Boots just fine. Can not install new image.

[pfeerick]

My question: How do I reimage this device?

I'm unable to get anything to boot or install. I have three different USB SD card readers. Four SD cards, five if I use my gskill 64 gig card. The Stock Ubuntu Mate is not unusable, but it keeps me from picking up the device and performing anything efficiently. DietPi sounds interesting.

How can I re-image this device with something other than Ubuntu Mate? Symptoms are every SD card - no matter the image, no matter the card - causes the machine to not boot and the light for the power just flashes. I have high end Samsung cards, SanDisk, Patriot, Gskil, etc. Once I remove the SD card it boots into the factory image just fine.

Ok, I'll first ask the really, really dumb question... because all have use have done this one time or another with the pine64 installer...  Did you make sure that you choose pinebook from the drop-down menu at the top? It defaults to the pine64 images, which won't work on the pinebook.

If you want to try a newer build of mate, you can also use this one. This is the build that is currently considered 'stable' (direct link) for Ubuntu Mate, and if you want to give i3 a try instead (it is an acquired taste though), you can download this image instead (direct link). For another lightweight desktop environment, give the Armbian builds a try, as they are using XFCE instead IIRC.