Pinebook Pro Review I received my Pinebook Pro (PBP) back in January but I wanted to "use it in anger" for several weeks before posting a review. The bottom line: I like it and would recommend it to developers, tinkerers, and probably everyone in the tildeverse. I would not recommend it to your grandmother. There are plenty of sharp edges still but you'd be hard-pressed to find better value right now at $200. Initial Setup The PBP came with a short setup guide the directs you to the forums. I was able to power on and log into the default Debian distribution that comes factory installed. The desktop environment is heavily modified and has a few rough spots I wasn't a fan of. For one, even though the PBP has a 64-bit ARM chipset, the userland in the default Debian installation is 32-bit. This is apparently because the Widevine DRM binaries for watching Netflix only come in 32 bit for ARM chips. I guess if you watch Netflix on your computer this might be a good thing for you. As an aside, this kind of B.S. is exactly why we didn't want DRM "standards" on the web in the first place. Also, the Debian PBP support is not official and thus the way you get updates for certain core packages is by pulling them down via an included script. All this script does is download from some GitHub repo. Not great. These factors immediately led me down the path of installing a different distro. Enter Manjaro After perusing the forums, I found the Manjaro team had received an early developer PBP unit and support was quite good already. Most importantly, they have an installer which you can flash to a microSD card and it will automatically flash to the internal eMMC memory on the PBP. Otherwise, you'd have to take out the eMMC and flash the image yourself. Go for the "emmc" images here [1]. The install worked perfectly on the first try and I booted into a nice, dark-theme XFCE4 desktop. WiFi and everything else that worked on Debian worked out of the box on Manjaro, but now I had the 64-bit userland I desired. I tried some quick development on it, downloading the arm64 binary Go distribution. Compilation was, of course, a bit slower than my top of the line machines, but not terrible. This was my first time using Manjaro, but I was able to install the usual packages after looking up docs for pacman, the package manager it shares with Arch. Printing and Compiling I joked about this on Mastodon, but it's true. arm64 will bring you back to the good old days of Linux. Get ready to compile a ton of software. Anything that wasn't a common library or program has to be compiled. One of the things I wanted to try was running some of my ham radio software. Fldigi was not available in the Manjaro repos, so I compiled it. There are instructions out there for raspberry pis that can be adapted for the PBP [2]. I got that working, plugged in my radio CAT control and actually made a PSK31 contact with KD5ILA on 40 meters. Will it ham? Yes! The same day I set up the PBP in earnest, I actually had cause to print something. I've used a Brother black-and-white laser printer for some time now and have been very pleased. My main computer runs Lubuntu and Brother provides .deb files to install the drivers. However, the only other packages they provide for Linux are rpms. Well, I can't use either of those on Manjaro! I installed CUPS and started it up to try to configure via the CUPS web interface. The Generic drivers didn't work (no surprise). I ended up having to break open the deb archive to pull out the PPD file and upload it to the CUPS web interface in the Add Printer section to get it working. How nostalgic. There were probably other ways to do this, but I used the IPP protocol in CUPS. The URL should be ipp:///ipp/port1 If you have a Brother laser printer you want to set up with the PBP, let me know and I can help. I think I might set up a CUPS server for my whole network on an RPI and then just have any new computers hit that CUPS server to prevent having to do this on any future non-Ubuntu machines. Rough Edges The following is a list of strange things that either were a problem or are still a problem with Manjaro on the PBP: * xfce4-screensaver is not installed by default, thus there is no lockscreen. A simple install via pacman fixed the problem but that's...odd * I can't get my RTL-SDR to work. I installed the package for it and gqrx, but for some reason the OS won't get samples from it. I haven't spent the time to dig into this one yet * WSJT-X won't compile, so no FT8 :-( Looks like this is an issue in the Arch package too - the version of Qt that ships is too new and there is a naming conflict it seems. * When audio starts up, it crackles for a second until it gets going. Very strange. * The headphone jack doesn't work. This seems to be common on the PBP and none of the prescribed fixes have worked for me. In the meantime I plugged in a USB audio interface which works fine The integrated speakers work fine however *shrug* Next Steps It seems that BSD support is chugging along, but for a laptop I can't install anything that doesn't support 5GHz WiFi. I live in a city and the 2.4GHz band is so saturated that it is unusable. That's a shame because I'd really like to try NetBSD on the PBP - I'm sure it would hum. That's it for now! Hit me up with questions/comments @jboverf@mastodon.sdf.org or [at] sdf.org! [1] https://osdn.net/projects/manjaro-arm/storage/pbpro/xfce/ [2] http://www.kk5jy.net/fldigi-build/