Pinebook Pro Initial Impressions

[bcnaz]

Hello all,

I noticed today that the bottom cover is not flush with the edge of the case on my Pinebook Pro. In particular, on the left edge near the IO. I had a brief look around and so far it seems pretty difficult to get both sides to go home at the same time. Anyone had something like this? I also noticed that one of the plastic standoffs were broken pretty much as soon as I opened the case.

I noticed the same thing on my pinebook pro as well. I haven't even bothered to open it up because I have read posts on here about how hard it is to take the back panel off and don't want to break any of the clips that snap into place. I guess I'll just make do with it. Besides that I have liked this laptop. I've been able to use firefox and chromium and haven't had any of the crashes people have discussed. I wonder if they would have charged at least $100 more, how much better the build quality could have been. I do wish the speakers could be better but doesn't really bother me.

**
 Yeah,  Mine was perfectly flush when I got it.

  But,  When I went to put it back on I could not get it that perfect again...  The first try it was pretty obvious it was no where near flush.

 I read in another post to "Bow" it slightly while installing it.   So I tried that, and with each try it improved.

 It appears to be just a 'hair' longer than the opening  ?

 I was tempted to try and give it a slight 'Bend' ( ya know more than a 'bow' ? )

 But,  instead I settled for it looking almost flush.

My spacers are undamaged,  and only needed to be re-aligned one time when I opened and closed the bottom cover.

 I do hope they start to offer some of those little parts on the website, it would be easy to lose or break those little spacers.

I would buy some ahead of time for those   "Just in case" senerios,  better to have 'on hand' than have to wait 6 to 8 weeks for parts.UPDATE

-----------------------------

NO SOUND : With some YouTube ads ? Using FireFox Strict settings
Appears there is no check box to turn on 'DRM' ? I am thinking that could be it ?
( Not that I mind it muting the ads) :-)

[SuperUJ]

Have been playing with the PBP for a week.  It's so far so good for browsing the Internet and word processing.  The major issue for me is Firefox, but not a show stopper.  It quits when OS wakes up from Sleep, or switching network/VPN (I believe that someone reported on this thread before). 
Sound on Firefox is also unstable for me.  Sometime, it has no sound ... need to restart a couple of times. Still looking for a patteern.  Someone mentioned a fix by switching to alsamixer, but I couldn't find such post for the fix details.  If someone can post the URL here, it will be great.
My attempt to install Spotify failed.  Hope it will work at some points down the road.
Also, hope to have a solution for WireGuard beside the workaround in the Tutorial section of the PBP.
None of the above is major, but would like to see fixes soon.  Looking forward to the trackpad fixes.
All in all, it's great community project.  Congrats!

[SatnSpwn]

I've been playing with my new PBP for a week now.

The physical look and feel is excellent. The flat black with matte screen is absolutely amazing looking. I did notice though, the bottom cover wasn't seated. The screws didn't seem to be fully tightened

The included software image does need some polish. Most preinstalled images do. I usually employ a "slash and burn" policy, removing a large number of installed packages. In this case I was a little reserved, I just removed haskell, mono, samba and a bunch of orphaned libraries. Good for just under a Gig of free space. (I even left systemd!!. Its not going to cause problems for me this time, I'm sure of it)

The console is not set up so in went the terminus font and console-setup. Set the keyboard to "gb" in /etc/default/keyboard. Set the font to "Terminus" at "10x20" in /etc/default/console-setup
I also had to set the locale with dpkg-reconfigure locales

In the GUI I noticed a bit of tearing and a bit of corruption when initially moving a window over another. Otherwise it is very usable.

Firefox crashed enough to make it unusable. I did notice this was an Ubuntu build, so I downloaded an update manually from ports.ubuntu.com ( version 70.0.1 for unbuntu 16.04.1, armhf). This version has been rock solid

I attempted the same with chrome, while it didn't crash opening settings anymore the video performance was very poor

Ejecting a usb drive caused an error message. Fixed it by installing 'eject'

There is a problem with suspend. I works fine the first time, after that it doesn't work. There is a "device usb5 failed to suspend: error -16" in the logs.

The headphone out has a problem. Sometimes it sounds as thou the channels are mixed up and out of phase, sort of like when the headphone jack is not fully seated. Playing around with alsamixer, turning the volumes up and down, fixes it. It seem like turning the volume up to the max trips it again.

The system hard crashes regularly when switching from the console to the GUI

I was going to investigate this this morning, but I found my PBP off even though I had left it on. Worse it wouldn't start

So I took the bottom cover off to have a look. I noticed a "reset" button, so I pushed it, screwed the cover back on and tried turning it on - no luck. When I went to remove the cover again I noticed one the hinge screws had pulled through. Reviewing the photos I had taken when I first removed the cover I see both hinge spacers were cracked. When I took the cover off a second time the one spacer had broken into many tiny pieces when the screw went through it.


I've got the epoxy out to attempt a fix, or maybe I'll make a steel spacer when I get into the shop later in the week

I manage to turn on the PBP just now so things don't look so bad

This not a laptop for someone who is afraid to roll up their sleeves and do some work on it

[Nappael]

Hello all,

I noticed today that the bottom cover is not flush with the edge of the case on my Pinebook Pro. In particular, on the left edge near the IO. I had a brief look around and so far it seems pretty difficult to get both sides to go home at the same time. Anyone had something like this? I also noticed that one of the plastic standoffs were broken pretty much as soon as I opened the case.

I noticed the same thing on my pinebook pro as well. I haven't even bothered to open it up because I have read posts on here about how hard it is to take the back panel off and don't want to break any of the clips that snap into place. I guess I'll just make do with it. Besides that I have liked this laptop. I've been able to use firefox and chromium and haven't had any of the crashes people have discussed. I wonder if they would have charged at least $100 more, how much better the build quality could have been. I do wish the speakers could be better but doesn't really bother me.

**
 Yeah,  Mine was perfectly flush when I got it.

  But,  When I went to put it back on I could not get it that perfect again...  The first try it was pretty obvious it was no where near flush.

 I read in another post to "Bow" it slightly while installing it.   So I tried that, and with each try it improved.

 It appears to be just a 'hair' longer than the opening  ?

 I was tempted to try and give it a slight 'Bend' ( ya know more than a 'bow' ? )

 But,  instead I settled for it looking almost flush.

My spacers are undamaged,  and only needed to be re-aligned one time when I opened and closed the bottom cover.

 I do hope they start to offer some of those little parts on the website, it would be easy to lose or break those little spacers.

I would buy some ahead of time for those   "Just in case" senerios,  better to have 'on hand' than have to wait 6 to 8 weeks for parts.

I came back to it this morning, and was able to pretty easily get everything mostly flush by gently bowing the bottom cover. It's not quite there, but it's so much better than it was. Enough for me to be happy with it at least.

Thanks for the suggestion.

[jiyong]

I'm sorry I didn't read the whole thread.
Just my observations after a couple of days of use.

First of all, the PBP is a steal at this price.
Sure it has some small issues, but I really think this has the potential to be good enough as a daily driver.

Now for the small issues.
My USB-C hub works for power delivery and with the factory image the USB ports also worked on the hub.
After the MrFixit update and apt upgrade the USB ports on the USB-C hub no longer get recognised by the PBP.
After the MrFixit update, it cleared the Windows virus, or I still need to run a separate script for that?

I'm in a hotel now and the PBP can't connect to the Wifi network.
The PBP sees it as a secure Wifi network, while my Windows laptop connects and launches the browser with a page where I can agree to the terms of use of the Wifi network.
Or is there a trick to connect with the PBP?

Sometimes the trackpad seems a bit off. Not sure how to describe it.
It feels as if it has some lag, once in a while.

I still have a lot more testing to do, but so far I'm happy with it.
Can't wait for more updates.

[tophneal]

I'm in a hotel now and the PBP can't connect to the Wifi network.
The PBP sees it as a secure Wifi network, while my Windows laptop connects and launches the browser with a page where I can agree to the terms of use of the Wifi network.
Or is there a trick to connect with the PBP?

Aren't captive portals great on Linux?
Looked around, and found a few suggestions you could try.

For some people sudo dpkg-reconfigure resolvconf worked.

Some "connected" to the network, and got their authorization token by going to the router IP instead of the portal page.

This page outlines a few other possible solutions.

[Kochise]

Good little computer, will see what I can out of its guts, right now too early to get a really appreciative feedback.


First thing I did was to open it to make sure the flash module was in place. I took the opportunity to make some changes according to forum users' feedback.



Speakers' border are a bit sticky so they got pulled out from their socket when I removed the underside.

Thanks I have some foam around.



Cut some and placed it in the speakers' sockets.



Placed the speakers into the sockets again, pressed them down, cut some paper towels.



Placed it on the speakers' sticky border, prevent dust from entering and muffle a bit the sound.



As someone mentioned it, beware not to loose the fragile little plastic thingies around the screen mount.



Magic foam at the rescue.



Look how gorgeous it looks, the plastic thingy is kept into place and cannot escape anymore.



Same on the other side.



Was a bit disappointed by the soldering of the battery bypass. Not tested to check its effectiveness.

---

Installed the M2 adapter board, and again disappointed by the misalignment.



Something looks rather odd there, but maybe I missed something into the mounting procedure.



Moved the "bypass" sticker elsewhere.



After a good charge (one night) tried the beast for a first ride. Good job buddies.

[jiyong]

I'm in a hotel now and the PBP can't connect to the Wifi network.
The PBP sees it as a secure Wifi network, while my Windows laptop connects and launches the browser with a page where I can agree to the terms of use of the Wifi network.
Or is there a trick to connect with the PBP?

Aren't captive portals great on Linux?
Looked around, and found a few suggestions you could try.

For some people sudo dpkg-reconfigure resolvconf worked.

Some "connected" to the network, and got their authorization token by going to the router IP instead of the portal page.

This page outlines a few other possible solutions.

Thanks. I'm typing this on the PBP connected to the hotel Wifi.
First I had to connect through my phone, as resolvconf is not installed on the PBP.

sudo apt install resolvconf
sudo dpkg-reconfigure resolvconf

Restarted the PBP.

I connected to the hotel Wifi and used FF to go to 1.1.1.1.
There I was able to accept the terms.
That worked for a minute or so.
It looked liked I lost the connection again.

Disconnected and removed the Wifi definition in Network Connections.
Connected again, accepted the terms again on 1.1.1.1 and now it is connected properly.

So it might be a good idea to put resolvconf in the standard image.

[Watercourse]

---

So I fixed the firefox crashing problem by flashing Ubuntu+Mate img to MMC with Wizzard's great instructions. However page loading in Firefox and chromium is very slow. I waited for 11 minutes to load www.pine64.org in firefox and gave up. Reading the "connection information" in the wifi icon on the top menu I get values between 0 and 26 Mb/s on the PBP and 60+ Mb/s on my Asus laptop running Ubuntu+Mate  in the same location in my house and even more in my Mint netbook. Since I bout the PBP mainly to surf the inte4rnet, read email, etc online, this makes the PBP virtually unusable. Thunderbird times out while downloading 4 emails! Does anyone else have this problem?I'm guessing it's either a problem either with the wifi hardware, firmware, the or kernel. I like the PBP other features and look but this is a deal breaker for me. What can I do about this?

I noticed putting processor speed to performance helps a lot...

That worked, Rick! I turned up the processor speed to 2.02 GHz. Thanks you so much. I was on the point of of turning my PBP into a trivet! Internet speed is  better.I thought the processor speed was dynamically set to save power? I had it on "interactive" whatever that means.

Care to share where to find the setting for processor speed?

Just look at the top or bottom edge of the screen for a number. Click on it and select "Performance". Please let me know if that works for you. :-)

Does not appear on this screen. C'est la vie

---

Thanks for the feedback. Stickied as I am very keen to hear from more of you.

Finally got Mine  !
I looked it over,  then charged it a few hours.
Then opened it up for inspection...  seemed the eMMC may have popped in a little...?
The left speaker wire was pulled a little tight, corrected that.
  It was a little hard getting the bottom to seat properly when I put it back together.
 Finally turned it on,  everything appears ok so far,  occasionally the keys do seem to not register but that seems to be improving.
I Did want to do updates first,  But there is no update icon.... ?
Next I guess I will look around the site for help on doing the initial updates and perhaps how to install the update icon.
  I am using Firefox with no problems,    ... so far.....

***  Thank You Pine64  and crew  ***

****
NO SOUND,
I had not tried the sound,  when I did try it,  NOTHING
tried both root/root  and  rock/rock
****
Discovered the 'Update" Icon was there in the lower right panel,  it kind of blends in.

*
*
Continued :


Got some help from zeebeez on another related thread :
Using terminal to change alsamixer from default to es8316-spk-sound...
See thread :  'No Sound, Non Root User'

I had lost sound, but it came back today (11/20/19) after running [sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade]
Someone's been working overtime! Thank you good person!

[Unorthodactyl]

Alright! I've finally received mine

Issues: Sleep/suspend function is broken. It works for the first use but not subsequent uses (either folding the laptop, using the fn+esc shortcut or trying to suspend via menu)

Secondly (most annoying issue), there was a sticker that read '365/128gb' or something to the left of the palm rest. Trying remove it revealed it was a very low quality sticker that was not intended to be removed cleanly, for whatever reason. It left behind a lot of sticky, papery residue when peeled away. Cleaning this up also removed a lot of what appeared to be black paint, leaving a large ugly 'polished' section on the bottom left palm rest.

Thirdly, the trackpad is not pleasant to use.

Lastly, the keyboard doesn't seem to be fitted in the laptop chassis correctly, some keys are very 'crunchy' to press & will get stuck in the chassis.

On to positives:

The battery life is great so far & the screen, while quite dim, is usable.
Software is quite slow & buggy atm. In the positives list as most of us here probably enjoy tinkering with this stuff

It's worth the $200.00 for a metal framed 'throwaway' laptop, though with the steep shipping price & potential import taxes, it's likely cheaper to find a linux compatible chromebook
At present I couldn't recommend this as a daily driver, unfortunately.