Today I installed this drive with @danielt hack (thanks ).
PBP was at 14% of battery at the time I booted it and the boot was successful. Then I copied almost entire filesystem from eMMC to SSD and it went fine.

So I think one might say it works OK. If anything bad happens I will update this thread.

I ordered it on amazon and it came quite quick delivered straight from amazon warehouse by DHL.


edit1: I have put it into hardware accessory compatibility list on wiki.


edit2: Some performance comparison between eMMC and NVME:


[root@pbp ~]# hdparm -Tt --direct /dev/nvme0n1


/dev/nvme0n1:
 Timing O_DIRECT cached reads:   1934 MB in  2.00 seconds = 966.69 MB/sec
 HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
 Timing O_DIRECT disk reads: 2646 MB in  3.00 seconds = 881.86 MB/sec




[root@pbp ~]# hdparm -Tt --direct /dev/mmcblk2

/dev/mmcblk2:
 Timing O_DIRECT cached reads:   300 MB in  2.01 seconds = 149.55 MB/sec
 HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed: Invalid argument
 Timing O_DIRECT disk reads: 440 MB in  3.01 seconds = 146.42 MB/sec

I taught coding at a private school for several years (first LegoWedo, then Scratch). I taught children from 5 to 12 years old. Children want to develop further in the direction of coding, so I want (after the winter break) to open a class with programming in Python and EduBlocks.
That's why I'm looking for single board computers for my class.

What do you recommend to me? My first choice was Raspberry Pi, but I'm a big fan of Pine64 (I use Pinebook Pro on a daily basis, and Pinephone (Brave Heart) will be coming soon ).

I want to be able to install a simple linux OS (debian, manjaro, ubuntu) with Python and a browser (EduBlocks).
I would also like to be able to connect additional sensors to the boards in the future (temperatures, distances, etc.). Ideally, the board should be compatible with the Grove system.

What do you recommend from the Pine64 family?

I'm having issues using my nVME drive with my pinebook pro.  Any time I do any sort of major read or write the entire system freezes.  I have attempted the power reduction settings listed in the wiki, however, the state is not saveable and does not fix the issue.  I'm using a Samsung 970 500gb.  Any help would be appreciated; I'm at a loss.

  Front Page at the Pine 64 Store :



          "The Brave Heart is Shipping"   !

Follow directions on the official Docker site here and use the armhf set of instructions. This is confirmed to work for me on MrFixIt2001's build of Debian at this time. 

The remainder of this post was hastefully written by me on my first night owning my PBP. The excitement must have gotten the best of me and can be ignored. It may still be useful if someone decides to use a distro that is configured for aarch64 and thus not supported by docker in a packaged form at this time. I am changing the repo name from being specific for the pinebook to being more generic as I feel it is misleading as it stands.

The steps taken in a nutshell are as follows

1. Choose from one of the available versions on docker.com and download the tarball
   
2. Extract the tarball to somewhere in your path. eg /usr/local/bin
   
3. Create the docker user group and add yourself to it.
   
4. Don't reinvent the wheel download both docker.service and docker.socket located here https://github.com/docker/docker-ce/tree...it/systemd and modify to your needs. Specifically make sure the ExecStart directive in the file matches the path you installed dockerd to.
   
5. Copy these files to /etc/systemd/system/
   
6. Enable docker via `systemctl enable docker` so that the docker daemon starts at boot.
   
7. Be sure to log out and log in for the group changes to take effect.
   
8. Enjoy docker!
   

Just curious if it's possible to swap the left control key with the fn key?

On the OS Level, the FN key doesn't even register so remapping on this level is not possible.

I noticed the tilde character is not mapped correctly. Also I noticed the double quotes and at symbol are swapped.           

Can this be mapped somewhere to be corrected or is it in the ANSI keyboard firmware?

Well, my PBP (ANSI) arrived yesterday!

It's been great fun to use so far -- I've even updated the keyboard and trackpad firmware (after finding an external keyboard after step 1 and a panicked moment), then discovered that my 5V power supply seems to be dead -- so I am borrowing a 3A USB power supply with a USB A to C cable and charging (sloooowly - about 1% an hour) through USB-C.

So - to my question - I've been reading that there are some kernel options to enable VPU decoding, but they don't seem to be configured with the kernel that shipped with the unit (or, rather, then one the Mr.Fixit script updated me to).  Is this still an important step in maximizing performance?  If so, what are the best next steps?

SGx2

I noticed that the default keyboard shortcuts for playing and pausing media does not work on Manjaro.

This is useful to have if you are like me and have headphones that have a play/pause button or a keyboard with media keys.
This works with my Razer Hammerhead USB-C Headphones and Logitech Craft Keyboard

First step is remove the default keyboard shortcuts.

Global Shortcuts -> Other Shortcuts -> Media Controller -> Play/Pause Media Playback. Set this to None. It doesn't work so
we are getting it out of the way.

Interesting to note that volume up and down work out of the box. Less work for us!

xbindkeys allows you to map any key to any command...

I want to buy 2 micro SD cards for running of alternative OSes.

The faster the more expensive . What speed class may be a sensible tradeoff?