Armbian on Pinebook Pro

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wove
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Armbian on Pinebook Pro

Post by wove »

Armbian is focused on ARM based single board computers and they do a nice job with all the low level work. Their distros do a very nice job of kernel tweaking. They manage to get all the hardware working and do a nice job of providing video acceleration for ARM's built in GPU.

Armbian's preferred DE is XFCE. The provide other DEs, but they stick with the XFCE applications no matter what DE is in the distro. I do not use XFCE on ARM. Plasma in my experience works exceptionally well on ARM hardware. Armbian uses Mousepad and Evince on Plasma. They are easy to switch out for Okular and Kate. But my install is missing the KDE systray items for Power and Network, and I am not sure what KDE calls these items so I can install them.

Overall Armbian and KDE are coming together fairly well. I have /root on the internal nvme and /boot on the emmc with the nix boot loader installed on the spi. With the boot loader installed to the spi, I can pick a boot device on startup and start from either the internals, or from a USB thumb drive or an SD card. Plasma booted from the nvme is quick and responsive and for the first time in a couple years the Pinebook Pro is acting like a very decent laptop.

I still need to figure out how to incorporate power and network control into Plasma's system settings. I am also missing whatever bit is need to handle display scaling from KDE's system settings. Ksysguard does not seem to be available in Debian Sid's repos and I do not know what Plasma is now using as a System Monitor.

It is very nice after a couple years to see this fine 1Kg 14" laptop becoming a useful machine.
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tlmiller
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Re: Armbian on Pinebook Pro

Post by tlmiller »

plasma-pa and powerdevil.
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crosscourt
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Re: Armbian on Pinebook Pro

Post by crosscourt »

Ksysguard is still being used by KDE as Ive got it in both Neon and Debian presently. Its functionality has improved quite a bit with a added system monitoring monitoring features.
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tlmiller
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Re: Armbian on Pinebook Pro

Post by tlmiller »

That's kinda funny. Pretty much every distro on amd64 it's been removed and replaced by the far more feature filled plasma-systemmonitor. I can't think of any distro for amd64 that has Plasma >5.24.0 that still has ksysguard installed.
wove
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Re: Armbian on Pinebook Pro

Post by wove »

Armbian has its own repositories. It also uses repositories from Debian SID, plus it seems the creators of the iso also add their own repositories. I have been using Muon for a package manager. The ISO I am using does not install a system monitor and Muon does not show ksysguard as being available. There are several things I can not find, some I assume is because I do not know the package name and maybe some are just not there.

Is the new KDE system monitor called "plasma-systemmonitor"? What needs to be installed to have the wifi icon show up in the system tray?

I really appreciate the efforts that folks have put into creating a functional ISO, I would have no starting point at all without their efforts. Overall though I can see that the difference between, it boots and it runs and a nicely put together distro is an order of magnitude.
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crosscourt
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Re: Armbian on Pinebook Pro

Post by crosscourt »

I use Neon, Q4OS KDE, MXLinux KDE and PCLinuxOS and all still have Ksysguard and its available in repos. Neon has ksysguard in the repos and installed but also has system monitor installed as does PCLinuxOS as they use the most recent KDE version. The other distros are using older KDE versions.
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tlmiller
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Re: Armbian on Pinebook Pro

Post by tlmiller »

wove wrote: Sat Sep 24, 2022 2:20 pm Armbian has its own repositories. It also uses repositories from Debian SID, plus it seems the creators of the iso also add their own repositories. I have been using Muon for a package manager. The ISO I am using does not install a system monitor and Muon does not show ksysguard as being available. There are several things I can not find, some I assume is because I do not know the package name and maybe some are just not there.

Is the new KDE system monitor called "plasma-systemmonitor"? What needs to be installed to have the wifi icon show up in the system tray?

I really appreciate the efforts that folks have put into creating a functional ISO, I would have no starting point at all without their efforts. Overall though I can see that the difference between, it boots and it runs and a nicely put together distro is an order of magnitude.
Yup, plasma-systemmonitor is literally just ksysguard v2.0. In fact the one tab for it IS the classic ksysguard view. Has a nice "dashboard" view on start that's prettier. Overall, it does have more functionality than Ksysguard, but they're more the same than different.

plasma-nm will give you the wifi icon ASSUMING you're using networkmanager as your backend. If you want to manage any ethernet devices as well, be sure the commend them out in /etc/network/interfaces
wove
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Re: Armbian on Pinebook Pro

Post by wove »

Thanks for the info. Plasma-nm showed up this morning when I was searching for plasma-systemmonitor. KDE on the Pinebook Pro is coming together very nicely. The installer image has mousepad for the editor rather than Kate. I installed Kate, which I think is one darn fine text editor. A nice thing I like about the iso though is that it installed Konqueror as the browser.
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