Pinebook Pro Initial Impressions

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Ladies and Gentlemen! All those not adequately addressed!

I just landed after many days abroad, to find my new, ANSI PBP delivered - not one hour prior to my own arrival. I had this stripped out of the box and booted on battery in about five minutes. I'm posting from Firefox and will be purging any trace of Google from the image. ;-)

First impressions align very much with those general recent postings. On first boot, KB and trackpad weren't responsive in Light DM, just frozen. A quick CTL-ALT-F1 got me to a console, tho'. I logged in root, changed password and quickly edited /etc/passwd /etc/shadow and /etc/group, then moved the /home/rock to my new <username>. A quick su - <username> landed me in the right directory, and ownership/permissions were verified, before giving a passwd command for change. I could exit both nested login shells, and ALT-F7 to LightDM, now behaving with the input hardware! Go figure. I was on wireless in less than another half-minute.

Zipping around, it's nicely set-up. I haven't done any upgrades yet to firmware - no mrfixiit updates yet either. "Raw" it's quite usable, as soon as I change the ISO keymap, at least!

I have a couple EMMc modules and the USB adaptor here. I also expect another ISO PBP that I bought from another user on the forum, which should arrive in a couple days. So, after also acquiring a gaggle of suitable SD cards too, I expect some grand experiments to commence. LOL

First will be just a stable Debian and upstream kernel, per the work of Daniel and others here. I'll have my comfortable environment and workflow, to always fall back upon.

Okay, enough spouting! I haven't even plugged the mains adaptor yet. Thanks again to Pine64 and the community for this lovely little machine!