(06-05-2020, 02:05 PM)lemaurien19 Wrote: Just got my Pinebook Pro. Even if I've had to pay customs duty/taxes for shipping to Ireland (~ EUR 77!), really glad I made the decision to buy.
I immediately cloned the default Manjaro installation from the 64gb emmc to the 128gb emmc I ordered along with the pbp; opened it up and made the swap. Working nice and smoothly 
Also, the unit I got booted properly from the get go and wifi was enabled out of the box. I didn't experience any of these known issues with some units.
Btw, I tried to boot up an SD card with Manjaro XFCE for Pinebook Pro https://manjaro.org/downloads/official/xfce/ but it was not booting up or either taking an extraordinarily long time. I tried the Debian default build and it booted from SD card without any issue. Might be Manjaro XFCE related.
Anyway, just dropped by to say that this is one solid machine and well-built and thanks so much for bringing this product
In terms of taking a long time to boot - this is a known issue. It usually actually is booted, it just stays on the splash screen (for some reason, I don't know why). If you press Esc you'll be able to log in.
First - very happy with the PBP over all, I expect to use it a lot as my travel laptop, and thanks to the team that developed it. That said, here are the issues I've encountered:
1) I cannot get my track pad to recognize a two finger tap as a right click, or I should say very rarely get it to work, if I try ten or so times in a row it seems to eventually like one attempt. I have tried messing with the timing settings but with no success. Two finger scrolling works, it can tell when one or two fingers are used.
2) Occasionally, probably once every two hours, a key sticks and starts filling the application until I press another key. I do not have to physically move a stuck key, and pressing any other key ends the process so this is clearly a firmware or software issue.
3) Manjaro keeps swapping back to the UK keyboard mapping after I set the US mapping. Again a software issue.
4) The very bottom, screw on, plate of the laptop is not even, some edges are below the lip of the base top portion and some are above it. As soon as I get the good screwdriver out of the lab I'll see if this is just a sloppy assembly issue.
5) Turning off the WiFi with the netmanager panel applet will make the wifi interface invisible if you don't enable it before you reboot. I had to use a bash shell and rfkill to get the controls back into netmanager, after the next reboot of course.
6) Manjaro lost the program group that contains settings, like for the keyboard mapping. I can get to the settings by searching for them, but the access via the menu system is gone.
Charging seems wonky, sometime is seems to charge much faster than other times, but I've got nothing specific on this I can quantify. The temperature is also a little wonky, the bottom gets hotter than is comfortable when sitting on my legs but it does not seem to be related to doing what I would consider high load activities, though I can't say how compute intensive just having LibreOffice or GIMP open are. The processor is refreshingly fast, I like that I can play a 1080p video and the display, though there are a few messed pixel on the very edge, is very very good.
I am probably more familiar with Debian systems so I'm still adjusting to Arch; but the software in their repo is refreshingly recent. I am far to accustomed to having to build software to get anything less than two years out of date, I definitely like that about Arch. But given the issues I've encountered with the keyboard mapping and the menu loss it looks like Manjaro still has little way to go before it is up for mainstream use.
So I'd give the PineBook Pro a solid B with a few issues that hopefully can get cleaned up to get to an A.
(06-09-2020, 04:24 PM)pjsf Wrote: ...
The last point sounds like the factory forgot to remove the protective film from the panel. this happened a few times with the first batch. there's a thread somewhere about the best way to remove it.
edit: here we go: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...ove+screen
Hm. If I gently press (with something soft) on the bubbly parts it doesn't bulge at all, and the display isn't diffuse in any way that would suggest there's a plastic film covering it. Is there a normal fixed screen protector infront of the display?
06-10-2020, 03:30 PM
(This post was last modified: 06-14-2020, 02:36 PM by timmes.
Edit Reason: Kernel oops' es with OpenGL are gone with the 5.7 kernel update
)
My Pinebook Pro arrived last week, so I suppose now is a good time to share my impressions too. I love playing with single-board computers ever since the original Raspberry Pi came out, I have a Pine64+ and I've been working Linux on servers for ages, but I never really tried to use a Linux-based desktop environment before. I've always been a Windows user on that front, and happily so.
Seeing your stand at Fosdem Brussels earlier this year triggered me to order it.
Delivery- Like others, I also had to pay a hefty EUR 63,75 import fee. If you can find a distributor in the EU, that would make all the difference.
Build quality- Maybe i got lucky here, but mine seems fine. The keyboard flexes a little bit and there's a tiny bit of slack between the display and the webcam, but for the rest it feels solid and smooth. The touchpad is properly snapped in and the display looks great.
First impression- Powering it up for the first time with the preinstalled Manjaro was a breeze, created a user, set a password and localization and off you go. Exactly how it should be.
- A sheet of paper with instructions for turning on the Wi-Fi was added, which worked exactly as promised
- After a reboot (as mentioned), connected to the Wi-Fi and fired up Firefox, everything worked as expected. Youtube works fine, even 1080P in full screen (although it does drain the battery faster, that's still no different from any other laptop).
- Installing a bunch of updates and rebooting, just the same, works like it should.
- Manjaro is really user-friendly and everything just works! For everything i did through the UI, nothing broke and not a single error message appeared. I was completely surprised that even WPA-Enterprise (PEAP + TTLS or MSCHAPV2) worked just like that!
Hardware- I have nothing to complain performance-wise, it might not be very high-powered but it doesn't feel slow when browsing and you have to really push it before the 4GB limit becomes a problem (if you disagree and use Chrome, switch to Firefox first).
- The EMMC module doesn't seem to be holding it back either. If it ever feels slow, it's more a matter of feedback (changing the pointer to indicate something is happening in the background). Such subtle UX improvements can make a big difference.
- The display is just great, especially for the money.
- Apart from the slight flexing, the keyboard feels good, I find it pleasant to type on.
- The touchpad is perhaps the weakest point, it's quite hard to position the pointer accurately even at low sensitivity and unusable at higher sensitivity, which means it can be hard to select or drag something across more than half a screen's width. This is quite annoying and i would've happily paid EUR 10 more for higher-quality touchpad. Then again, as the firmware is upgradable maybe there is room for improvement as well. The buttons are fine and it's nice to have some gesture support and two-finger scroll.
- Sound quality is okay.
- Webcam gives an extremely low framerate in Cheese, picture looks okay for a laptop of this class. Haven't used it with a real video chat application yet.
- Haven't used the microphone yet.
- Haven't used the USB-C, USB3-A ports yet, or the MicroSD reader.
Tweaks & Tinkering- Following the Arch Linux guides seems to work well in general and Arch's documentation is very good.
- I use a Yubikey for logging in (via pam_u2f) and this works fine. U2F in Firefox works as well, and so does SSH auth using the pgp certificate in my Yubikey.
- I encrypted my homedir with fscript and this works fine too, did have to make a few tweaks as for example putting something in ~/.pam_environment doesn't work.
- Enabling OpenGL ES 3.0 and installing mesa-git was easy and works fine.
- Installing an NVMe drive was easy enough (but i'm used to tinkering with hardware) and it was recognised immediately.
I've put /home and /var on it as I didn't want to take the risk of changing the boot device and failing. I know I can fix anything, but I also don't have time for everything.
- Created a page file and modified the kernel command line to use it for hibernation. Appears to work. Perhaps this should be done by default?
- Even something like Keepass (on Mono) worked out of the box.
The future
The Pinebook Pro is already quite usable for me, but I feel the real potential still lies ahead. Panfrost is developing rapidly so I'm hoping that in a not too distant future there will be Wayland, Firefox with Webrender and video acceleration out-of-the-box. If an aarch64 build of widevine-cdm comes out that would even unlock Netflix and the likes, and it should be more than powerful enough to decode that in Full HD.
For me, and I suppose many with me, it would then tick all the boxes for a daily-driver laptop.
The tide is also with the Pinebook. Yesterday Apple basically put the first nail in Intel's and X86'es coffin as far as the consumer market is concerned. Other hardware vendors will follow suit with ARM-powered laptop with long battery life and future historians will point to the Pinebook as the genesis of this revolution.
The real killer
The real killer for me is that the Pinebook Pro charges on 5V. This may seem a bit odd, but it means a lot.
It can draw power from most public USB sockets which are everywhere, in airports, shopping malls, public transport, without having to carry a bulky charger around or having to worry about 110/220V. All you need is a USB-A to USB-C cable that you probably already carry with your phone.
This also means it works with the cheap and ubiquitous power banks. I've tried a bunch of them and all seem to feed power into the PBP. It also works with an iPad charger and other USB chargers with 2A+ capacity. I have wall sockets at home with USB sockets in them, and those work fine too.
I created my own USB-A to 3mm DC barrel plug cable which also works, with the benefit of keeping the USB-C port free.
Issues- Unfortunately having the NMVe SSD seems to be preventing it from going into standby now, see https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...7#pid67907
- When I opened it up to install the NVMe adapter and SSD, the speakers were stuck to the underside. The wiring doesn't have a whole lot of slack so it was difficult to figure out what to do. I was initially searching for a connector to unplug, until i checked some pictures online and noticed that the speakers were supposed to be stuck to the plastic shell rather than the metal underside. I pryed them loose, put them in the plastic shell and now it's fine. I think the adhesive was put on the wrong side of the speaker during assembly (they were facing the right way).
- I also get the high-pitched noise which indeed seems like it's from a switching power supply. Luckily as I get older my hearing will deteriorate and i will stop hearing high frequencies, so this problem will solve itself eventually
 . It's not at a level where it is annoying. Additionally i hear a slightly louder noise, a bit like a whine, whenever sound is being played back as well as a couple of seconds afterwards, until it stops the sound device again. This one does seem to come out of the speakers. If i had to guess i would same some high impedance PCB traces between a DAC and an amplifier somewhere are picking up crosstalk from digital traces nearby, or the amplifier's power supply (or analog ground) are noisy.
TL;DR
Would I recommend it to my mother? Not yet.
Would I recommend it to tech-savvy people, even if they're Linux novices? Hell yes.
(06-10-2020, 01:06 PM)Tiny Pudding Wrote: (06-09-2020, 04:24 PM)pjsf Wrote: ...
The last point sounds like the factory forgot to remove the protective film from the panel. this happened a few times with the first batch. there's a thread somewhere about the best way to remove it.
edit: here we go: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?...ove+screen
Hm. If I gently press (with something soft) on the bubbly parts it doesn't bulge at all, and the display isn't diffuse in any way that would suggest there's a plastic film covering it. Is there a normal fixed screen protector infront of the display? There was no additional screen protector on the first run of machines - I don't know about the latest ones
Many thanks to all who have posted their first impressions, successes, and troubleshooting efforts upon receiving their new PBP!
While I am very envious of everyone who is already tinkering on their new toy, I am glad that I will have a few less things to figure out before getting up and running when my unit does come in.
Keep those posts coming, it helps me have less FOMO by reading about your experiences!
-B
Just to add to what I wrote earlier: I got the bill for VAT (19 CHF, about 20 USD) and DHL handling (another 22 CHF), so my PBP has to total all inclusive price tag of about 280 USD.
I guess that the 22CHF handling could be shared, so people in Switzerland should maybe team up together if you want to reduce the price.
first update from the factory image prompted a "transaction summary" (if memory serves) and wanted to install kdsoap and libwbclient. im not sure what those packages are, seems a bit strange. should i be concerned?
Hi All,
I experience heavy flickering using Ayufan's Bionic MATE release.
Any solution for that? Might be a kernel related issue?
Thanks!
Just got my Pinebook Pro.
Used it a couple of hours.
I have one word in mind:
Respect.
Respect for the people behind pine64 and all software/project partners.
/Maba
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