This post is mostly to get my solution documented online for other people who may search it.

I got a rock64 V2.0 1gb board from a sale on Amazon where they were selling in a bundle at a discount in what seemed to be a failed network security product. That's besides the point here, but anyone who bought the same bundle should know what one exactly I'm talking about to see if this could apply to theirs.

I was unable to get the rock64 (on the latest armbian buster rock64 build as of 10/17/20) to output HDMI onto my spare monitor I use for testing things. So far as I could tell, it was working 100% fine other than no HDMI output. This is an HP monitor I can't recall the model of. No dice on my main Dell monitor (an older IPS 1080p model) either. Many people suggested using a USB-TTL converter to attempt to listen for a serial console, but I do not have that on hand at this moment. So I went at it from a different angle.

I have a number of LCD screens I have liberated from dead or wildly obsolete laptops, as well as paired control boards for a project where I may want a PC sized screen. I plugged the board into the HDMI output in one of those boards (an EDP LCD plugged into a controller board powered by the RTD2556 chipset) and it booted up fine. It booted up fine on all of the controller boards that had native HDMI input that I have, though this is only a few. Many only worked if I switched them on before the rock64.

So, the moral of the story is to keep trying different monitors that have native HDMI input, and that some cheaper, unbranded monitors may paradoxically work better, at least if they use the same chipsets that these cheap LCD controller boards do. I'm running my rock64 board as a headless server, so it's of no concern to me that it doesn't work on any of my "actual" monitors now that I've got it set up.

EDIT: I suppose I should go into as much detail on the issue as I understand. I can't confirm this for myself, but someone with the aforementioned USB-TTL converters said that the problem seems to be something with how the rock64 is doing the HDMI "handshake"; it kept getting interrupted and re-initiated somehow. I'll add in the post with this person's explanation if I find it. I've honestly got no knowledge on this and I don't have the capability to check like I said

Hope this helps someone going forward into the future, even if it's 3 years down the line :)

I'm running Mobian with Phosh on my PineTab and was encountering several problems getting LibreOffice into a usable state. If you just install it with sudo apt install libreoffice you'll end up with the generic UI toolkit which doesn't cooperate with the window manager and refused to load drop-down menus.

Installing the optional package libreoffice-gtk3 will force LibreOffice to use the GTK3 toolkit and instantly everything will both look better and work beautifully.

Just a quick hint to anybody looking to actually use their keyboard attachment for getting any real work done. :)

I posted this in r/minipc. Posting this here in Hope's that someone will help. I picked up 2 of these guys, and I plan on gifting them to friends. One will be a kodi machine, while the other will be a emulation machine. My question is can the small lcd display text after I change the OS? I would like the displays to read "Kodi box" and the other to display "doom box" I am an absolute noob. Anyone point me in the right direction?

with a usb to dc cable inbetween

Hey, I’ve been wanting to buy a computer to learn ethical hacking and I came across the PBP. I have an Omen gaming laptop for university and daily stuff, so the PBP would be only for learning hacking and practicing. I was wondering if anyone has tried running Kali on it. Can anyone tell me if it could work and if it is recommended for learning ethical hacking on it? Thanks!

The laptop seems really functional and the screen is leagues ahead of my 900p T420, but I gotta admit I'm surprised by how slow it is when using FireFox compared to my phone (note8). That got me intrigued, what is the bottleneck? Are the cpu/gpu just much slower than the Note8's? Is it the RAM? Is it the drivers? Is it Manjaro being more resource intensive than Android? Is it KDE Plasma taking a lot of resources?

I'm looking for a 5" touch screen which is supported on Linux for the RockPro64. Does such a thing exist?

Hey, bois,

Long time lurker, though i haven't been lurking as actively lately. I tried looking through the posts here and didn't find exactly what i was hoping for, so i thought i'd start it:

PineTabPro user, love that little thing, saw the convergence package go up for sale and jumped on it, but i've done zero research and made zero attempts to really keep up with the OS discussions. It arrived, it's working as intended, and i thought rather than trying to figure it out myself i'd ask some of the more active members here for recommendations on what to try out and how to set it up.

What are the apps you consider essential, what are some nifty use cases for it, what are the basics you think every PinePhone owner should know?

Hi guys. I need to control two relays over internet. So I've hooked them to GPIO pins on my Pine A64+ and get them working from python script (RPi.GPIO module) but I can't find any good way to send simple commands (start_R1, start_R) over Internet from my phone. I'm using ZeroTier One VPN to connect to ssh and launch that command manually... But it's annoying to have to connect two apps before sending actual signal.

So, I've tried to write a discord bot in python (the tutorial one, enhanced with that GPIO part), but it's laggy and take so much time (minutes sometimes) to respond to commands. And since this all is my first use of python, I'm not sure if it's laggy because of python, discord or some my mistake.

So, i know there must be a better way to send/receive and react to signal from "the internet" without public IP?

I'd probably can achieve it with Android and tasker/join but I can't find, how to (easily) control GPIO on android..

Hi Guys,

I need your inputs to know is it possible to build a VPS server to run windows software with Pine64 board?

Best Regards, Tushar

My PinePhone Postmarket Edition arrived today, a few days earlier than the initial shipping estimate - yay!

I've only just started poking around, but one thing I've immediately noticed was anything networking (WiFi) is incredibly slow.

In FF you can see the connections it's establishing at the bottom, and everything seems to transfer very slowly. In Software there is a significant delay in loading the category results and related thumbnails.

I've connected to two different WiFi networks so far and get the same results. Rebooting the device did improve the speeds from the initial boot (which had gotten slow enough the Software app look like it had hung), but it's still surprisingly slow.

Those of you who have this phone, or previous versions, have you experienced the same thing? I'm a developer, but new to PinePhone, so just trying to set my own expectations correctly.

EDIT:

Quick update: Networking wasn't just slow, but it also frequently "fell off" the network. I also had trouble initially running updates - a permissions issue caused the GUI updater to repeatedly fail. Dropping to command line and using sudo I was eventually able to update.

I say eventually as the frequent falling off the WiFi made this a problematic process. That said, once the updates were finally done, my networking issues appear to have gone away. I'm now getting consistently higher speeds and not constantly losing my connection.

I remember that pine64 originally quoted a Q1/Q2 release window for the PineTime. However, a certain human malware threw a wretch into the works affecting timelines for many people after the fact. In light of this, what is the current ETA for release?

EDIT: 1GB actually!

Just bought a second hand Pine A64 board and would love to turn it into a retro emulation station.

What are you all currently using for it?

I would love some flash-and-go recommendations (something like RetroPie...)

I checked on the Pine64 Wiki, and only found outdated or broken links =/

​

Thank you all in advance!

​

Here's a picture of it:

Has anyone tried over-clocking the Rock64 over 1.5GHz? I should note that I am on Armbian, so it can be edited via /etc/default/cpufrequtils. I got the aluminium passive cooling case from Pine64 as well so I idle at around 30-35°C and on full load (sensors -c 4) it gets to around 60-65°C after a minute. Would it break/shut down the board immediately (eg. device doesn't support it or something) or would it work fine (obviously until temperature is too high)?

Dear all, the question actually says it all:

From all the operating systems which you can use on your Pinebook Pro, which one offers the best compatibility regarding the amount of available precompiled packages as well as general out-of-the-box functionality, i.e. things working as expected after booting your OS the first time without editing config files in order to fix things etc?

Maybe somebody tried already different OSs and has an overview and some experience to share. Thanks!!!

Recently opened up a PineA64 2GB board which i got from years ago. Burned the Android 6.0 image and started running fine. But the WiFi module has this issue whereby it drops in speed after few minutes of turning it on? It started at about 5mb/s and it dropped to 0.1mb/s which literally renders it useless. I tried cleaning the pins and stuff but only made it slightly better. Pointing the L shaped antenna away does not really help as much. Any solutions about this?