pinebook 1080p crash and fix
#1
My pinebook 11" 1080p crashed and failed to boot - and how i recovered it.

In may 2019 I received my new 11" pinebook 1080p laptop with the default ubuntu bionic 18.04 and kde neon 5.14 desktop. I used it only a few times and after installing some seemingly innocuous packages using the software manager "discover" and also python pip it failed to boot. It displayed the circle splash screen on startup, but then remained blank and did not display the login request. (I had previously set it to NOT auto boot to the desktop).
I was able to get a console login using  CTRL-ALT-F2 and login as root. I use a wired lan connection via a usb ethernet adaptor and I had "automatic" internet access from the console.(May be more difficult using wifi). I ran startx, but it failed and "could not connect to server". "X -configure" did not fix the x server either. I used apt-get update (or upgrade, I forget which) and it downloaded about 100Mb of updates. This took a while and you need to press the shift key occasionally or the system goes into screen shutdown and cannot be woken-up. Shift does nothing and seems to prevent inactivity-shutdown.
Now the system would boot to the login screen, but this would only flash briefly and you could not login and the screen remained blank. I downloaded the current distribution image (20190428) from the pine64 website https://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Pinebook_Main_Page  . Be careful to get the 1080p version or standard version for your laptop screen resolution. I put this on a flash-memory card but this would not boot at all, not even the circles splash screen at startup.

I returned to using the console, booting off the internal MMC and tried to use apt-get again. This gave a message to use pkcon instead on this ubuntu version! I used 'pkcon update' which was messy, but downloaded more updates and installed them. (use the shift key trick above to avoid inactivity sleep blanking!)

The system now booted correctly. It had updated KDE neon to 5.15. It was able to boot from the flash disk that previously failed to boot.

Main points:
1) use CTRL-ALT-F2 to get a console. (It must partially boot to do this)
2) use "pkcon update" to update the entire system. its not the same as apt-get update! There are many updates to the factory supplied version
3) Booting from a flash-memory card can apparently be disabled by some unknown software issues on the MMC disk.
4) Use a USB-LAN adaptor and wired network if wifi does not work from the console.

Despite the recommended changes to "settings", "desktop behaviour", "screen locking" it still suffered unrecoverable inactivity shutdowns. (perhaps closing and opening the lid works - i did not try that) I have changed the shutdown time to maximum allowable 99 mins, but this does not help either! To prevent unrecoverable sleep events I have used the forum comments to use a separate profile, not the default, and set this to never sleep. This works. (settings > power management > activity settings > *define special behaviour, *never shutdown screen, *never suspend )


Messages In This Thread
pinebook 1080p crash and fix - by nano2 - 06-08-2019, 12:06 AM
RE: pinebook 1080p crash and fix - by tllim - 06-13-2019, 07:10 PM
RE: pinebook 1080p crash and fix - by pyrrhumain - 06-24-2019, 07:41 PM

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