PINE64 - Linux on Pinebook Pro

Touchpad tap to click

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 19:38:34 +0000

Debian 13 / xfce with Daniel Thompon's ancient 5.7 kernel and updated touchpad firmware (too long ago that I remember the details).

Under xfce -> settings -> mouse and touchpad, I checkmarked "tap touchpad to click". Tap to click works with one finger taps, only. For 2 or 3 finger clicks, I need to press the touchpad.

On other computers running Debian / xfce, I can tap with two and three fingers as well.

What about you? Does it work for you on the Pinebook Pro and I just need to dig deeper?

Window Maker Live for Pinebook Pro

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 13:14:39 +0000

As was just verified, the arm64 UEFI variant of the Window Maker Live Linux distribution based on Debian/Trixie boots just fine on towboot enabled Pinebook Pro. This also includes the graphical debian installer routine, avoiding the need to bother with the awkward serial console for installations. I didn't complete a full installation yet on my own bare metal PBP because the machine needed for development is not suitable also for testing, and all installation testing has been done only in qemu so far.

See https://wmlive.sourceforge.net for more details and descriptions, screenshots, and download options.

Before you start downloading the ISO image for trying it out yourself, be aware that with the exception of the freely usable i386 version, the ISO images for both arm64 and amd64 are distributed as encrypted 7z archives which require a password to unpack them. Due to personal circumstances i am currently not in the position to just give away the fruits of my time and efforts investment without asking for a return. Until it will finally be publicly disclosed at the end of this year, this password is therefore provided only to people who are donating some cash to the project.

On the other hand, the sources to enable people to build any variant of the ISO themselves are, of course, readily available. So if you can't afford even any minimal donation and don't want to wait for the public password disclosure at the end of the year, you can simply create your own custom ISO image.

For interested people who are contributing any publicly accessible open source work themselves, the password will be freely provided without any donation requirement. Please contact me privately if this is of interest for you.

Armbian fix, current version now works

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 14:49:07 +0000

A user on the armbian forum figured out how to get armbian to work. I was able to follow these instructions and update my machine. This requires tow boot on the spi. My system is on an nvme.

The forum pst is here:https://forum.armbian.com/topic/50474-ex...ebook-pro/

PulseAudio dropouts after Manjaro Testing 2025.07.26 update

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 05:31:28 +0000

I see on the Manjaro forums they have a thread for every ARM Unstable Update.
https://forum.manjaro.org/c/arm/100

They say that only ARM Unstable is maintained anymore, but Testing seems to be getting updates too.

This Testing update arrived around 07.26 (Sat). Videos that used to play fine in mpv started getting debilitating amounts of audio dropouts with a buffer underrun message each time.

At first I thought it was due to video decompression getting less efficient and eating all the CPU, but playing the same files with --no-video and top running showed the system lightly loaded (~8% CPU), and yet the audio dropouts occured in the exact same places.

I tried updating to the Megi 6.15 kernel and rebooting. mpv no longer said "Audio device underrun detected" but the dropouts still occured, and pulseaudio was now hanging all the time and needing to be killed & restarted.

Start reading through this loooong page:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/PulseAu...leshooting

Try running with pulseaudio -v, notice that it seems to be suspending too much.

Section 4.8, unload-module module-suspend-on-idle

And that fixed the problem completely.

(I had tried various other things since 07.26 like turning timer-based scheduling on and off, and adjusting buffer sizes, and so far none of it had helped.)

So pulseaudio suspend-on-idle is currently completely broken, at least with the default config. It thinks it's "idle" while it's playing back a video and the laptop is actively being used.

Next problem was pulseaudio sometimes starts endlessly spamming to the console,

Code:
W: [alsa-sink-ff890000.i2s-ES8316 HiFi ES8316 HiFi-0] alsa-sink.c: Resume failed, couldn't restore original sample settings.

I: [alsa-sink-ff890000.i2s-ES8316 HiFi ES8316 HiFi-0] alsa-sink.c: Trying resume...

I: [alsa-sink-ff890000.i2s-ES8316 HiFi ES8316 HiFi-0] alsa-util.c: Cannot disable ALSA period wakeups                                      

I: [alsa-sink-ff890000.i2s-ES8316 HiFi ES8316 HiFi-0] alsa-util.c: Device hw:rockchipes8316c doesn't support 48000 Hz, changed to 44100 Hz.

Solution to that was to edit /etc/pulse/daemon.conf and set both default-sample-rate and alternate-sample-rate to 44100.

Can’t login to Linux

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 06:30:04 +0000

Hello, I am a newbie in Linux and I have a problem with login to Manjaro linux.
I bought pinebook pro Pine64 in Canada and I can use it normally. After I transfer to Thailand I cannot login to Linux screen and screen turn on as shown below.

Welcome to Manjaro-Arm
Website : https://manjaro.org
Forum :
IRC:
Matrix:
Last login:

(Xxx@xxxx)$

How can I fix this?
Please help.

I need help deciding if my PBP can be updated

Tue, 10 Jun 2025 16:54:05 +0000

Pinebook Pros,

I need to update my PBP and want your advice.

Here is my Linux background. I've had Linux as my desktop since about 1992. Softlanding Linux right when it came out and supported X-Windows. Others came and went over the next 30 years like Slackware, Red Hat, CentOS, Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu. I'm now back to Debian 12 with the MATE desktop. Before all that it was SunOS (Unix) on my desktop.

I ordered my Pinebook Pro when it was announced and finally received it in 2019. Then I added Manjaro to my list of Linux desktops. The PBP is not powerful but has been all I've needed in a laptop. I do all my primary work on desktops. I've used my PBP on three continents so far and am headed to another continent in the fall. I'm trying to decide if I can bring it up-to-dated. Manjaro doesn't seem to be keeping up.

Questions:

1) Linux Version
* Is Debian a good option now for PBP?
* Are there guides for installation?
* Can I use MATE?

2) Updates
* Are there firmware updates that I should apply. It's never been updated.
* I've never gotten it to suspend or sleep. Or I've never gotten it to wake back up. But, I've found that I don't really need that for how I use it.
* Some of the function keys don't work the way they are advertised but the ones I use work fine.

3) Hardware
* The left side hinge doesn't open correctly. It's doesn't really bother me but I might try to fix that when/if I re-build the whole thing. Are that any good pages showing the proper way to crack into the case?

Thanks!

Bill

PinePhone keyboard not registering input properly

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 09:37:52 +0000

I've recently got my PinePhone with the keyboard case.

Everything was going well at first, but I’m now noticing that some keys don’t register consistently, especially the spacebar and a few on the top row. Sometimes I have to press harder than usual.

I'm running postmarketOS and haven’t done much customization beyond updates.

Is this a known issue with the keyboard hardware, or should I be looking into software configs or firmware?

PBP does not power on (or only 1 in 10 times)

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 21:15:40 +0000

Hi,

I have a PBP which when I press the power button, powers on about 1 in 10 times. Otherwise, the power light does not come on.

Has anyone encountered this? What could I do?

One thing I noticed is that successes and failures seem to appear in a row, e.g., 9 failures - 3 successes - 6 failures...
Also, it seems like when it had been powered off for some minutes, it always starts with a series of failures - as if it had to "warm up" somehow?
(Of course, that may be nonsense, it but wanted to mention just in case it is not :-))

Many thanks for any hints!!

PBP does not start from postmarket OS image burnt to sd card

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 18:45:15 +0000

Hi,

I have burnt the latest stable PBP image to an sd card, but after insertion and booting the display stays black (even though the light is on).

The output of lsblk (on my laptop) looks like

```
mmcblk0 179:0 0 29.5G 0 disk
├─mmcblk0p1 179:1 0 228M 0 part
└─mmcblk0p2 179:2 0 4.1G 0 part /run/media/key/pmOS_root
```

which could be a problem maybe - there is no boot partition on mmcblk0p1 (I remember there was when recently I had flashed a manjaro image...)?

BTW for burning to sd I used the standard command,

```
dd if=some.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=4M status=progress

```

It would be awesome if someone could help!! Thanks!

Doing a fresh install

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 18:31:22 +0000

My friend gave me their old Pinebook Pro 14" after not using it very much.
They do not remember the password, so I would like to put a fresh install onto it.
They got this one in 2022 I believe.

I have a couple of questions I have not able find answers to on the forums.
firstly I have seen this: https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinebook_So...0181028.5D

but I am not sure what the standard OS on pinebook is. I do not want to do anything fancy just get the original OS and flash it on.
So what is the standard OS for the Pinebook Pro?

Also is flashing that OS on through micro SD the best method for a fresh install.

Thanks for reading, any help is appreciated!

pbp with manjaro arm seems to not find any hardware[no wifi, blutooth or battery]

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 07:49:09 +0000

I decided to try with manjaro arm again. I've got it running but recently my device seems to be unable to most needed hardware. It seems to think it has no wifi, or blutooth and I can't see the battery status(seems to think it's always on wired power)

Has anyone encountered this issue before? I've currently got this issue when I boot from sd card(with Manjaro-ARM-gnome-pbpro-23.02) or from the emmc.

new manjaro install: wlan0 stuck in setting network address

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 17:50:17 +0000

Hi,

I am following this post:

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=10403

to install current Manjaro on the ponebook. So far, I have successfully installed Manjaro 23.02 on the sd card.
But from the new sd card installation, I cannot use wifi to download an image for the emmc install:
wlan0 is forever hanging in "connecting"/"setting network address".

ip link shows the interface as dormant. NetworkManager is running, and the nameserver setting is correct in /etc/resolv.conf. I can also ping the nameserver.
But ip route does not return anything.

Would anyone have an idea what is going wrong? Many thanks in advance!!

Improved battery life with TLP daemon

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 13:46:15 +0000

In one of the recent Manjaro system updates TLP was mentioned as an option to power-profiles-daemon to manage battery life for the Pinebook Pro.

On the Pinebook Pro the TLP power management gives subjectively better battery performance over power-profiles-daemon. Especially sleep lasts over night without problems. My PBP is one of the earliest (second batch, I believe) and yet with TLP the battery performance is great.

The downside is that the PBP user interface feels slightly more sluggish in KDE Plasma. Everything seems to be a bit slower than it used to be. This might be different in a simpler (tiling) window manager. The TLP documentation mentions that their power management suits light users best (writing, etc).
However, the battery performance feels much improved.

If you are interested:

## Install TLP

Code:
$ sudo pacman -S tlp

You will be asked to uninstall **power-profiles-daemon**, say yes.

There is an additional package `tlp-rdw`, check in the docu if you want that.

To enable the service use (and reboot)

Code:
$ sudo systemctl enable tlp.service

## Config
I have used this config change to improve performance when power is plugged in:
Edit /etc/tlp.conf and un-comment and update:

CPU_ENERGY_PERF_POLICY_ON_AC=performance

You can check the config with:

Code:
tlp-stat --config

tlp-stat -p

tlp-stat -p -v

If you want you can set `CPU_ENERGY_PERF_POLICY_ON_BAT` to `performance` as well.

Here is a link to the TLP documentation

# power-profiles-daemon
To switch back to the **power-profiles-daemon**:

Code:
$ sudo pacman -S power-profiles-daemon

$ sudo systemctl enable power-profiles-daemon

And here is the link to some power-profiles-daemon documentation

What's a good image to use now? [tutorial help as well]

Mon, 16 Dec 2024 11:09:20 +0000

I'm trying to get my pinebook pro up and running again. What's a good OS to put on it now? Can someone also recommend a video tutorial for how to put a new OS on the pinebook pro?

Void Linux: missing firmware from pinebookpro-firmware?

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 19:58:29 +0000

I'm running Void on my pbp, which currently is working fine, but during installation wifi didn't work, and `ip a` said that wlan0 didn't exist at all, and the privacy switches didn't help. The unbind/bind trick:

Code:
sudo tee /sys/bus/platform/drivers/dwmmc_rockchip/{un,}bind <<< 'fe310000.mmc'

complained through dmesg of error -2 when looking for brcm/brcmfmac43455-sdio, which indeed didn't exist, so I copied it over from the stock Manjaro install on the eMMC (here eMMC is mounted under `/run/mount/manjaro' and void SD card is mounted under `/run/mount/void'):

Code:
cd /run/mount/manjaro/

cp --parents -Pvt ../void/ lib/firmware/{brcm/brcmfmac43455-sdio.{bin,clm_blob,'pine64,pinebook-pro.txt'},cypress/cyfmac43455.*}

Now it works. Should those files be in pinebookpro-firmware?