Pinebook Pro?

[RMJ250]

Regarding available software, forgive my lack of knowledge, I realise Arm chips are not Intel but what are the limitations? I.e. if something is open source and any necessary libraries are available for the architecture, it can be compiled to run on Arm? Is it much more involved than that?

[lucad111]

more information about NVMe as main boot device and maybe some performance testing

About NVMe as a boot device -we'd need a user-friendly and safe way to flash uboot to SPI. Ayufan already has a solution on the Rock64 but not for the Pro. It will happen at some point in the future - that I am sure. 

Regarding performance, what exactly are you after?

Still it would already be possible to use the eMMC as boot partition and have rootfs on the NVMe i guess, am i correct?

I'm looking to use the pinebook pro as a replacement for everyday work, especially when travelling, so anything comparable to current performances on a x86 based laptop would be good for me.

Not sure if it has been discussed before ( if so i apologize ) why uboot instead of UEFI?

Yea, sure, you could have rootfs on the NVMe (if you care to look though the RPro64 subforum, I am pretty sure someone has already done it). Obviously uboot on SPI would be more ideal.  As for UEFI - you'd have to ask an actual dev (IRC/ Discord buttons at the top of the forum)

ok thank you for your help, can't wait to order one!

[evantaylor]

Regarding available software, forgive my lack of knowledge, I realise Arm chips are not Intel but what are the limitations? I.e. if something is open source and any necessary libraries are available for the architecture, it can be compiled to run on Arm? Is it much more involved than that?

It can be a pain, but in general yes.  This is why the Debian Repos for ARM64 are fairly complete.  I at one point setup a gentoo (Linux) server to compile from source with the specific optimizations I wanted for my Desktop/Laptop machines and make my own personal package repository (This was a long time ago when 64bit computing at home was "new").  I imagine it is not too much more work to create a build environment targeting ARM64.

If you've run Armbian before on a SBC, there isn't much that is missing.  The biggest thing I noticed were that some software packages didn't seem optimized (e.g. Chromium runs pretty fast on a Raspberry Pi 3 B+, but is very slow on my Libre Computer Renegade (Rockchip 3288)).

I am very interested in this Pinebook Pro, as it looks like the Rock Pro 64 has accelerated X11/GPU drivers and has enough "oomph" that I could use it to do my work and stream the occasional high-def video.  Does anyone know if the Armbian distro for this chip supports accelerated X11/glamour?  The video of the RockPro 64 demo is making me want to pull the trigger.

[dumetrulo]

In all seriousness I've found as time goes on their macOS launches support more and more drivers as it goes on, making Hackintosh super easy*. Unless they start from square one again and start building up drivers upon their own launches, it could be a possibility.

Hm… an ARM-based Hackintosh sounds like an interesting proposition. In the meantime, while we wait for the PineBook Pro, I had to replace my ageing home laptop (Dell Vostro 3500, about 10 years old) with a slightly less aged ex-company laptop (Dell Latitude 7450, less than 5 years old), which was quite a bargain at €225 plus the old laptop. I might make a Hackintosh out of that one…

But I still want a PineBook Pro when it's out!

E7450? Looks like you can mate! https://osxlatitude.com/forums/topic/851...uefi-only/

It still relies on the macOS ARM move being true, which is currently unconfirmed.

I gave up on the E7450 Hackintosh for now because Intel WiFi is a no-go with OS X…

In other news, I recently met a guy who works at Google, and told me they already got developer MacBooks with ARM CPU, so it looks like the switch is happening.

[z4v4l]

Not sure if it has been discussed before ( if so i apologize ) why uboot instead of UEFI?

because UEFI needs to be ported for rk3399. that edk2 thing. is rockchip working on this? maybe, but who knows. it requires a lot of effort. I, as a hobbyist, do work on my own UEFI implementation, not based on edk2, but it's, yeah, it's incomplete*. rk3399 unfortunately is out of my scope, i just don't have boards with it, rk3328 at most. but I'll beep here, when I have something worth looking at for the Pine boards (I have Pine64+ and Rock64). it's a good question, I really like the idea of having UEFI as FW for SBCs. so far, only quite pricey things like HiKey960/970 have this decent solution. and RPi, that has a huge support behind it. still I don't know how mature their port is.


* - that link in my signature is just a mirror repository, that is highly out of sync now, the amount of code written is way more, than is seen there, still, it's very unusable, basically runnable on just 1 board (and it is a MIPS machine ). however, I hope, as a temporary solution for ARM targets, soon use uboot (because of SDRAM init procedure and accompanying very low level stuff not written yet for the boards) for testing Boot Services that are at the core of UEFI and are mostly written. the big problem as well is reaching the display. UART is cool for tracing and command processing, but not for cute (but also - feature rich) GUI, this FW should provide. Boot Manager is a weak part overall. ah well, it's just my hobby project, you need to wait until SoC vendors finally join edk and will port it to their products. UEFI must take over that chaotic half assed mess, called uboot.

[soupbowl]

I gave up on the E7450 Hackintosh for now because Intel WiFi is a no-go with OS X…

In other news, I recently met a guy who works at Google, and told me they already got developer MacBooks with ARM CPU, so it looks like the switch is happening.

Grab an Edimax USB or a TP-Link dongle, as they tend to fix that shortfall. Experienced the same issue with my Toshiba Satelite.

Promising, but not a guarantee. We have a Linux sysadmin but no Linux servers at work. We're experimenting with moving to Linux, but it's not guaranteed to be fully implemented.

[pandruszkow]

A couple of questions/things that I hope will be addressed with the Pinebook Pro:

- Is there any chance you can move the power button off the keyboard? It was supremely annoying on my own Pinebook. I'm always scared to hold down Backspace to delete something, since I feel like I'm moments away from force-shutting down my laptop if I press the wrong key.

- Will the spacebar work better than on the current generation Pinebooks? My one doesn't work when I press it on the edges, which is very very annoying. I use my Pinebook for writing on the go, and that issue alone is serious enough to sometimes make me not want to use my Pinebook at all.

- Any comments on imports/taxes to the UK? When I bought my Pinebook online, I didn't realise that VAT was not included (which was not mentioned, but then I don't blame Pine at all). A $99 laptop stops being $99 when it turns out that I need to pay additional $20-something for shipping, and £20-ish for VAT, and another £15 just-because-we-feel-like-it fee imposed by the shipping company for the "privilege" of handling the import tax for me. Ideally, a UK (or at least EU) based reseller would simplify things a little bit.

[soupbowl]

[..] - Any comments on imports/taxes to the UK? [...]

I really hope you can set-up a UK reseller! I ended up paying 150 pounds for mine If a hard Brexit occurs, we could strike up a US deal and get cheaper tariffs!

Power button will be in the same place likely. Unless you change power settings both Linux and Android should prompt before shutting down. You'll notice in time before it shuts down if you're holding power instead of backspace.

[lucad111]

because UEFI needs to be ported for rk3399. that edk2 thing. is rockchip working on this? maybe, but who knows. it requires a lot of effort. I, as a hobbyist, do work on my own UEFI implementation, not based on edk2, but it's, yeah, it's incomplete*. rk3399 unfortunately is out of my scope, i just don't have boards with it, rk3328 at most. but I'll beep here, when I have something worth looking at for the Pine boards (I have Pine64+ and Rock64). it's a good question, I really like the idea of having UEFI as FW for SBCs. so far, only quite pricey things like HiKey960/970 have this decent solution. and RPi, that has a huge support behind it. still I don't know how mature their port is.


* - that link in my signature is just a mirror repository, that is highly out of sync now, the amount of code written is way more, than is seen there, still, it's very unusable, basically runnable on just 1 board (and it is a MIPS machine ). however, I hope, as a temporary solution for ARM targets, soon use uboot (because of SDRAM init procedure and accompanying very low level stuff not written yet for the boards) for testing Boot Services that are at the core of UEFI and are mostly written. the big problem as well is reaching the display. UART is cool for tracing and command processing, but not for cute (but also - feature rich) GUI, this FW should provide. Boot Manager is a weak part overall. ah well, it's just my hobby project, you need to wait until SoC vendors finally join edk and will port it to their products. UEFI must take over that chaotic half assed mess, called uboot.

Indeed it takes a lot of effort to port everything, so uboot in this case is the choice to be able to have things up and running without waiting for a porting to be complete ... and stable.

The HiKeys have the unfortunate disadvantage of not having any ethernet connector, limited storage options and few other things not really helping.
Although i suspect there might be some hope of someone working on the edk2 port at some time since there is a Rock960c  board that uses the same rk3399 chip.
I think i might ask around and see if someone knows anything about that.

[odinson]

Another person here who signed up on the forums for the Pinebook Pro. I read about it on the Ameridroid blog. I plan to evaluate it for my transition off Macbook Pros as I don't like the direction Apple has taken with the new ones and the various quality issues/cover ups they've engaged in of late. Not to mention the terrible port situation. 

I love the keyboard/trackpad combo as it looks exactly like the MBP setup. I really hope the keyboard and trackpad have a proper feel to them. That's going to be the make or break for me. There is absolutely nothing more important to me for my day to day use. Other things matter too, but a laptop can hit every other note and then have a keyboard or pointing device that feels wrong and it's just game over for me. So I'll be buying one of these out of the gate as soon as they're available, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed on this one point alone. If it nails it there, I'll be buying more for family and possibly employees & partners.

I can live with 4GB of RAM(ARM based Linux desktops I've played with actually run pretty good in 2GB of RAM). The potential to be able to swap out the board for newer and faster motherboards down the road makes the inability to upgrade the RAM a non-issue for me. That will most likely be how we end up upgrading the RAM.

Really looking forward to this.