Customised (encrypted) eMMC installation using Anarsoul's ArchLinux

[xmixahlx]

oooooooooooooooo sorry, misreading!

[thunderweasel]

Appreciate the link - I'll have to try building the Manjaro kernel sometime when I get the chance.

It should be available as a pkg.tar.xz, too, in case you'd rather download and install instead of building it. There's also a linux-pine64-420 if you don't want mainline.

The pine64-4.20 kernel is actually the one I was already running, but I got the 5.3 kernel built and installed, and everything appears to be working fine. I severely underestimated how long it would take to build locally though (~10 hours), so if anybody else reading this is considering upgrading I'd highly recommend just downloading the pkg.tar.xz from the Manjaro-ARM repositories.

*Seems I spoke too soon. No 8723 wireless module after upgrading.
*Looks like the 8723 dkms module needs to be updated to the 2019.07.31 from 2018.11.07 to work with the 5.x kernel - you can download the dkms-rtl8723cs-2019.07.31-1-any.pkg.tar.xz package from any of the Manjaro-ARM repositories and manually install it to get wireless up and running

[thunderweasel]

I hate to bump an old thread, but for the benefit of anybody who might run across this from a search engine, as of this writing the mainline Arch-ARM aarch64 kernel (currently 5.8.9-2) boots properly and functions well on the original Pinebook, with the following minor caveats:

After booting the kernel, only a black screen is displayed, so the encryption password prompt is not visible. However, the prompt does load properly, so typing the encryption password and pressing enter will continue the booting process to the login prompt. In other words the prompt is there, you just can't see it.

The rtl8723cs dkms module package and bluetooth firmware package need to be built locally or downloaded from the Manjaro-ARM repositories and installed manually as there are no binaries in the Arch-ARM core repository.

[thunderweasel]

Bumping an ancient thread yet again with a minor update just in case it might benefit somebody. Since the mainline Arch-ARM kernel incremented to the 5.11.x kernel series, the latest rtl8723cs DKMS module from the Manjaro repos no longer builds properly against the kernel (which means no wifi). It still builds just fine against the last 5.10.x kernel, so for the time being I've just reverted to that.

The odd thing is that the Manjaro Pinebook image uses the 5.11.x series kernel, and wifi works out of the box. I assumed there must be some patches in the Manjaro kernel to enable the Realtek module, but if you run

Code:

dkms autoinstall

or

Code:

dkms install -m rtl8723cs -v 2020.06.27

from the Manjaro image, it produces the exact same build error as my Arch install, even though the module is loaded and running. If time permits and I'm able to find a solution I'll post back, or if anyone else knows what I'm doing wrong, please let me know.

[thunderweasel]

Yet another update to an otherwise dead thread, but just in case it may benefit someone:

After having left my Pinebook 1080p sitting around for months while I had some other stuff on the front burner, I just pulled it out and updated it. Still no pre-packaged DKMS module or staging driver for the wifi is included in the mainline Arch Arm packages or kernel. Manjaro's build still has the 8723cs driver loaded automagically from staging now (no DKMS), but transplanting the modules from their package/live image fails with exec error due to being compiled against the Manjaro kernel source. Thankfully, after sifting through no fewer than 10 forks of the old icenowy 8723cs driver, I finally found one that compiles on the now-current 5.17.x mainline vanilla Arch Arm kernel:

https://github.com/java-batista/rtl8723cs 8723cs

The only caveat is that I had to add "-Wno-date-time" to the CFLAGS section of the makefile to keep it from choking on a warning (which the compiler treats as an error). 

Once installed, the driver has been working very well. It looks like I've finally got my encrypted ebook reader and media control machine back