What's a good image to use now? [tutorial help as well]

[KC9UDX]

Apparent antenna size doesn't directly correlate to signal strength. There are several factors. I don't even know what's inside that little dongle; it could perhaps be a nice fractal antenna. The internal antenna may work better outside the case. Mine (I have 3) might be ill-placed, cut to the wrong length, too close to certain metal objects. All of them are far too close to the bottom cover. The receivers and transmitters could be vastly different. Ever wonder why some cellphones outperform some laptops for connectivity?

There's nothing here like schöner Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof to compare; (and I am forbidden to return there to experiment). Also I'm not sure I ever tried any such "public" WiFi. I only use it at home, or tethered (by WiFi) to a phone. So it is perhaps different in other situations.

[frank_philip]

What's a good OS to put on it now?

The important question to ask: a) does suspend to mem work and b) do webbrowers as well as (some) video players decode in GPU.

I hadn't even thought to ask those questions to tell the truth.

[xyzzy]

The one problem that could come up is with a wifi app wpa_supplicant. The latest version (2.11, from memory) seems to have trouble with the Pinebook Pro.
Setting the version back (to 2.10 I think) solves that. There is a Manjaro.forum post if you face that issue.

In testing branch Manjaro is a great and up to date distro.

Just tried this and can confirm that wifi still doesn't work, until I downgraded wpa_supplicant to 2.10.  That got it working again.
However, KDE was broken.  It would constantly spam messages about ksystemstats crashing.  Downgrading back to stable was quite the nightmare.  Lots of packages changed names, which pacman couldn't handle in the reverse direction.

[mikehenson]

What's a good OS to put on it now?

I just installed PostMarketOS on my PineBookPro. Easy and painless. Wifi works, I have not tried much more yet.

https://images.postmarketos.org/bpo/

Get image, unzip image, put on SD, put in PineBookPro.
Boot off SD, (ESC as it boots if you have Tow boot on the SPI) Get image again on PineBookPro, unzip image, dd to the eMMC
Turn off PineBook, take SD out, Turn on PineBookPro

By the way, I really like Arch Linux, So I got that booting last night.

[Surehand53]

The one problem that could come up is with a wifi app wpa_supplicant. The latest version (2.11, from memory) seems to have trouble with the Pinebook Pro.
Setting the version back (to 2.10 I think) solves that. There is a Manjaro.forum post if you face that issue.

In testing branch Manjaro is a great and up to date distro.

Just tried this and can confirm that wifi still doesn't work, until I downgraded wpa_supplicant to 2.10.  That got it working again.
However, KDE was broken.  It would constantly spam messages about ksystemstats crashing.  Downgrading back to stable was quite the nightmare.  Lots of packages changed names, which pacman couldn't handle in the reverse direction.

I am using KDE Plasma 6 myself in the testing branch. It works fine for me. Might be worth to check in their forum ?

[KC9UDX]

NetBSD 10 runs very well on the PBP.  Though you'll need a small WiFi dongle for now.

Needing a dongle isn't so great for me. Would the steps for loading a new image be the same?

I don't know when it started working.  But I noticed today with NetBSD 10.1, the internal Wi-Fi adaptor in the Pinebook Pro seems to be working flawlessly.

[flynx]

What's a good OS to put on it now?

The important question to ask: a) does suspend to mem work and b) do webbrowers as well as (some) video players decode in GPU.

I'm also looking for a good image.   I have Kali loaded now, which works GREAT.  Suspend to mem works fine, except its permanent.  Wake from mem doesn't exist.  For me that's a deal breaker if I want to actually use it.

So I'm asking the important question:  Is there an image where suspend to mem and wake from mem both work?

[wdt]

>Wake from mem doesn't exist.
Yes, this is the case about 95% of the time (note: all leds off for STR- sleep to ram)
Late 5.7, all 5.8, mrfixit uboot, setting in sleep.conf,
maybe something else, don't remember
in systemsettings lid close - ignore,,, pwr buuton - menu
STR is good for 10+ days, maybe 14
---
most lid magnets are in wrong place, that is why ignore

[Der Geist der Maschine]

What's a good OS to put on it now?

The important question to ask: a) does suspend to mem work and b) do webbrowers as well as (some) video players decode in GPU.

I'm also looking for a good image.   I have Kali loaded now, which works GREAT.  Suspend to mem works fine, except its permanent.  Wake from mem doesn't exist.  For me that's a deal breaker if I want to actually use it.

So I'm asking the important question:  Is there an image where suspend to mem and wake from mem both work?

I don't recommend running a non-maintained kernel, but if you are really interested in deep sleep then read on.

>Wake from mem doesn't exist.
Yes, this is the case about 95% of the time (note: all leds off for STR- sleep to ram)
Late 5.7, all 5.8, mrfixit uboot, setting in sleep.conf,
maybe something else, don't remember
in systemsettings lid close - ignore,,, pwr buuton - menu
STR is good for 10+ days, maybe 14
---
most lid magnets are in wrong place, that is why ignore

I am still running Debian from Daniel Thompson's Debian installer https://github.com/daniel-thompson/pineb...-installer and have deep sleep working. This Debian installer exactly installs kernel 5.7 plus Mr. Fixit's uboot. I did not know that this is the only working combination [one needs to make sure not having an alien uboot installed on the spi such as tow-boot otherwise Mr Fixit's uboot on the emmc does not take over].

Nowadays, Daniel Thompson's Debian installer does not work, anymore. I revived it here https://github.com/schaecsn/pinebook-pro...-installer - see the last 4 commits. It installs Debian bookworm.

You will also need to remove  /etc/tmpfiles.d/force-s2idle.config. Perhaps, I should remove that file as part of the debian-installer? Anyway, with that file, the Pinebook Pro will not sleep very deep, so remove it. For this to change to become active, you need to reboot once.


o Suspend to mem works but upon returning from suspend to mem, audio fails and needs to be manually revived with:

Code:

$ sudo tee /sys/bus/i2c/drivers/es8316/{un,}bind <<< `basename /sys/bus/i2c/drivers/es8316/1*`

At that time of running above command, make sure no program is playing audio (webbrowser, mp3 player, ...) or the kernel crashes.


o You may want to disable wake up from suspend on plugging the power supply in or out by creating such an udev rule (this seems to be an anti-feature):

Code:

$ cat /etc/udev/rules.d/90-disablewakeup.rules
SUBSYSTEM=="power_supply", ACTION=="add", RUN+="/bin/sh -c 'echo disabled > /sys/devices/platform/dc-charger/power/wakeup'"

o Closing the lid does not go into suspend for me. I can suspend with "systemctl suspend", only. Perhaps it's a magnet problem? YMMV.


o The 5.7's panfrost kernel driver module is crashing the kernel after 30 min of extensive use of the GPU, say playing videos. Perhaps disable it. I use X's fbturbo driver which does not make use of panfrost. Make sure you do not see Panfrost but LLVM (maybe YMMV):

Code:

$ es2_info | grep RENDERER
GL_RENDERER: Mali-T860 (Panfrost)
  vs
GL_RENDERER: llvmpipe (LLVM 15.0.6, 128 bits)

Without a console cable, you will have a hard time switching to a newer kernel and you will be stuck with this 5.7 kernel, see https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=15284. But hey, that's what you want, anyway.

[wdt]

my uname -a is 5.8.14-1-MANJARO-ARM ,, from Oct 7 2020
I forgot about the audio reload,
In rc.local echo disabled > /sys/devices/platform/dc-charger/power/wakeup
so that inserting charger does not cause a wakeup
pwr button is the control for me, to enter sleep, tap pwr, select from menu, to wake tap pwr button
----
BTW, it had 5.4 on it, STR did NOT work, had to install 5.8.14, works,, I had nothing in /etc/tmpfiles.d/
After several sleep/wake cycles it gets a bit slow, needs a reboot (>10?)
----
Are there any later kernels where STR works correctly?