Skip to main content


The PineBook Pro is rather beautiful on the inside.

(Although I’d rather I was able to make it boot from an sd card without having to open it and unplug wires.) 👀

#Pine64 #PineBookPro

in reply to Aral Balkan

Snapped off the eMMC drive and it’s booting into Tow-Boot from the SD card.

#PineBookPro

in reply to Aral Balkan

Scratch that, thought I’d repurpose the drive from the MNT prototype I’m not using (makes a lovely prop, though, and glad I supported them; they’re doing great work) but that’s an mSATA not NVMe. Oh well, will have to order a drive for later.

#PineBookPro

in reply to Aral Balkan

You should aim for an nvme with as little power consumption as possible. at least on OpenBSD (which lacks nvme power management) the pinebook pro board will hang and freeze if the nvme draws too much power.
in reply to Stefan Sperling

@stsp Good to know, thanks. I’m planning on running Silverblue on it but always a good thing to keep in mind :)
in reply to Aral Balkan

it's rather stupid that the M.2 PCB does not clearly state it's SATA only, like how hard could it be to silkscreen that on??
in reply to Flaki

@flakoot Oh, no, sorry, I meant the MNT’s drive is an mSATA (I misremembered it as NVMe). The fault’s with me :)
in reply to Aral Balkan

Might have spoken too soon. Either it’s taking forever (seems stuck on “writing objects”) or it’s stuck.

#FedoraSilverblue #PineBookPro

in reply to Aral Balkan

Aha, and now an error message:

“The following error occured while installing the boot loader. The system will not be bootable…:

Failed to set new efi boot target. This is most likely a kernel or a firmware bug.”

Fun times.

Someone get the folks at Fedora a PinebookPro.

CC @Pine64

#FedoraSilverblue #Pine64 #PineBookPro #ARM

in reply to Aral Balkan

Ah, interesting, so maybe the error message is wrong?

discussion.fedoraproject.org/t…

(Don’t you just love those?)

#Fedora #FedoraSilverblue #PineBookPro #install

in reply to Aral Balkan

Yep, the error message is itself erroneous (fun times). Continued with the install regardless and pressed the reboot button. Seemed stuck on a cursor. Turned it off and then back on again (drink!) and voila! :)
in reply to Aral Balkan

Hmm, seems it’s not seeing the WiFi adapter (yes, I checked the kill “switch” – meta + F11 – it’s correct, and yes I rebooted just to make sure) :)

Gonna try postmarketOS next, me thinks :)

#PineBookPro #fedoraSilverblue

in reply to Aral Balkan

It’s installed and snappy (I installed the GNOME version and it’s faster than it was under Fedora Silverblue). And WiFi works. But… no GNOME Software? No web browser? 👀

#postMarketOS #pineBookPro

in reply to Aral Balkan

You have been duped, it's just an installer for an on-screen keyboard!
in reply to Aral Balkan

So if anyone else is running into this, you can install the basic GNOME apps by running:

sudo setup-desktop gnome

Not sure why postmarketOS GNOME for Pinebook Pro doesn’t come with this as default.

#postMarketOS #pineBookPro #GNOME #alpine #apk

in reply to Aral Balkan

The default resolution is too dense on the Pinebook Pro, so I had to:

gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"

And then set it to 150% in the display settings.

If you do that and use Firefox, it will appear blurry so edit the firefox.desktop file (/usr/share/applications/org.mozilla.firefox.desktop) and change the exec line to:

Exec=env MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 firefox %u

#postmarketOS #alpine #fractionalScaling #firefox #wayland

in reply to Aral Balkan

I should’ve known this before rage purging Ubuntu 🫠
in reply to josef

@josef I have a lot of server stuff deployed with Ubuntu but I have no idea why anyone would want to use it as a desktop at this point. I’ll take a distro with stock GNOME (like Fedora) any day (I run Fedora Silverblue on my daily driver).

Also, postmarketOS + GNOME runs really well on the Pinebook Pro. I’ve almost got everything set up exactly as I want it :)

in reply to Aral Balkan

Yeah, I’m warming up to Fedora. Don’t mind flatpaks either.
in reply to Aral Balkan

@josef I have no idea why any one would use Ubuntu on servers when you have Debian.

On the desktop, if you like new software, you can run Debian testing or unstable, whatever you prefer.

On a side note: Just updated an old Debian install from 9 to 11, skipping 10. Try that with Ubuntu LTS.

in reply to Aral Balkan

Until there is a Firefox update and you'll have to do it again.

Copy org.mozilla.firefox.desktop to ~/.local/share/applications/ and edit the file in that location.

Aral Balkan reshared this.

in reply to Aral Balkan

I guess you're not using the Fedora Firefox, right? Because the Fedora one should run on Wayland by default.
in reply to Jiří Eischmann

@sesivany Yeah, Fedora Firefox is fine (apart from not being able to play videos when first run). I installed postmarketOS on the Pinebook Pro (Silverblue wasn’t a great experience on it.) Love it on my beefy Rizen desktop machine though.
in reply to Aral Balkan

is.... is that a snake key on the British English keyboard

why does British have a snake key

in reply to Nate Cull (.social)

@natecull No idea, I use the English (Mac) layout everywhere and rarely glance at the keyboard :)

With the compose key set to Caps Lock, that pretty much gives me all the typographical expressiveness I need (ar.al/2018/07/18/typographical…) while typing. Well, it would if Ctrl+. worked everywhere, not just in GTK apps, to bring up the lovely emoji picker popover in GNOME :)

Unknown parent

Aral Balkan

@kayfaber [Citation needed]

;)

(Seriously, though, if you’re not going to include the GNOME apps, why make a GNOME build of your distribution?) :)