An unofficial Debian Installer for Pinebook Pro
#41
How does the installer set up booting when put on the MMC? The reason for this is a bit of a horror story. I wanted to try out the disk encryption, but on an SD card first.

I installed Ubuntu LXDE on the MMC using dd. This broke things pretty badly but I only found out afterwards. I could create the SD card just fine but I could not get the system to boot it. The reason was that the boot setup that comes with the Bionic image does not try to boot from the SD card, it always boots from MMC. I had taken a full image copy of my MMC, but because I could not boot from an SD card and I did not have a flasher for MMC I could not write it back.

In the end I fixed it by booting with the MMC disabled with the hardware switch and then toggling it back on before the kernel loaded. It took several tries but eventually I got the timing right and could restore the backup. If the installer sets things up so that SD card booting still works, testing this would be easier as you can boot from an LXDE card and install directly to MMC. If things don't work then doing a rollback would be simple.
#42
(01-01-2020, 09:12 AM)ljones Wrote: First thing I would like to try to get working (but do not know how) is 2D (xorg) and 3D (GPU) acceleration. If I'm reading things right the 3d requires something called "panfrost", is that correct? But what on earth does 2D acceleration require?

Panfrost is the kernel driver, no need for configuration, it's always active.
If you just install GNOME desktop via tasksel, everything works out of the box.
GNOME uses Wayland. X11 might be harder to configure with acceleration.
#43
(01-02-2020, 02:22 AM)siemsenit Wrote:
(01-01-2020, 09:12 AM)ljones Wrote: First thing I would like to try to get working (but do not know how) is 2D (xorg) and 3D (GPU) acceleration. If I'm reading things right the 3d requires something called "panfrost", is that correct? But what on earth does 2D acceleration require?

Panfrost is the kernel driver, no need for configuration, it's always active.
If you just install GNOME desktop via tasksel, everything works out of the box.
GNOME uses Wayland. X11 might be harder to configure with acceleration.

Intresting I wasn't aware that the debian packages now have wayland -- last time I checked it wasn't avaliable. I'll give that a go although I'm not really a gnome user; can wayland+kde be installed via a similar method?

Update: I tried gnome but window resizing still seems slooooow....x.x

Update 2: I did get wayland to work with KDE, but it crashes all the time!

ljones
#44
(01-01-2020, 07:32 PM)jpakkane Wrote: How does the installer set up booting when put on the MMC? The reason for this is a bit of a horror story. I wanted to try out the disk encryption, but on an SD card first.

It will reinstall the bootloaders and at present it uses the ones found in the @Mrfixit2001 update repo so the behavior will be the same as a factory image updated to v1.5 or higher (e.g. it will try to boot from SD card before booting from eMMC).
PineTime: wasp-os and MicroPython, Pinebook Pro:  Debian Bullseye
#45
(01-02-2020, 01:19 PM)ljones Wrote:
(01-02-2020, 02:22 AM)siemsenit Wrote:
(01-01-2020, 09:12 AM)ljones Wrote: First thing I would like to try to get working (but do not know how) is 2D (xorg) and 3D (GPU) acceleration. If I'm reading things right the 3d requires something called "panfrost", is that correct? But what on earth does 2D acceleration require?

Panfrost is the kernel driver, no need for configuration, it's always active.
If you just install GNOME desktop via tasksel, everything works out of the box.
GNOME uses Wayland. X11 might be harder to configure with acceleration.

Intresting I wasn't aware that the debian packages now have wayland -- last time I checked it wasn't avaliable. I'll give that a go although I'm not really a gnome user; can wayland+kde be installed via a similar method?

Update: I tried gnome but window resizing still seems slooooow....x.x

Update 2: I did get wayland to work with KDE, but it crashes all the time!

ljones

I have no idea if KDE or the required packages from QT are built against gles2 on Debian. An alternative would be to get Sway or Wayfire on it. So far those would be my first choice for Panfrost followed closely by Plasma. I definitely prefer them to Gnome by a long shot.
Compiling Mesa git is also a great thing to do if you want the most out of Panfrost. (disable libunwind when you compile it)
#46
(01-01-2020, 07:29 AM)wasgurd Wrote: Dear @danielt,

I've been using Debian over 10 years and want to make PBP as my daily driver. The default system, unfortunately, hasn't LUKS and based on Deb 9.0 while I prefer to use the testing. You have done really good job to adopt mainstream Debian to PBP, thank you!



My PBP has arrived yesterday and here's my short report:

- I didn't see how to set up root pass and host name during the installation.

- FN keys for regulate display's brightness doesn't work until I've added to /etc/udev/hwdb.d/10-usb-kbd.hwdb

evdev:input:b0003v258Ap001E*
KEYBOARD_KEY_700a5=brightnessdown
KEYBOARD_KEY_700a6=brightnessup
KEYBOARD_KEY_70066=sleep

I believe it could be added to the installer to reduce number of post-install tweaks.

- If I plug in 3,5 audio jack, the laptop's speakers doesn't disable.

- Suspend works weird. When I close the laptop's lid, it is going to suspend in 50 % cases. Then, when I open the lid, there was no automatically wake up.
I can't find a pattern to describe how it works. I used to push some keys and then, with 30 sec -1 min delay the laptop is going to woke up.

- Annoying quiet noise from the speakers

For the root prompt, hostname and Fn keys, there is sudo instead of root password (so if you want a root password you can use sudo to run passwd) but I should probably add a prompt to set the hostname (currently it inherits the hostname used by the system we install from) and make those keys work.

I've not had the same level of problems with suspend you are seeing and I certainly usually get an automatic wake up. I have occasionally had the long delay waking it up and I think that happens if I open the lid within seconds of closing it. The biggest problem with suspend is that is using suspend to idle so the power draw is a little on the high side (there is a useful level of power saving... but not enough to allow the PBP to be suspended overnight without eating battery).
PineTime: wasp-os and MicroPython, Pinebook Pro:  Debian Bullseye
#47
Hello

Thanks for making crypto disk + bullseye work, really appreciated.

I have the same problem with the audio jack. It is shortcut with the bult-in  speakers.

Comparing the bullseye/PBP with my buster/Dell laptop I find that pulsaudio on the PBP provides only the Headphones connector, whereas the other laptop has Speakers/Line_Out/Headphones (eg. Sound-> Output->Connectors). So it might well be a software problem.

I will check it against the stock OS when I have a fast SD ready.

Jordan
#48
You mentioned that other Debian-based images would work as well, so in order to install e.g. Ubuntu, the only thing necessary would be to edit the etc/apt/sources.list file right?
#49
(01-04-2020, 08:14 AM)brent.thierens Wrote: You mentioned that other Debian-based images would work as well, so in order to install e.g. Ubuntu, the only thing necessary would be to edit the etc/apt/sources.list file right?

Not sure if you replied to me directly but I guess I can answer this partly:

I would not do it live by renaming the package lists. I moved once live from a Ubuntu to a Debian release opening a can of worms. In particular, the libc components differed which forced me to boot from a live USB and replace components manually (after the system became unusable or crashed as far as I remember.)




I found this useful with the bullseye version (not needed on buster or earlier):

Starting synaptic as:

   env -u LANG synaptic-pkexec

re-enables the incrementing 'Quick filter' search field (env LANG=C .. also works.) Although I use en_GB as locale environment some python libs complained about UTF-8 problems (background story here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5552...ation-byte.)

Jordan
#50
1. In additional, I've found that LibreOffice is extremely lagging.

2. Regarding to audio:
The Pine64's wiki has different /var/lib/alsa/asound.state file, what you could find there:

https://gitlab.manjaro.org/manjaro-arm/p...ound.state

Has anybody checked how it works?

3. Bluetooth as well doesn't work, hcitool dev couldn't show any device.


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