11-17-2019, 05:34 PM
I've been playing with my new PBP for a week now.
The physical look and feel is excellent. The flat black with matte screen is absolutely amazing looking. I did notice though, the bottom cover wasn't seated. The screws didn't seem to be fully tightened
The included software image does need some polish. Most preinstalled images do. I usually employ a "slash and burn" policy, removing a large number of installed packages. In this case I was a little reserved, I just removed haskell, mono, samba and a bunch of orphaned libraries. Good for just under a Gig of free space. (I even left systemd!!. Its not going to cause problems for me this time, I'm sure of it)
The console is not set up so in went the terminus font and console-setup. Set the keyboard to "gb" in /etc/default/keyboard. Set the font to "Terminus" at "10x20" in /etc/default/console-setup
I also had to set the locale with dpkg-reconfigure locales
In the GUI I noticed a bit of tearing and a bit of corruption when initially moving a window over another. Otherwise it is very usable.
Firefox crashed enough to make it unusable. I did notice this was an Ubuntu build, so I downloaded an update manually from ports.ubuntu.com ( version 70.0.1 for unbuntu 16.04.1, armhf). This version has been rock solid
I attempted the same with chrome, while it didn't crash opening settings anymore the video performance was very poor
Ejecting a usb drive caused an error message. Fixed it by installing 'eject'
There is a problem with suspend. I works fine the first time, after that it doesn't work. There is a "device usb5 failed to suspend: error -16" in the logs.
The headphone out has a problem. Sometimes it sounds as thou the channels are mixed up and out of phase, sort of like when the headphone jack is not fully seated. Playing around with alsamixer, turning the volumes up and down, fixes it. It seem like turning the volume up to the max trips it again.
The system hard crashes regularly when switching from the console to the GUI
I was going to investigate this this morning, but I found my PBP off even though I had left it on. Worse it wouldn't start
So I took the bottom cover off to have a look. I noticed a "reset" button, so I pushed it, screwed the cover back on and tried turning it on - no luck. When I went to remove the cover again I noticed one the hinge screws had pulled through. Reviewing the photos I had taken when I first removed the cover I see both hinge spacers were cracked. When I took the cover off a second time the one spacer had broken into many tiny pieces when the screw went through it.
I've got the epoxy out to attempt a fix, or maybe I'll make a steel spacer when I get into the shop later in the week
I manage to turn on the PBP just now so things don't look so bad
This not a laptop for someone who is afraid to roll up their sleeves and do some work on it
The physical look and feel is excellent. The flat black with matte screen is absolutely amazing looking. I did notice though, the bottom cover wasn't seated. The screws didn't seem to be fully tightened
The included software image does need some polish. Most preinstalled images do. I usually employ a "slash and burn" policy, removing a large number of installed packages. In this case I was a little reserved, I just removed haskell, mono, samba and a bunch of orphaned libraries. Good for just under a Gig of free space. (I even left systemd!!. Its not going to cause problems for me this time, I'm sure of it)
The console is not set up so in went the terminus font and console-setup. Set the keyboard to "gb" in /etc/default/keyboard. Set the font to "Terminus" at "10x20" in /etc/default/console-setup
I also had to set the locale with dpkg-reconfigure locales
In the GUI I noticed a bit of tearing and a bit of corruption when initially moving a window over another. Otherwise it is very usable.
Firefox crashed enough to make it unusable. I did notice this was an Ubuntu build, so I downloaded an update manually from ports.ubuntu.com ( version 70.0.1 for unbuntu 16.04.1, armhf). This version has been rock solid
I attempted the same with chrome, while it didn't crash opening settings anymore the video performance was very poor
Ejecting a usb drive caused an error message. Fixed it by installing 'eject'
There is a problem with suspend. I works fine the first time, after that it doesn't work. There is a "device usb5 failed to suspend: error -16" in the logs.
The headphone out has a problem. Sometimes it sounds as thou the channels are mixed up and out of phase, sort of like when the headphone jack is not fully seated. Playing around with alsamixer, turning the volumes up and down, fixes it. It seem like turning the volume up to the max trips it again.
The system hard crashes regularly when switching from the console to the GUI
I was going to investigate this this morning, but I found my PBP off even though I had left it on. Worse it wouldn't start
So I took the bottom cover off to have a look. I noticed a "reset" button, so I pushed it, screwed the cover back on and tried turning it on - no luck. When I went to remove the cover again I noticed one the hinge screws had pulled through. Reviewing the photos I had taken when I first removed the cover I see both hinge spacers were cracked. When I took the cover off a second time the one spacer had broken into many tiny pieces when the screw went through it.
I've got the epoxy out to attempt a fix, or maybe I'll make a steel spacer when I get into the shop later in the week
I manage to turn on the PBP just now so things don't look so bad
This not a laptop for someone who is afraid to roll up their sleeves and do some work on it
