pine64.org
Pinebook Pro pre-orders start July 25
forum members get priority. fuck.
Let’s talk a bit about the state of Linux for the Pinebook Pro. As far as Linux on ARM development goes, I can say with confidence that we’re in what I like to call the luxury territory. What I mean by this is that everything works – some things better than others, but it’s all there – and there are no deal-breaking issues in any of the builds. Developers have effectively moved from ‘making things work’ to ‘making things work better’ in the past two months. Improvements are literally done daily, if not hourly, and everything from desktop acceleration to trackpad settings and battery-life is being continually tweaked. Regarding the custom Debian build that will ship with the Pinebook Pro – at the time of writing we still have about two weeks to continue tweaking things so they work their best. You will, of course, likely want to hit the update icon when you get your laptop, which will update the kernel and numerous other things, as well as run your regular apt updates and upgrades.
That said, cool things have been done to improve battery life on the kernel level. MrFixit2001 has managed to make the governor monitor activity, so that not only does it set the frequency of the cores but also automatically turns the cores on and off on a need-be basis. We expect that this will see a significant improvement to battery life as well as thermals whilst having a relatively small impact on performance. From my testing, relative to all cores being active and the default interactive governor settings being applied, running webGL demos and playing simple games the observable performance difference is really negligible (for reference, 5 FPS difference running Aquarium WebGL demo). This is a very cool trick and one will be further improved upon and find its way into the majority, if not all, OS’ for the Pinebook Pro. Lastly, I think its worth noting that you can also turn individual cores on and off manually from the userspace for cores cpu0-5 (exchange value for X), which comes in handy if all you’re doing is terminal work or taking notes in class: echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/online. This applies to all current Linux builds.
There are three privacy switches mapped to the F1, F2 and F3 keys on the Pinebook Pro keyboard. They deactivate the following: 1) the BT/WiFi module; 2) the webcam; and 3) the microphones. I’ll give you a broad overview of how the switches work and answer the inevitable questions about their security. The keyboard has a special firmware that lives on, and operates separately of, the operating system. In a nutshell, it detects if F1, F2 and F3 keys are pressed for 10s. Once one of the keys get pressed for the set duration, the keyboard firmware cuts power to the chosen aforementioned peripheral. The implementation is no different to cutting a peripheral power mechanically via a physical switch, and the power state settings for each is stored across reboots.
there's nothing on the link about pre-disabling Intel ME or AMD ST because that shit was never present in the first place
Year of the Linux ARM Laptop
Other urls found in this thread:
forum.pine64.org
opensource.rock-chips.com
marc.info
puri.sm
youtu.be
pine64.org
linux-sunxi.org
twitter.com
Pinebook Pro? Who thought of that name?
another garbage ARM SoC system that's not properly supported by anything except some hacked together frankenkernel
thats nice but i wont buy a new laptop before the thinkpad breaks
they've got a pinebook for half the price that's lower quality, that they'll continue to sell when this one's available.
except by all this shit: forum.pine64.org
and Android, and ChromiumOS
and OpenBSD after the Pro's out for a while.
Nice.
so the already slow hardware could be even slower
So? A bunch of distros? What does it matter? Most Distro maintainers are attention-whoring retards that just pack a bunch of software on top of a linux kernel. Many have no idea what they're doing. It's not up to them how well or not the SoC is supported. Support in the one and only kernel is important - also: the RK3399 doesn't support graphics output in any *BSD. Even the advert you linked says that. If you'd were familiar with how *BSD usually works, you'd know it could take years until that support actually realistically comes, if ever. Not even speaking about graphics acceleration and in-hardware video decoding. lol good luck with that ever arriving.
This link actually gives a more honest picture:
opensource.rock-chips.com
That's what you get with mali graphics core. Yeah, they're getting mainlined but still pretty much work like shit. Think nouveau. Not even looking into details like encryption engine etc. as these are usually never properly supported by anything but the vendor kernel.
0/10 garbage ARM toy that'll have zero support by the manufacturer the moment they managed to get their money out the nerds buying this.
yeah, pine64's been around for a while. "the moment they got their money" is in the past.
...
Again, irrelevant. Tons of ARM SBC board manufacturers out there that have been around for years now and that'll happy push out the new SoC of the hour on a new board without ever really giving any support in actually making it work beyond "Here's a link to some random github of a 3.x kernel, have fun". Garbage ARM board and at this rate I think you actually might be mentally deficient, probably non-white.
The kvetching intel shills in this thread are hilarious. For what most people do, this machine is quite adequate.
you're accusing them of dropping support for the laptop as soon as they "get their money from geeks".
Trackpoint is my only deciding factor for laptops anymore.
what do they even support if it didnt have open source drivers on release
can it run useful software though haha
you can't play steam games on it, and any closed-source applications probably won't work, and the GPU probably isn't much. If you get any use out of Linux outside of those things, you'll probably get the same use out of Linux on this.
I've tried a couple of ARM laptops and liked the Pine (pre-Pro) the best. The keyboard layout's just a little wonky; reminds me of the Zaurus's layout. I'd use it more if I hadn't become a hikikimori all of the sudden. If I'm always home, I'm just going to use more powerful stuff.
but does it support the normal kernel that you can get from kernel.org or just some 5 years old chink kernel?
So much wasted money.
Could all go into CPU, RAM and GPU.
This is pure normiecore!
Is this newspeak for HDMI, DVI, or DisplayPort?
DON'T BE ARM
DON'T BE ARM
DON'T BE ARM
:(
kys
OpenBSD boots it fine, without blobs.
marc.info
I think it's working on NetBSD too, bunch of people on arm list are talking about it recently. No idea of the extent of onboard device support, and anyway it seems like a high priority SoC, so I'm sure it'll get good support soon.
OTOH, the A72 is speculative execution, so get plain A53 SoC only instead if you want to be safest. That means the old Pine64+ or similar boards (also I guess the old Pinebook, but it's build is shit and Olimex has a better one, but at higher price).
Needs storage, a real battery, and enough RAM to open a single tab on furryfox.
I also seriously hope you can install a non-cianigger distro on it.
Also what says
0 sales, 0 worth.
Yes
What did he mean by this?
I don't see how this is a bad thing?
...
That sort of thing must be dirt cheap to add to the machine.
...
So security by trusting a kike chink thrusting a c4 up your ass
what do you think you're trusting with any other kind of switch? Cameras can have a switch that physically obscures the camera, but what are you going to do about mics or wireless?
Why would you trust a home light switch? It directly puts circuit in the "open" state. There's not much room for bugs there. When code is involved, things get more complicated and brittle, because it's no longer as simple and direct and immutable (code can change easily).
CIAnigger laptop confirmed. How the fuck can physically disconnecting the device from the laptop be under any circumstance less safe than some fucking firmware implementation?
All of my computing requirements are outside of those things. Games and closed-source applications are for fags.
it's chinese SoC ARM
I'm literally shaking right now.
This. It's laughable to suggest otherwise. These guys for example went with physical disconnection.
puri.sm
also no one has yet said if the keyboard firmware is even open source
i rather take the mnt reform pill
yeah a simple physical switch like pic related that just cuts the voltage to the devices in question would've worked and could've been easily put in a somewhat retracted spot (so you don't hit it accidentally) on the case. Would've probably been cheaper to make too. I swear to god todays engineers just can't into any design that doesn't involve doing everything in firmware.
well it's memearm and nothing will work properly on it anyways.
those are much better than a firmware based thing. its always either on or off but with a firmware it might be on for a while until the firmware and settings get loaded.
Too bad it is coming
Why would they use one of the worst keyswitches on Earth
New video about the Pinebook Pro (an update to the blog post in the OP): youtu.be
Pinebook Pro - 4K playback, Youtube, WebGL and Quake 3 Demo
ffmpeg -i pinebook-278.webm -i pinebook-76k.webm -map 1:a -map 0:v -c:a copy -c:v copy pinebookpro-144p.webm
what do you mean it's invalid??? fuck off 8ch.
They cucked out on the cherry ML due to production reasons and instead use Kalih's low profile keyswitches (which are way better, they were the inspiration for BOX switches with the click bar), Now I would say it's the one of the best keyswitches on Earth.
once our electric grids r taken over by the russians, this kind of energy efficient tech shall come in handy
It's the day.
Despite saying that the old process sucked and they had a new better one now, the new better process is only better for pine64 forum users.
This is what you gotta do:
1. go to the store
2. try to buy the pinebook
3. get told "there are problems with your order" because you don't have a coupon code. the explanation directs you to pine64.org
4. at this page, you
CANNOT EVEN FUCKING PREORDER A PINEBOOK WITHOUT FORUM CREDENTIALS
5. so you get those, and then enter them into that page, and you'll be told that you don't qualify for a free eMMC upgrade.
6. then you wait.
you will be waiting >72 hours, you're warned (elsewhere), because you're not a forum member.
Not being a forum member is akin to being a vandal, don'tcha'know. You're out there painting "pinebook sucks" on bathroom walls and abandoned buildings.
You're lucky to have been given this last chance to redeem your soul with forum access.
How do you fuck up this badly?
The keyboard looks super un-comfy. Wouldn't want to do much typing with such shallow keys.
Olimex also have ARM laptop. It's an A64 SoC (quad-core Cortex-A53), so not as fast as this Pinebook, but can still be useful depending on what you plan to do. It's also immune to the Spectre class of bugs, so safer than this Pinebook. The older Pinebook is more equivalent in specs, but that one had shoddy build because they where trying to fit everything into $100 price.
linux-sunxi.org
This
Ain't gonna cut it.