Armbian on Pinebook Pro
Posted: Thu Sep 22, 2022 3:13 pm
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.
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.