Initial Start

[lyssa]

Machine arrived yesterday. Very pleased with quality. Manjero set up with absolutely no problems. KDE seems unrefined compared to cinnamon, but I think it's safest to stay with what's known to work for now. Next step is figuring out how to make the M.2/NGFF adapter work. Need a bit more storage to make this thing a daily driver.

Great job, Pine People!

[Syonyk]

The wiki has some useful documentation on the M.2 adapter, but be aware (for daily driver use) that deep sleep is unreliable (read, "mostly doesn't work") with at least most of the NVMe SSDs installed. There's some issues with them, and unless you're really, really dead set on NVMe (at the cost of deep sleep most likely not working), I'd suggest just using the eMMC for a root partition (buy the 128GB one if you need), and toss a decent uSD card in the slot for extra storage.

The "safe" way to use your NVMe SSD is to keep your boot partition on the eMMC and pivot to the SSD for your root filesystem/home. Throw swap on the eMMC, put zswap in front of it, and you're golden.

Alternately, you can flash the various boot binaries (uboot and crew) on the internal SPI chip, which ships empty. This is a decently safe path, but if something goes wrong, it's a lot harder to recover. If you screw up the eMMC, just open the case, disable the eMMC, and there's a sequence of switch fiddling that will let you boot from firmware on the SSD and then access the eMMC. If you screw up the SPI, it's a bit of a more involved path to recover.

What are you doing that requires all the storage, out of curiosity? 128GB + a 256GB uSD card is an awful lot of reasonably performant storage unless you're really hammering the random IO (I wouldn't keep the OS on the uSD card, but the eMMC is halfway decent - slow compared to the NVMe SSD, but also lets you sleep, which is important).

I've been daily driving mine on the eMMC, and it's quite nice (I wrote up a tutorial for Ubuntu 20.04 down in the tutorials section, to include deep sleep and sound). I've got the NVMe adapter, but until the sleep issues are worked out, I don't feel like I'm generally lacking in disk performance. Try it for a while before you decide to switch things out.

[lyssa]

Good advice. Will try 128 G eMMC (on order) and SSD. Reading about SSDs here suggests that you are correct. I really don't need the SSD capacity now, so this is all good. I've always had 256G SSDs on my Linux boxes. Force of habit. And...this is all about learning some ARM stuff for me. So, good.

Now if I could only get the forum formatting to work.

L


SyonykThe wiki has some useful documentation on the M.2 adapter, but be aware (for daily driver use) that deep sleep is unreliable (read, "mostly doesn't work") with at least most of the NVMe SSDs installed.  There's some issues with them, and unless you're really, really dead set on NVMe (at the cost of deep sleep most likely not working), I'd suggest just using the eMMC for a root partition (buy the 128GB one if you need), and toss a decent uSD card in the slot for extra storage.

The "safe" way to use your NVMe SSD is to keep your boot partition on the eMMC and pivot to the SSD for your root filesystem/home.  Throw swap on the eMMC, put zswap in front of it, and you're golden.

Alternately, you can flash the various boot binaries (uboot and crew) on the internal SPI chip, which ships empty.  This is a decently safe path, but if something goes wrong, it's a lot harder to recover.  If you screw up the eMMC, just open the case, disable the eMMC, and there's a sequence of switch fiddling that will let you boot from firmware on the SSD and then access the eMMC.  If you screw up the SPI, it's a bit of a more involved path to recover.

What are you doing that requires all the storage, out of curiosity?  128GB + a 256GB uSD card is an awful lot of reasonably performant storage unless you're really hammering the random IO (I wouldn't keep the OS on the uSD card, but the eMMC is halfway decent - slow compared to the NVMe SSD, but also lets you sleep, which is important).

I've been daily driving mine on the eMMC, and it's quite nice (I wrote up a tutorial for Ubuntu 20.04 down in the tutorials section, to include deep sleep and sound).  I've got the NVMe adapter, but until the sleep issues are worked out, I don't feel like I'm generally lacking in disk performance.  Try it for a while before you decide to switch things out.