#pinebook pro

Manjaro ARM, the Arch Linux-based operating system tailored for ARM architecture, rolled out a significant update on November 15th 2023, bringing a range of enhancements and updates to its stable release. In this latest update, several key components have received attention to ensure improved performance and stability: Some Kernels got updated Linux-Firmware got updated Plasma got updated to…

I really love this page Manjaro has for the status of every mirror. I've experienced problems before with my mirror having issues syncing which didn't result in errors when checking for updates. Instead, the mirror was still online and servicing requests. But it hadn't been in sync for several weeks, so it just always replied that no new updates were available. I periodically find myself hopping over to this page to see if I need to swap mirrors when I feel like it's been a little while since my last round of updates. The rolling release model for Manjaro means they tend to be frequent.

After far longer than I care to admit, I finally managed to get a Bluetooth keyboard paired with my Pinebook Pro. My first attempt was to just launch the Bluetooth Adapters application from the Manjaro XFCE main menu. Doing this resulted in absolutely nothing visible. After seeing that this launcher runs:

blueman-adapters

I tried running that from the CLI where I was greeted with an error message that no adapters were found. I knew that wasn't the case since the official page clearly highlights that the device has Bluetooth 5.0 support. I eventually realized that I simply needed to start the service before anything else would work, AKA the first thing I should've checked:

sudo systemctl status bluetooth

This showed the service as disabled, which I could fix via:

sudo systemctl enable bluetooth

And:

sudo systemctl start bluetooth

This resulted in the expected Bluetooth icon showing up in XFCE and only reinforced that it was something I probably should've checked first. After this, though, I still needed to get my keyboard paired, which I attempted to do through the Bluetooth Manager application. This allowed me to easily discover devices, though only 2 random devices (presumably from some of my neighbors) showed up, and neither of them was my keyboard. This despite the fact that the keyboard itself was in pairing mode. Multiple rescans showed no difference. I eventually went for the trusted "turn it off and on again" by toggling Bluetooth off and back on. Sure enough, after this my keyboard was finally visible. The initial attempts to pair still failed, though, as Manjaro would provide a code that it wanted me to enter on the keyboard. This worked fine except for the final number in the 6-digit string that it refused to accept the first 2 times I tried. The 3rd time was a charm, though, and after that I could finally use my keyboard... which I just used to type up this post.

New Post has been published on https://www.aneddoticamagazine.com/pine64-stand-fosdem-2019/

PINE64 stand @ FOSDEM 2019

PINE64 stand @ FOSDEM 2019 Preview of :

PineBook Pro

PinePhone

PineH64

SNES Case

Manjaro brings Firefox 93, QT 6.2, and an updated Uboot and kernels to the stable branch

Manjaro developers announced a package update in the stable branch of their system for ARM devices. Of the major updates, Firefox came out in version 93, Qt 6.2, Uboot packages updated to 2021.10, KDE Gear updated to 21.08.2 and KDE Frameworks updated to 5.87. Some highlights: Most of our kernels got updatedQT 6 got a big point release with 6.2.0And Firefox is updated to 93.0Most of our…

My Pinebook Pro has been riding the struggle bus lately. It's at the point where I'm starting to think that I need to drop Manjaro XFCE on it and start considering a different operating system in the hopes that what I'm experiencing are OS issues rather than device or firmware issues. This wouldn't exactly be new territory for me, as just a couple of months ago I finally gave up on using Manjaro XFCE on my Star Lite laptop. I simply ran into too many bugs with Manjaro and swapped to Xubuntu, where things have been going much more smoothly for me. I'm not confident that an OS swap will fix what I'm experiencing now, though.

Initially, Manjaro was a significant step up for my Pinebook Pro, which is old enough that I received it running the old Debian image that was so highly customized that a sizable number of software packages on it couldn't be updated, making it a security breach waiting to happen. After seeing the amount of love that Manjaro was getting in the Pine64 community, though, and how invested the Manjaro folks seemed to be in working well with the Pinebook Pro hardware, it seemed like a smart move. When Manjaro KDE became the default OS on new Pinebook Pro units, I decided to flash Manjaro XFCE onto my device's eMMC. It was exciting to go from not being able to update anything to having updates available constantly. I'd typically only use my device once or twice a week, and basically every time I fired it up there would be a significant number of updates available.

The honeymoon didn't last forever, though. One of the initial issues I saw was with respect to the battery. Unlike Debian, Manjaro features both a "Suspend" and "Hibernate" mode for sleeping the device. To my understanding, Suspend is supposed to remove power from most of the hardware but keeps the RAM warm to facilitate waking seamlessly and rapidly, though this obviously comes at the cost of draining the battery more to keep the RAM powered up. When using Suspend, I could let the device sit for about a day and half before it would be completely drained. Hibernate, on the other hand, writes the content of RAM to the swap space -- enabling Hibernate will actually fail if you've forgotten to create a swap space -- to save on power but still allow for the state of the device to be saved. That being said, if you don't have any applications waiting between sessions, the time to return from Hibernate and to boot from being fully powered off is, to the best that I can tell, exactly the same. As a result, I'm better off simply shutting my device down between uses.

While the battery can cause annoyance, I've since discovered far more significant issues. One is that the wireless NIC is periodically not recognized by the operating system when I either boot or wake the device. It'll simply show that no network devices are available, and using the XFCE UI to toggle networking off and back on makes no difference. If I was more savvy in the realm of Manjaro/Arch, I may be able to do some further troubleshooting via the CLI. Given that Debian-based distros are my forte, though, I typically just reboot and hope for the best since that's faster than grabbing another device which is connected to the Internet in order to start looking up solutions. A reboot will typically fix the issue, but not always. Earlier this week, I had the exact same behavior after a reboot. At that point I just shut down my Pinebook Pro and used another device for what I wanted to do. I left the device off until I decided to write this post, and I was happy that after a few days of sitting in the corner my laptop was able to connect to WiFi once again.

The firmware woes don't end there, unfortunately. The trackpad on the Pinebook Pro has always been a bit of an issue, with a very noticeable latency when using it that made precise movements very difficult. Clicking large buttons on web pages was simple, for example, while clicking the small x buttons in XFCE to close application was a struggle... especially for applications which weren't fullscreen, meaning that the button wasn't forced into the top-right corner of the screen. I had hoped that this problem was about to be solved a few months ago when new firmware was released that dramatically reduced the latency. After following the well-written community documentation to go through the slightly nerve wracking process of flashing the new firmware -- which included a small but non-zero chance that the ability to use the trackpad could be completely bricked -- things were working much better for me... until they weren't.

While the new firmware worked great most of the time, I started to periodically see problems where touching the trackpad with my finger would cause the cursor to "jolt" as if simply touching the surface were registering that I moved my finger about an inch or so either up or down. This wouldn't typically manifest itself immediately after a wake or boot, but would randomly crop up after I had been using the device for some time. When it happened, though, it made using the device nearly impossible. While I could fight against it to move the cursor where I needed it to be, lifting my finger off the trackpad and then tapping down to register a click would cause the cursor to jump either up or down, meaning that I was clicking on either 1.) nothing or 2.) the wrong thing. At that point, I was back to struggling to interface with the device enough to reboot it and hoping for the best after that.

While trying to write this post the first time, I ran into yet another issue which may be related to the last problem and may be something entirely new. While using the Tumblr web UI to write the post, my device suddenly kicked me back to the login screen as if I had opted to lock the screen. Weird. I tried to enter my password in order to log in only to discover that the keyboard wasn't working. I could still use the trackpad to move the mouse cursor, but tapping on it would no longer register as a click. I eventually discovered that I could still physically press the trackpad to click and used that to just reboot the device rather than running off to dig up an external keyboard that I could connect. The reboot once again seems to have restored functionality, though I lost all of the blog content that I had written.

While I'd like to switch operating systems and get away from Manjaro since that made my life significantly better on my Star Lite, I'm at least a little concerned that my issues are mostly firmware related and may not be fixed by a different flavor of Linux. If I do switch to anything different, I'd prefer it to be Armbian since I'm most familiar with Debian-based distros.

PineBook Pro with Nordic style [how-to]

Today I am going to show you how to make KDE Plasma with Nordic style. I will be doing this on PineBook Pro with Manjaro ARM installed. Let’s get started. Initial setup 1. First open Plasma system settings and go to Desktop Effects. Enable following effects: Sheet, Dim Inactive, Dim Screen for Administrator Mode and Slide Back. Then choose get new desktop effects, install Maximize effects and…