Coronavirus restrictions in Guangdong province 

The Guangdong province, where cities of GuangZhou and Shenzhen are located, has today issued a restrictive order delaying businesses from resuming activity until 10 February 2020. This is done in an attempt to curb the spread of the Coronavirus. This date may, and likely will, be further extended. For those who don't know, this is the region where PINE64 gear is produced.

Furthermore, Hong Kong - where popular PINE64 devices* featuring Lithium Ion batteries, are shipped from - has now also imposed limitations on border crossings.
[edit 03/02/2020] Hong Kong authorities announced they'll be closing all major boarder crossings from China until further notice.

What does this mean for you?


Production and shipment delays seem unavoidable at this time. The length of the delay will, of course, depend on how quickly authorities are capable of tackling the virus. There is no saying at this point if we are talking days or weeks - no one can predict how the situation will pan out.

If you wish to discuss the outbreak, its severity, how the government is handling the situation or any other aspects pertaining to the epidemic, then this isn't the right place to do so - I redirect you to the WHO discussion forums where such a conversation is more appropriate.

I'll update this post on a need-be basis.

*the Pinebook, PinePhone and Pinebook Pro all ship out from Hong Kong.

Hey guys today I'm happy to share my CS and HL builds with you
They are both uploaded on my personal gdrive and they are simple .zip files
which need to be unzipped and played nothing much or less
They both have .sh files for faster execution (Counter Strike.sh and Run Half-Life.sh)
The gameplay is not perfect but that's what we need to deal with on the stock Debian..
Hopefully later when mature a bit I will be able to offer you special build CS:GO like which runs 
on the PBP at the moment but is a bit lagy 

the cs have a fuel bugs that needs to be addressed and repaired but not a lot of time for that now..
known bugs are 
-knife animation and sound 
-zombie mode funny place respawn 
-game menu intro music have some problems with pulse audio same as on the rpi 4
-something else ? Share with me

Half-Life no bugs found  
but doesn't support bots on single player
added some skins from the newest black mesa (guns hands etc)
oh and my savegame as a bonus for you if you just want to test the game its with enabled sv_cheats 1 godmode and impulse 101
or you can just start a new game

Playing on Performance Mode is advised 
Please keep in mind that they are not the cleanest build and need some extra work to be done feel free to mod share etc..
okay that's enough for now links are under hope you enjoy and I will work on them when I have time to fix the issues

CS - https://drive.google.com/open?id=1XP87P-...2QGOn9SWi1
HL - https://drive.google.com/open?id=1eBbANr...D7rg9Q8mOd

greetings,

here is a simple build script for openarena that can be used on debian based systems. tested on debian sid arm64. i recommend using mesa-git for the latest panfrost graphics. see that other thread for details.

you can also append openarena commands to the run script, or use to make your own launch script. i've included my own below.

happy fragging.

greetings,

if you are on a "recent" kernel (5.2+) you will benefit from installing mesa from git to take advantage of the VERY latest panfrost graphics driver. 

below is a simple script to build and install mesa-git for debian-based setups. confirmed working on debian buster, bullseye, and sid. you may rerun the script at will to update mesa-git at any time.

folks on non-debian based systems can simply address requirements manually.

ccache is used to speed up rebuilds. feel free to remove if you don't want that.

hint: regarding rebuilding, you can review the git file changes for panfrost to determine if rebuilding is advantageous.

installing to /usr/local does not impact your distro mesa in ANY WAY. to uninstall for any reason,

enjoy your fps!

EDIT: now part of pbp-tools. see other forum thread for details.
https://github.com/xmixahlx/pbp-tools
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=10190

Hi guys,

I've talked personally with a few people who seem to think android support isn't really necessary for a strong Pinebook community. Even if Android support seems like the most obvious thing in the world to you, there are people who are firmly against using Android on their device. For this reason, I thought I'd try to enumerate some reasons why I think we really need to get it going.


1. Android provides easy access to Microsoft Office.

Linux users might groan at this, but the Android version of Microsoft Office is surprisingly full-featured. It provides much more than Office Online and many people, even Linux users, still have to use Office to some extent.


2. Access to games

The Pinebook will never be a gaming powerhouse, but if we can get Google Play working reliably, the Pinebook is powerful enough to play a wide variety of Android games.


3. Fills a niche

Considering the low-end specs of the Pinebook, one of the best ways to maintain healthy development for the device is to increase it's lateral utility. Being able to boot into a baremetal armv8 android install would be a strong incentive for hobbyists, developers, and mobile gamers who can't really get that experience from another laptop.


4. Access to Google proprietary video codecs

The Pinebook struggles with 1080p video streaming. There are many android devices with far inferior specs to the Pinebook that can manage it just fine on android.

I'm sure there are more, but these are some of the biggest reasons I don't want to see this area of the forum languish with only three posts.

Hello,

I got a new PinebookPro last week and did not change much except installing jackd 2.
I noticed that the sound was totally wrong, not in a distorted sense but technically wrong. After some investigation, actually some hours with ALSA devs in freenodes #alsa channel, they came to the conclusion, that there is some need for clarification and/or work to do.

Bottom line question is:  Does the PinebookPro hardware support the 32bit float sample format?
If yes there is something wrong with the driver.

What follows is a curated alsa report summary with annotations from the alsa devs.

I hope this information will be useful in creating a better software revision for units shipped in the future:

Hi,

I have a quick question.

When I got my PBP, I had the option to set the CPU speed to 1.99 MHz but after moving the icons around and messing with the layout of my desktop I can set it to 1.55 MHz max. The 1.99 MHz option has disappeared.  Also the on-demand option doesn't go higher than 1.55 MHz anymore. 
How can I restore this setting so that it goes to 1.99 again?

Thanks for any answers!

Hi Piners,

Thanks to all the tutorials and discussions on these forums I was able to get into PineTime development and put together a firmware for the watch + a companion phone app. I'd like to give back to the community. Maybe someone would find this useful.

Repository: github.com/Dejvino/pinetime-hermes-firmware

It is still an alpha version, but it serves my needs for the most part:
1) digital watch with time synced from my phone
2) notifications from the phone.

Currently it features two "watchfaces".
Standard HOME watch view:


and a CONSOLE view with a scrolling terminal of notifications:


The companion app is a very crude Android application, though I don't plan on polishing it much. Ultimately I want to create an app for PinePhone. As soon as my BH arrives, that is 

The feature set this firmware provides is tailored to my needs. I plan on daily driving this. Mainly to receive relevant notifications, see calendar events etc. I don't care about e.g. the heart rate sensor. But if you'd like to play around with this, customize it for your own needs, give it a go!

Hi there,

I am pretty new to this whole topic and therefore that might be a noob question 


I’ve bought a ROCKPRO64 and my goal is to build a NAS with openmediavault. For Powering the HDDs I had ordered the cable by pine64 but somehow I forgot to order the raid/sata controller. 

In hope that everything would work here I just bought a Raid Controller online now, actually it is a Star Tech 2xSATA Raid Controller with Marvell - 88SE9128 Chipset. As soon as arrived directly pluged into my rockpro64 but unfortunetaly I can not see the Raid Controller and therefore of course also no Disk ... :/ Google around a bit and checked with lspci etc but never able to see the raid controller. 

Can you help me out here please? Or is this Controller simply just not supported with the rockpro? 

Thanks a lot for your Help,
Kind Regards,
MAN

Hello! I've been using Manjaro Arm (burned on the emmc) on my PBP for a few weeks now and it's awesome; thanks a lot for all the work that goes into this. Really love this pinebook.

But I do have a problem happening on boot:
When I hold the Power button a few seconds, the LED light up; but the screen stays dark for 32s before anything starts showing (the M Manjaro logo comes first; then my login screen).
It's a shame because once the screen lights up the boot is pretty fast. Is this delay normal? I don't remember having these kind of delays on the default debian install.

The 30s value make me think it could be a timer on a misconfigured u-boot that maybe tries some invalid boot option, wait for 30s then tries Manjaro? I have no expierience with u-boot and am not very clear on how to debug this issue? Any clues would be welcome.