Initial Impressions
06-06-2023, 03:42 PM
I got mine yesterday, and my experience was similar to yours. It botted right up. I was al ittle confused about the wireless not wokring until I did a little hunting around on the internet. Then I dug out an old USB wireless donglw (which need to be converted from USB 3 to USB C), and plugged it in. After that, the local access points came right up in the network settings. Typing this on the PhineTab2 now, in fact.
Once I had the internet up and running, I pulled up Konsole and typed:
pacman -Syu
to see if there were any updates. Nothing yet. Then I typed:
pacman -S vim mutt kstars marble
to get some appliations I use a lot. The only one I haven't found I was looking for was Arianna, but Okular works well for PDF's, so it's not a huge deal, caibre is listed in Discover, so I may try that later.
I did some testing in two modes. The first was using the keybaord. In that mode, it kind of reminded me of a Chromebook, minus the Google oversight. I'm using Angelfish right now, will probably try installing Firefox later to see how it performs. KMail is wokring fine for my IMAP email needs, with mutt as a backup. I unhooked the USB dongle to attach a USB drive that I use to back up my laptop, and dumped a variety of videos, images, books and music onto the drive. mpv ended up being my goto application for the videos, as VLC tended to stutter. mpv had surprisingly smooth playback. It was able to handle MP4's, MKV's, FLV's and WEBM's out of the box. Gwenview reliably handled my images, as expected. Okular handles PDF's well, but was only successful with some of my ePubs - others had weird gaps in the display. As for music: my MP3's come up in VLC, but my OGG's come up in Eliza. The playback was fine in either, and the headphones worked fine in the jack, but the speakers in the tablet itself sounded better than expected. I didn't try FLAC's or OPUS files.
The second mode I tested was tablet mode. I took the tablet out of the case and booted it up. The signon screen (SDDM) comes up in portrait mode. You can fix this using a trick someone posted in the PintTab Software subforum, which involves installing xrandr and calling it from an sddm script with the right arguments. The touch screen was very responsive. However,the tablet doesn't seem to support rotation out of the box - maybe later I mostly used it to surf the web and read books, and it did both capably. I was also able to stream from YouTube in Angelfish without any stuttering. Having KStars on a tablet means you can carry it outside to line up the view with the actual stars overhead! This was a very gratifying moment for me.
The PineTab2 seems to take a couple of hours to charge from 50% to 100%, but I was tinkering with the wireless, etc, while it was plugged in so this may not be accurate. Also, the estimates I got for how long it would take seemed way off (the battery indicator told me 2 hours from 50 to 100, then later said 2 hours from 98 to 100).
Overall, it's been a very pleasant experinence so far! I'm way ahead of where i expected to be when I took it out of the box. I'm looking forward to ditching my Android tablet for good once we get a working wireless driver.
Once I had the internet up and running, I pulled up Konsole and typed:
pacman -Syu
to see if there were any updates. Nothing yet. Then I typed:
pacman -S vim mutt kstars marble
to get some appliations I use a lot. The only one I haven't found I was looking for was Arianna, but Okular works well for PDF's, so it's not a huge deal, caibre is listed in Discover, so I may try that later.
I did some testing in two modes. The first was using the keybaord. In that mode, it kind of reminded me of a Chromebook, minus the Google oversight. I'm using Angelfish right now, will probably try installing Firefox later to see how it performs. KMail is wokring fine for my IMAP email needs, with mutt as a backup. I unhooked the USB dongle to attach a USB drive that I use to back up my laptop, and dumped a variety of videos, images, books and music onto the drive. mpv ended up being my goto application for the videos, as VLC tended to stutter. mpv had surprisingly smooth playback. It was able to handle MP4's, MKV's, FLV's and WEBM's out of the box. Gwenview reliably handled my images, as expected. Okular handles PDF's well, but was only successful with some of my ePubs - others had weird gaps in the display. As for music: my MP3's come up in VLC, but my OGG's come up in Eliza. The playback was fine in either, and the headphones worked fine in the jack, but the speakers in the tablet itself sounded better than expected. I didn't try FLAC's or OPUS files.
The second mode I tested was tablet mode. I took the tablet out of the case and booted it up. The signon screen (SDDM) comes up in portrait mode. You can fix this using a trick someone posted in the PintTab Software subforum, which involves installing xrandr and calling it from an sddm script with the right arguments. The touch screen was very responsive. However,the tablet doesn't seem to support rotation out of the box - maybe later I mostly used it to surf the web and read books, and it did both capably. I was also able to stream from YouTube in Angelfish without any stuttering. Having KStars on a tablet means you can carry it outside to line up the view with the actual stars overhead! This was a very gratifying moment for me.
The PineTab2 seems to take a couple of hours to charge from 50% to 100%, but I was tinkering with the wireless, etc, while it was plugged in so this may not be accurate. Also, the estimates I got for how long it would take seemed way off (the battery indicator told me 2 hours from 50 to 100, then later said 2 hours from 98 to 100).
Overall, it's been a very pleasant experinence so far! I'm way ahead of where i expected to be when I took it out of the box. I'm looking forward to ditching my Android tablet for good once we get a working wireless driver.