postmarketOS/Alpine edge image for the Pinebook Pro

[MartijnBraam]

After some help on the chat channels, here's the first Alpine Linux/postmarketOS image for the Pinebook Pro, only tested on an ansi model.

Images can be downloaded here:

http://images.postmarketos.org/pinebookpro/

The current image has no UI installed since the postmarketOS UIs have touchscreen optimisations in them, meaning random things will be unnecessarily big. You can use the normal Alpine instructions for installing your favorite desktop environment.

default account is demo/demo

[anjanmomi]

This image doesnt boot if flashed to the emmc. It only boots from sd card.

[MartijnBraam]

I hadn't tried it on eMMC yet, still have the debian build on that. I do have u-boot in the image but there's a pretty high chance that it's broken.

[anjanmomi]

Thank you for this distro. I was a bit concerned about using postmarketos as my daily driver because it only ran from the sd card. I was running manjaro before and I would constantly run out of ram. I have never ran out of ram using Postmarketos and it has been the smoothest distro I have ran on my pinebook pro. Furthermore, the trackpad settings on i3wm were sane out of the box.

Very excited to use and contribute to postmarketos when I get my pinephone.

To compensate for the sd card issue, I just made /home the emmc. Now I can distro hop without any issues! Please let me know if I need to wipe and reflash / when a new update for this distro is released. Also, I do get some lag when resizing windows in i3. Furthermore, scrolling in dino (my xmpp client) is also slow. Scrolling in firefox is super smooth so I'm unsure if this is a consequence of i3 and dino, the default graphics driver, or the fact I am running the os off an sd card.

It would also be nice if I could see the text of services starting when the pinebook is booting up. I dont know if that is an option with openrc.

If you are a new user planning to install this distro, look at alpine's install scripts to change the keyboard mapping (I have an iso pbp) and other things: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Alpine_setup_scripts

Be advised: steps setup-disk and onwards in this script do not work.

If you have any questions or anything you would like me to document to the pinebook postmarketos wiki page, message me on irc: amom or reply here!

Kind regards!

[MartijnBraam]

The issue that you can't see the services starting is because the display driver isn't loaded yet at that point, I need to figure out which modules are required inside the initramfs to make that work.

[anjanmomi]

I experienced my issues with the graphics less after the last mesa-git update.

[branon]

I tried installing a graphical desktop using this image but didn't get far. Ran setup-xorg-base, installed mesa-git-dri-panfrost, and tried https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Sway

I guess I am supposed to be running Wayland?

[tophneal]

Yes, sway uses Wayland.

[MartijnBraam]

I tried installing a graphical desktop using this image but didn't get far. Ran setup-xorg-base, installed mesa-git-dri-panfrost, and tried https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Sway

I guess I am supposed to be running Wayland?

You need mesa-git-dri-panfrost and mesa-git-dri-kmsro on the pinebook pro. One is for the GPU and the other is for the display. 

If you want the postmarketOS sway setup you can also install postmarketos-ui-sway which will set up lightdm to launch sway.

[slyecho]

What is the status of the Pinebook Pro support in postmarketos?

Currently I'm getting errors from APK when installing updates. Are the pinebookpro packages in the main repo or not?

Code:

pinebook:~# apk add sudo
ERROR: unsatisfiable constraints:
 mesa-git-dri-panfrost-0_git20200110-r0:
   conflicts: mesa-git-dri-gallium-0_git20200116-r1
   satisfies: device-pine64-pinebookpro-0.1-r0[mesa-dri-panfrost]
              device-pine64-pinebookpro-0.1-r0[mesa-git-dri-panfrost]
 mesa-git-dri-gallium-0_git20200116-r1:
   conflicts: mesa-git-dri-panfrost-0_git20200110-r0[mesa-git-dri-panfrost=0_git20200116-r1]
   satisfies: device-pine64-pinebookpro-0.1-r0[mesa-git-dri-panfrost]
              device-pine64-pinebookpro-0.1-r0[mesa-git-dri-kmsro]

Otherwise, I really like it, being from an Alpine fan myself.