Pine64

A new community update! New hardware to announced and previous hardware to return!

Can anybody suggest an enclosure for the Star64 SBC ? The only one they list as compatible on the Pine64 store is the acrylic enclosure but that won't work if one wants to use the M.2 PCI-E card which I do. I think the ROCKPro64 Premium Aluminum Casing will fit well enough by looking at how the ports would line up but it would be nice to get more info before ordering.

I they have had radio silence for months and the website hasn't changed much. I wonder if there is trouble.

It doesn't seem to have recovered since January

Happy to report that the Wifi on the Pinetab 2 now works. Still early days but I am using it for a few hours now and it works.

Details in the forum

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=18575&pid=121457#pid121457

So I have been using the pinetab 2 for about 6 months or so on and off. Mostly off to be honest. My final thoughts are that I can't really recommend this device to basically anyone. Even as a power user and someone that does software development I can say this device is a slog.

Cons: In terms of raw computing power this device is slow even with 8 GB of ram. Programs take a long time to start Once they do launch they are mostly fine however video playback in most modern browsers is terrible and stutters. You can actually get DRM playback to work if you are willing to put in 3 + hours to get widevine installed from AUR and modify your user agent. However it's not really worth it because the actual playback is awful.

It seems as though Wifi is never going to work. From what I have read there is practically no one working on the driver and it seems like the driver is so complex to do that with the community size it's basically a non-starter. So essentially this means you will always need an external Wifi dongle. Ubuntu touch has implemented the internal Wifi card but it's so unstable as to be unusable mostly.

The device is heavy. With the keyboard case attached it's heavier than my laptop and it's bigger than my laptop too. So the idea of it being portable is only true without the keyboard case.

The screen is not very good and is definitely dim even with the brightness turned all the way up so using it in full sun is not something I would recommend. The resolution is also low for a modern device. It's serviceable but not what someone would expect out of a modern tablet 50$ walmart tablets will be as good if not better.

Pros:

There is something magical and that just joyful seeing linux running on a tablet. As a linux enthusiast I still want it to be a thing but this might not be the place it happens. There are other linux tablets on the market that look like they are more modern and have better support : https://us.starlabs.systems/products/starlite?shpxid=5a56d85e-f63c-4d39-8bf9-91e4dd227aa1 But obviously they are a lot more expensive.

The keyboard is very good and once you get used to it's smaller form factor it's actually a good typing experience for what you would expect for a tablet case.

The tablet without the keyboard case is just nice and a good form factor and a joy to hold. They onscreen keyboard is responsive enough in all the OS choices I tried and doesn't become too cramped or too wide.

I appreciate the selection of ports having two usbs and an hdmi as well as a headphone jack is very uncommon in a tablet. not to mention the microsd card slot. It probably has the best selection of ports in a tablet.

swapping OSes: Being able to swap Oses just with the microsd card is a lot of fun. I just wish any of them were less beta at this point. With that said it's so easy to just grab an image write it to disk and reboot with the disk in and try out a new OS.

Final thoughts: Well I tried to put my overall impression right up front. However to reiterate I don't think this device is really read for real workloads. It's a fun sort of toy and to maybe if your goal is to tinker and work on a project it's okay. If you need a real world daily driver tablet there are better options for a linux tablet. If you just need a cheap tablet there are better options too. I wish I could say that the community loved this idea and that there was lots of exciting things coming. However it seems like the community around this tablet is very small, development has been slow to non-existent. so in conclusion I can't recommend it.

Struggling a bit to get any wi-fi network to show up through Ubuntu Touch on the Pinetab2. Am I missing something?

Wi-Fi is toggled on and flight mode is off.

Right now, the European webshop of Pine64 says the PPP is out of stock along with the PinePhone Keyboard. If it won't come back in stock in a few weeks, I might order it from the US-based webshop.

Does anyone have experience on ordering the PPP from the US to an EU country? Roughly how much extra would I need to pay thanks to customs/delivery?

Its out of stock right now and the Quartz64 is a bit underpowered

Sharing how I use my Pinetab 2 as a daily device. Honestly, it's a bit of a pain. Since the same vulkan is not supported by gpu, even though I took it mainly for ebook and coding. Of all the browsers I tried, the most productive was qutebrowser, and I noticed that it is the only one where multithreading works properly. But at the maximum loaded sites the browser starts to lag a lot

Battery life I didn't really pay much attention to, but it feels like the tablet can last +/- 4-6 hours. The speakers in the tablet really suck, I haven't heard such a deafening sound in a long time. Keyboard turned out to be quite convenient in typing. Why did I choose sway? Well first of all I just know it, secondly it works much more responsive than the same plasma or gnome, but it's obvious why. What I didn't really like is the protective cover, which opens endlessly in the same backpack, but it is fixed with a regular extra case or a narrow space. Well and still no drivers for the wifi module and camera, which is a little sad, but I will look forward to it. I apologize for the crooked spelling, This is my first time trying to express in English.

I bought a Pinephone out of curiosity and while it has been fun to play with, I am looking to repurpose it to something else. Has anyone found a good use for it, maybe incorporated into a smart home setup or something along those lines?

Still a lot of unfinished styling/animations, and several apps can't yet utilize the OSK, but so far I'm liking this GNOME far better than vanilla on the PT2. Installed on Danctnix via gnome-mobile-shell from the AUR.

Has anyone had any luck building a NAS with a PCIE adapter giving 4 SATA interfaces? I want to move away from my Synology box in favor of the Pine64 solution, but the guides I'm reading all talk about a dual-PCIE-SATA card.

I've heard software RAID is the way to go. My initial plan is 4x8TB with RAID 5. That's what I'm using in my Synology currently.

I purchased a PBP not long ago to replace my Acer Aspire 5742Z (~2010). Thought to share my use case and impressions to give others who are still on the fence after all these years a sense of how it holds up in 2023.

Use case: Email, web-browsing, videos, text-editing.

Setup: I am using the pre-installed GNU/Linux distro (Manjaro) but have swapped the Plasma DE for X Display Manager (XDM) and the Calm Window Manager (cwm). I've also gutted a few of the systemd services like resolved, homed, firewalld, etc. I like DEs and feel like this machine would do better with a lighter environment. (It does!)

Opinion: I was worried coming over from x86 that lots of things I use would not be available with aarch64. There are definitely warez out there that won't easily port over, but I haven't run into any road blocks yet.

What I notice the most is that the PBP does exhibit more screen tearing than the 2010 Acer. Further, even though it has 3x the cores and another GB of RAM, the Acer still felt more performant with its higher clock speeds. (But not by much)

Both machines bog down while loading demanding web pages like Youtube and the full-fledged web browser experience can be irritating on certain websites. Most pages load quickly and I don't even notice this is a lowpower device. (Like Lemmy for example)

If you can avoid using a web-browser for everything, then it's quite a nice device. (Email client instead of gmail.com, mpv instead of youtube.com, for example)

Then for the actual device, I like the screen it's great, keyboard is 'OK' and the trackpad is 'not terrible.' Each one of these things is better than the Acer and it weighs a few pounds less too.

Finally, the battery life destroys the 2010 Acer. I'll get 6-8 hours of work time out of it.

Really, there aren't many alternatives for an ARM laptop and zero at this price point. If an ARM laptop interests you, try the PBP.

Hello all,

I just realize my PineTime connector have some quality problem and gets wearied.

Is anyone having same problem? Can I fix it?

So I got my pinetab2 a few weeks ago. I am going to leave aside for a moment the absolute hell it was to get this thing. How it arrived broken and how I had to argue with support for a week to get a replacement. Now that I have it and have been playing around I must say it's sorta decent.

1. If you can't stand the thought of using a usb wifi dongle use ubuntu touch. Ubuntu touch has the ability to enable the internal wifi and in my testing it was stable so if you just can't stomach the idea of a dongle that is your best bet.

2. If you need bluetooth you are SOL at the moment

3. if you want to watch DRM protected streams it technically dooable but not advisable. this is because to do it you need to install widevine and in my experience it takes like 5 hours to install and I never got to install it because I didn't hit yes to a prompt in time and so I wasted like 5 hours.

So what is this tablet like to use on a day to day basis. First Issue is that this tablet has no sleep or standby mode yet. All you can do is turn the screen off. needless to say this thing is a battery killer at the moment. It gets decent battery life but with no standby you can't make it through a day with it.

The keyboard seems nice until you try to use it. I don't know why but I run into input lag with the keyboard. sometimes it misses characters when I type. When it is working it's a decent keyboard overall. However it's been a bit flaky for me.

The onscreen keyboard is actually fine except it doesn't yet really work for desktop applications. You need to use the dock button to get the keyboard to pull up with desktop applications. For some strange reason desktop applications cannot receive numerals or the lower character from any key. It's as if you are holding down shift all the time so good luck putting in a password or tying a url with no numbers and no "." . Also sometimes this dock button because unresponsive and you just can't get the keyboard to pull up no matter how much you mash the thing.

Performance is both good and terrible surprisingly. I have the 8 GB RAM model and applications can take a while to open. Video playback will stutter at times. Even old android tablets with just 2GB of ram seem to perform better. This doesn't really make sense so I assume there is still performance tuning that needs to be done. Ubuntu Touch runs much better on this device.

My conclusion on this is that at the moment everything has it's issues. Things work great at times but it's very rough around the edges. You get better results if you use it more like a laptop than a tablet. However the battery life and no sleep is really annoying at the moment.

there is just a few things that are keeping me from using this as a daily driver tablet. I think they could be fixed in relatively short order so I have high hopes of having a really cool device in the coming months. I say if you have the money pick one up and even if it doesn't work for you now you will have it for when the software has more polish.

[email protected]

Reddit has a small pinetime community, let's make it bigger on here!

I recently got my PineTime, and so far it's a very cool gadget, especially for the price. However, it is giving me every notification twice. Anyone know if there's a way to fix this? Currently running Infinitime 1.13.0 connected to an Android phone via GadgetBridge. It is only happening with some notifications... But so far I'm not seeing why some do and some don't duplicate.

There is no point to this post I'm just excited and have no one to tell lol.

I was wondering if there is support for active styluses on the pinetab. I’m looking for an arm linux tablet with support for styluses for taking notes, watching videos and browsing the internet. Any suggestion would be great!

I find that the brick is so heavy and the connection point doesn't fit very snug, and the power plug falls out quite easily. Anyone else experience this?

Do you have any tps, tricks and other thing to share with me on this device ?

I can't wait to get my hand on this device!

First impressions of the new Pinetab2 after one day