Pinebook Pro?

[brent.thierens]

+1 for options other than Paypal

[dumetrulo]

I've read that booting from nvme will likely not be supported, but am wondering whether some kind of dual-stage boot will be possible to unlock the most performance out of such a drive. And if not, then at the very least, at least we'll be able to put swapfiles on nvme, right?

Swap is typically enabled late enough in the boot process that NVME or not should not make a difference, except perhaps for hibernation.

[stguller]

What kind of Linux distributions can be installed on the Pinebook pro and Which is linux system supports to booting from NVME?

[kracejic]

@Luke how much does it weight?

[Luke]

@Efe: Its paypal for now. We'll consider other options.
@stguller: Any that have ARM packages. On day one you can expect Debian and Ubuntu builds. But I am pretty sure that many other including Manjaro and KDE Neon - projects we have a very good working relationships with - will follow swiftly after. There is a lot of interest surrounding the Pinebook Pro, and I've spoken to prominent devs from large projects, so I expect that many popular distributions will find their way to the PB Pro
@kracejic, I haven't answered this before because the specs are not final -- the current prototype is approx 1.3kg, but please don't take this as a final answer.

[edit] about booting from NVMe ... you could use NVMe as a boot disk once SPI flash is figured out and you can flash uboot to it. I guess that you could also have uboot on eMMC/SD and point extlinux to rootfs on the NVMe drive. I'm not an expert nor a dev, but I believe this is accurate.

[scruffypants]

@Efe: Its paypal for now. We'll consider other options.
@stguller: Any that have ARM packages. On day one you can expect Debian and Ubuntu builds. But I am pretty sure that many other including Manjaro and KDE Neon - projects we have a very good working relationships with - will follow swiftly after. There is a lot of interest surrounding the Pinebook Pro, and I've spoken to prominent devs from large projects, so I expect that many popular distributions will find their way to the PB Pro
@kracejic, I haven't answered this before because the specs are not final -- the current prototype is approx 1.3kg, but please don't take this as a final answer.

[edit] about booting from NVMe ... you could use NVMe as a boot disk once SPI flash is figured out and you can flash uboot to it. I guess that you could also have uboot on eMMC/SD and point extlinux to rootfs on the NVMe drive. I'm not an expert nor a dev, but I believe this is accurate.

I am not sure If this applies here (for pinebook pro) but it is possible to boot Raspberry Pi from USB drive by copying everything (from MMC) except for the boot script to a USB drive and then in the said script defining the new root point. Once again it has been done on Raspberry Pi and might not be applicable here.

[zl1tet]

About privacy switches on the Pinebook Pro -- we're looking into it, but no promises. Probably not.

About Kali -- you are welcome to get me in touch with an active Kali dev who has ARM experience (if s/he is interested in the PB Pro of course).

@Luke, thanks for replying on the privacy switches, great it is being considered.

I had a look at the SoC and the audio is integrated, so that’s out of the question. If the power supply for the WiFi/Bluetooth is buried in the PCB mid layers, we’ll have to wait for the next design to bring them out to the surface.

[RMJ250]

@Efe: Its paypal for now. We'll consider other options.
@stguller: Any that have ARM packages. On day one you can expect Debian and Ubuntu builds. But I am pretty sure that many other including Manjaro and KDE Neon - projects we have a very good working relationships with - will follow swiftly after. There is a lot of interest surrounding the Pinebook Pro, and I've spoken to prominent devs from large projects, so I expect that many popular distributions will find their way to the PB Pro
@kracejic, I haven't answered this before because the specs are not final -- the current prototype is approx 1.3kg, but please don't take this as a final answer.

[edit] about booting from NVMe ... you could use NVMe as a boot disk once SPI flash is figured out and you can flash uboot to it. I guess that you could also have uboot on eMMC/SD and point extlinux to rootfs on the NVMe drive. I'm not an expert nor a dev, but I believe this is accurate.

As of May 7th apparently you will lose the 2.9% fee if you refund a PayPal transaction, fyi

[DoMiNeLa10]

wudo

Will an ANSI keyboard be an option or will the Pinebook Pro be ISO keyboard only? I love everything else about the Pinebook Pro so far but every other computer I use has an ANSI keyboard

Speaking as someone who has had both ANSI and ISO keyboards as their primary keyboard, I wouldn't worry too much about that. It's very easy to get used to and even switching between them isn't much of an issue.

From my experience this is pretty important. Constantly switching between ISO and ANSI when I got my laptop (and before I swapped the keyboard for a brand new ANSI one) drove me insane, and I would constantly hit quotation marks instead of enter. I guess this depends on the person (probably a non-issue for people who look at the keyboard when tying) and those used to ISO or used to switching (enter could be 1U for me, I always hit it on the left side.

---

Does anyone know whether Arch Linux ARM project will support this laptop? They seem to have Rock64 support at the moment, and I haven't heard of any involvement in getting a port ready before release. I'd love to be able to use my favorite distro from day one without having to use something else as a stop gap before making a switch back to Arch.

[Luke]

You are welcome to point out the PB Pro to an Arch dev and have them contact me.
I'm sure Manjaro will be available either immediately or soon after first batches go out.