Last week on Manjaro I got a whole stack of updates to GNOME and some system packages. After rebooting, both gdm and GNOME give me black screens with cursors, journalctl /usr/bin/gnome-shell gives me a bunch of errors: 

I would like to see a PineTime LTE (eSIM) version...if there is even an OpenSource/FreeSoftware OS that supports this.  I gather Google hasn't bothered to open source WearOS.

My RockPro64 finally arrived, and when I unpacked it, I realised that I forgot to include a CPU heatsink on my order.

I have read in a number of places that the RK3399 get very hot, so it would be foolish to run it without a heatsink, but as my last order took 6 weeks to arrive, I don't want to order just a heatsink from the PINE store and wait that long before I can start using my new RockPro64.

Can anyone suggest where I might get a substitute heatsink from? Does the heatsink spec match a well known standard from elsewhere in the electronics industry? Looking at the board it is clear that a CPU cooler from a desktop CPU would not fit, and the mounting would be totally different, but would a chipset heatsink likely fit?


Thanks.

Hello wonderful Pine64 people,

First off, I read all the other threads on vibrating and motors on this forum for the pinephone. I don't see a fix for my problem with an otherwise cool phone. I got my really cool pinephone in the mail earlier this month, and it vibrates all the time it is on. Before the booting even shows light on the screen, the motor is vibrating. It vibrated from the first moment I turned it on. It vibrates after the screen shuts down, and up until the phone is completely off. It vibrates now. I tried booting a different OS to see if it the motor still runs all the time, it does, it still has the same issue. So, it likely isn't a programming issue. When I contacted support I was told: 

Hello (Motor_why),

Please to inform you that the PinePhone batch consider as developer state, for more info on PinePhone bring up, please visit PINE64 forum and also communicate with developers at PinePhone IRC, http://www.pine64.xyz, /join #pinephone


Your understanding and patience is greatly appreciated.

support team#2...


I don't know what to do. I am now posting here, Reddit. The private outreach didn't work, and since I can't return it for a phone that is vibrating all over, I'm willing to do what people recommend. 


I really want this phone to work. 


Sincerely,
Motor_why

Have been having trouble getting mobile data on any of the available distributions, and finally with the help of IRC, manpages, and a few guides, I managed to get mobile data on my operator, which requires setting up an APN with user and password.

So for me it wasn't a simple matter of using ofonoctl wan --connect --append-dns, or simply enabling ofonod, or anything of the sorts. I had to dig in deeper.

This has only been tested under pmOS + Phosh so far, because it uses NetworkManager and it's easy to install ModemManager without messing up the whole system (like I did once under Ubuntu Touch). YMMV on other distributions.

Step 1

Install pmOS your favorite way, and make sure to install modemmanager

Up for a crude, barely functional method for taking photos with your PinePhone?
Of course you are. You wouldn't have one otherwise.

It's not too hard either. Credit to the postmarketOS wiki as it had the hard part.
You will need to install the mpv and v4l-utils packages.

I have gone around in circles trying to get a couple Brother printers to work on my network.  They are an MFC-J4620DW (color ink jet) and an JL-L2930DW.  Both are less than a year old.  The AUR builds end up with  the drivers 'not available for aarch64 architecture.  I've done some searches for ideas, but apparently, I'm not grasping something ... as all i end up with is my head spinning.  I'm not new to Linux, but am to Manjaro (usually use flavors of Ubuntu) ... I don't seem to be having too much trouble with Manjaro but apparently the aarch64 architecture is.

Thanks in advance.https://download.brother.com/welcome/doc101074/cv_eng_login_password_insertion_a.pdf

As you may have seen in my other posts, I am tinkering with Gnome in PMOS/Alpine.

Originally, I installed Gnome alongside Phosh and started it from Terminal. Although all individual screen elements were rather small, this produced a near perfect screen layout (for me at least).

I am now trying to build an image from scratch that I may be able to share. However, deleting Phosh and booting right into Gnome has messed up the video driver.

Checking under Settings/Details/About gives me "Graphics unknown" whereas my old setup says "Graphics Mali400".

I found some interesting info about the Mali400 hardware here:

https://wiki.debian.org/MaliGraphics

And, checking both my installations, I found a file called    mali-dp.ko   in

/pmOS_root/lib/modules/5.5.0/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/arm

The problem seems to be that this driver was deactivated when I deleted Phosh.

How can I get it back to run?

Many thanks for your help.

Power measurements of kernel builds on X cores with make -jX. [Note, the base system is booted off an SD card with the kernel source code located on the eMMC card. Eventually, I will redo the measurements when booted straight from eMMC].

-j1: 10.0W +/- 0.5W (0 ... 07.0W with screen disabled)
-j2: 12.7W +/- 0.5W (0 ... 09.6W with screen disabled)
-j3: 13.7W +/- 0.5W (0 ... 10.2W with screen disabled)
-j4: 14.3W +/- 0.5W (0 ... 11.2W with screen disabled)
-j5: 15.0W /- 0.5W (0 ... 11.3W with screen disabled)
-j6: 15.0W /- 0.5W (0. .. 11.4W with screen disabled)

When the screen is turned on, power consumption is quite constant with a variance of +/- 0.5W. It's puzzling that occasionally no power is consumed for a few seconds when the screen is turned off. Maybe the battery is taking over during these short intervals?

The external power supply can provide up to 15W. Utilizing 4 cores, the system requires from time to time almost all that power and while utilizing 5 or 6 core, the system requires all the time all that power and probably occasionally even more. This helps explaining the sudden drops in battery charge from 100% to 91% on systems under load (there are are a few threads here on this board).


I also noticed weird things going on which are barely explainable [the actual timestamps are rough guesses. Numbers for the sake of numbers]:

t=00min. I stress the system with make -j5. Power consumption 15W
t=10min. I continue stressing the system with make -j5: Power consumption goes to 0W.
t=11min. I stop the make -j5. Power consumption remains at 0W.
t=20min. Power consumption goes to 13W.
t=40min. Over the last 20 min, the power consumption went slowly down from 13W eventually reaching 8.4W. 8.4W also the power consumption of a freshly booted system.


I gain the impression that at t=10min, the internal battery may have taken over and then from t=20 to 40, the power supply charged back the internal battery. I did not see any capacity drops on /sys/class/power_supply/cw2015-battery/charge, though. Maybe the charge dropped by less than 0.5% keeping the rounded value of 100?


Let's focus on display off (without load): When the display is off, there is an oscillation of 0W for 2 seconds and 5.4W for two seconds. Do here really main power and battery flip flop charging the Pinebook Pro?

Any comments? Can you guys do further power measurements?

It's about time.

Just keep in mind that this is a PoC about native virtualization on AW A64, Windows 10 ARM on A64 is not really usable as you thought, no networking, keyboard/mouse get borked most of the time when you do something, frequent BSODs because watchdog keeps timeout and very slow.

The way how this is being done is the same as Pinebook Pro, but you have to skip OOBE using audit mode (Shift+Ctrl+F3 when it fails to update).

But better yet, just replace the ISO Windows with a Linux distro, it makes your life easier, and it's also faster too.