Pinebook Pro Initial Impressions

[kaylios]

I seem to be sinking deeper down the rabbit hole  ortal/portfolio/overview

I turned off the machine when the power got low and charged it until the happy light went out.

I'm only using Firefox/Chromium as supplied with the Pinebook - both seem to be working now.

Seems great to me.
Maybe your browser wasnt working because you did something wrong when trying to fix something and after the fresh restart, what you did was reseted ? (if you played with sysct or did echo XXX > /proc/sys/.... or something like that.
Maybe yesterday you did open at the same time firefox and chromium and you were too short in RAM ?
Maybe your CPU was busy running some garbage ?

Next time, if you have such issue, you can start by running and showing us the result of cat /proc/meminfo ??
And also you could start htop or top (or any other system monitor application you want) in the same time you run your browser ?

I added my "standard test" of Aisleriot Solitaire using the add software package - it has never worked on this machine.

Maybe this application is not working and this may be an issue of the distro/application and may not be related to pinebook ? By the way which OS is shipped by default with this laptop ? armbian ?
Maybe not much people are playing with it.
If I were you, and If I really want this game, I would start searching on the OS forum if anyone is aware of this BUG. You should try to find if this application has a web site with BUG report or forum or something like that
If needed, I would try to rebuild the application in debug mode and will try to get a core. So I could post the bug report to the community.

I have the eternal problem that my printers (Brother HL4150CDN and Epson XP830) are not listed in most of the limited Linux CUPS system.
Can't remember the one distro I used a good while ago that worked like windows and installed them without any effort.
It's half installed now but mentioned a missing driver element I have no idea how to get.
I copied the PPD file using a pen drive which is perfectly mounted and accessible but refuses to eject citing "no such file" or similar.

So your printer is working, isn't it ?
Don't forget that you have an ARM system with small size in comparison to x86_64 ubuntu desktop OS. So it's not a surprise to me that several things that are present in ubuntu aren't in armbian.
But in this case, I think you could have installed the driver by installing some packages. (use google to find which package). But if it's working then dont touch it
Regarding the pen drive .... next time check in the command line.
I suppose the pendrive is automounted. So next time, after mounting it, run the mount command and find your pendrive entry. (do it also before plugging your pendrive to be sure of what you are doing).
Then eject it. By the way how are you ejecting it ?
Check again with the mount command to see if the entry has disappear. If not, then you may have an issue. As a work around you can unmount it using umount command

I tried to shut down the system at one point, but although video went black it didn't turn off, ever. I had to force power off.

What had you on the screen ?
After how much time did you get something on the screen ?
Are you sure your system wasnt in the middle of the shuting down process ?

My battery level indicator has now disappeared from the desktop so I can no longer tell how low its going.
The 1.4GHz CPU speed I set on a previous boot has reverted to 400MHz.

How are the CPU speed changed ? If by doing echo to /proc/something then it's the expected behavior. This is not a permanent config change.
For the battery level, you should check it in the console to be sure that the low level is working
Unfortunately, I dont have yet the laptop so I dont know but it can be something like
cat /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/capacity

And now the system itself crashes and restarts after 5-10 minutes.

Do you have something printed in the console just before it restart ?
For example a kernel oops or kernel panic
something like that:

RBP: 00000100065cb440 R08: 00000101f8f1cff0 R09: 00000101f8f1c088
R10: 00000101f8f1cfa8 R11: 0000000000000001 R12: 0000010000012780
R13: 0000000000000000 R14: 0000000000000000 r15: 000001022fde7e48
FS: 0000000000000000(0000) GS:ffffffff804c0c00(0000)
knlGS:0000000000000000
CS: 0010 DS: 0018 ES: 0018 CR0: 000000008005003b
CR2: 0000000000000070 CR3: 000000000e3f4000 CR4: 00000000000006e0
Process kswapd0 (pid: 66, threadinfo 000001022fde6000, task
000001022fd947f0)
Stack: 00000101f8f1cff0 ffffffff80174ca5 00000000000000d0 0000000000000000
0000000000000001 00000100065cb440 0000010000012780
ffffffff8015ebdd
0000001700000001 ffffffff00000000
Call Trace:<ffffffff80174ca5>{try_to_free_buffers+67}
<ffffffff8015ebdd>{shrink_zone+3369}
<ffffffff8015f3a8>{balance_pgdat+506}
<ffffffff8015f5f2>{kswapd+252}
<ffffffff80133686>{autoremove_wake_function+0}
<ffffffff80130bd5>{finish_task_switch+55}
<ffffffff80133686>{autoremove_wake_function+0}
<ffffffff80130c24>{schedule_tail+11}
<ffffffff80110c87>{child_rip+8} <ffffffff8015f4f6>{kswapd+0}
<ffffffff80110c7f>{child_rip+0}

Code: f0 0f ba 68 70 10 8b 11 8b 41 18 83 e2 06 09 d0 75 51 48 8b
RIP <ffffffff80174a20>{drop_buffers+39} RSP <000001022fde7b28>
CR2: 0000000000000070
<0>Kernel panic - not syncing: Oops

If you have the rebbot every 5-10 minutes, then try to run dmesg command after let's say 3-4 minutes and show us the dump. You may get some hints on what is going on.

I think I might really need to try another Distro and see if that improves my lot.

Why do you have such issue and not other guys ?
It's either an hardware issue (so changing the OS wont fix it, and you may get hints using dmesg command), or you broke the configuration.

Good luck