Pinebook Pro Tips
Last week’s PineBook Pro review was so well received I thought you’d enjoy a some tips on using it. Here’s a list that’s come in very handy for me as I break mine in:
The first and best place to check for info is the wiki.
The wiki is quite thorough; for example I was having issues with video chatting with family until discovering Privacy Switches were on. The wiki gave me the fix quickly:
PineKey + F10 for Microphone
PineKey + F11 for Wifi
PineKey + F12 for Cam.
Confirmation of these switches is the CAPs lock LED blinking: 2 blinks = enabled, 3 blinks = disabled
To fully update an arch system:
Though is a frontend patch management GUI, I had an error and switched to the CLI to see the problem:
sudo pacman -Syu
When fully updating for the first time via pacman I got this error:
/usr/lib/p11-kit-trust.so exists in filesystem
Fortunately Arch’s website had the solution:
pacman -Syu --overwrite /usr/lib/p11-kit-trust.so
And… we’re fully updated!
Better GPU performance:
The wiki recommends issuing this command for better GPU performance:
pacman -Sy mesa-git
Personally I found very little difference but admittedly chess isn’t all that high performance to begin with.
Improve suspend:
You can improve suspend with PCM720’s u-boot.
Download the first 3 files. DO NOT DOWNLOAD the SPIFLASH.BIN.
Execute the three DD commands EXACTLY as listed.
DO NOT RUN THE SPIFLASH command.
Reboot.
Next change the sleep behaviour:
nano /etc/systemd/sleep.conf
From Suspend to Idle:
SuspendState=freeze
To Suspend to Memory:
SuspendState=mem
You will notice a significant battery saving difference while suspended.
How to fix SPIFLASH:
I mentioned not running SPI flash above. It’s really a huge pro tip because I practically bricked my PineBook when I ran it. When I ran the SPI flash I lost all video output and couldn’t boot from microsd, USB, nor onboard.
I had to hold the power button for 20 seconds to turn off the laptop then carefully remove the back cover (the metal case is thin and sharp and leaves nice deep thin cuts). The basic procedure is, surprise, on the wiki!
In my case the recovery button did not work so I removed the shielding and shorted the VSS (bottom left) and CLK (right side) pins.
I did the process slightly different by leaving a bootable microsd in the laptop.
What happens when you short the SPI chip is that it no longer works as a boot device forcing the board to check microsd for bootable media. From there I ran this command to wipe out the SPI flash:
dd status=progress if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mtd0
The laptop reboots without issue once the SPI flash is gone. Phew!
The PineBook gets great marks from me given you can fundamentally brick it and still get yourself out of hot water.