Pinebook Pro Initial Impressions

[ab1jx]

OK, skimmed this thread to try to make sure I’m not making redundant comments.  I can’t read the bloody thing, the resolution is just too high to fit in a 14 inch size.  Some stuff is OK but for serious programming in an rxvt or uxterm window where things are a fixed number of pixels it’s hard to tell a . from a , or : from a ;.  Emulators like lxterminal don’t work because they hog too many key definitions and interfere with mc.  I’m glad I didn’t get the 11 inch version.

So, looking for a little advice on changing the screen resolution.  In /boot/extlinux/extlinux.conf the video resolution appears in what seems to be a kernel command string.  On my Rock64 that’s not the only place it needs to go, also need to update-initramfs.  You can’t define new resolutions there, you can only pick ones defined at a lower level.  With help a year ago I got my Rock64 to run at 1024x768.

I don’t like the physical touchpad, no visible border around it, no markings where the touchpad leaves off and the buttons begin.  Combined with the all black case it’s very difficult to use in bad lighting.  You can’t feel an edge that isn’t there.  I’ve been using laptops for 25 years, never hit one where somebody decided to hide the buttons before.  Doing a right-drag is lots of fun, or even a left drag.

Some problems are caused by there being no locale defined.  I stuck a copy of raspi-config on and let it fix that.  But it’s Stretch, not Buster, not worth sinking a lot of time into.  Firefox crashes, it’s nice to build from sources, they seem to work better that way, don’t fret what’s in the debs.  I’d consider the OS to be just for testing the hardware but now it’s time to replace it.

I ordered an emmc to usb adapter with it, haven’t found it yet