit my needs.

This may not be the best way to handle it; but, its what I did to get moving:

Hi,
I just received my new pinebook pro today. It booted up no problem. But there is no wifi? When I do ip addr in a terminal it only shows a loopback adapter no wifi adapter.

your help is appreciated.

geekyjm

Hi,

I got inspired by the cool sxmo project and decided to try something similar with my favorite tiling compositor: Sway. I've put together a proof of concept (POC) solution which consists of several config files and shell scripts. You can find it here: https://github.com/Dejvino/pinephone-sway-poc

There are various menus and shortcuts to help you avoid using the on-screen keyboard all the time. E.g. touching the backlight indicator spawns a custom dialog where you can change the settings. You can also use touch gestures to do some common tasks like move terminals around etc. Pressing the power button puts the phone into "sleep" mode to avoid draining the battery that much (replacing  the default shutdown action).

Be aware that this is just a bunch of configs that you can apply to your existing postmarketOS installation. Not a full image. Plus it likely has some gaps. But I think it could be helpful for someone anyway. It's surprising how much you can achieve with just the sway config file!

But that's not all! Even if you don't care about sway you might want to check out pinephone-toolkit which is a collection of UI-agnostic tools for controlling the LED, backlight, vibrations and putting the secondary CPUs into sleep. These should work with any distribution, so it is a nice building block.