Dianne S.

No, a MacBook is not the answer. Proprietary software never is. I have an x86_64 laptop running Linux that works perfectly. I understand and appreciate that the Armbian devs are volunteers and do a lot of hard work. But if you can't properly support a platform, don't advertise it as supported. That just wastes everyone's time. I see now that the Pinebook PRO is no longer listed as a supported platform. I wish that had been the case a year ago when I made the decision to purchase mine. (It is still listed as "community maintained" which IMO is misleading. It's not maintained by anyone. Please remove it completely from the list of Armbian hardware.)

My final note... I'm unfollowing this thread as I sold my Pinebook Pro. It wasn't worth the hassle. Regards, Dianne.

Late reply here, but it seems all the Armbian images are broken. While I understand your frustration with Pine64, I think you should remove the Pinebook Pro from your list of images. Being up front and saying that you don't support the hardware is better / less frustrating than claiming to support the hardware but providing broken images. Anyway, I'm selling my Pinebook Pro and reverting it to the factory Manjaro build. It's too annoying to keep fighting with it.

Thanks. However, I have a working solution (using the Kali dtb) and I have no motivation to go chasing this down... I'm not an Armbian dev and don't have the time to put into this. I would hope that the Pinebook Pro maintainer would be able to do it.

Any progress on this? Each time the kernel upgrades, it messes up my PBP and I have to re-install the Kali Linux dtb file. Any pointers to where I can at least find the Armbian dts and dtsi sources so I can start comparing them with Kali?

Well, there are a lot of differences between the files, but most of them seem minor (different phandle values, for example). I wouldn't know how to look for significant differences in the dtbs, so I have to leave this with the Armbian devs. Thanks to all who helped with suggestions.

Hi. My PBP is very new; I bought it within the last couple of months. I decompiled the two .dtb files using dtc, but there are a lot of differences and I'm a bit out of my depth here. Also, it's probably better to look at the source files rather than the decompiled .dtbs because they will have comments and symbols. Anyway, for what it is worth, I have attached the two decompiled dtb files. The kali one works and the armbian one does not, when booting from the emmc. armbian-rk3399-pinebook-pro.dts kali-linux-rk3399-pinebook-pro.dts

So, just to close this out: Writing directly to the emmc did not work. The system was unable to find the root file system. It had the wrong UUID somehow, so I changed it with tune2fs. Still no luck. I then replaced the rk3399-pinebook-pro.dtb with the one that ships with Manjaro. That booted, but the laptop screen did not come on. I could only access it via the serial port. Finally, I saw this post: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=17215 When I replaced rk3399-pinebook-pro.dtb with the version from Kali Linux, it booted, I got the display, and everything worked. I now finally have Armbian running from the emmc, albeit with the device tree blob from Kali Linux.

Awesome, thanks for your help!

Thanks. With the emmc disabled, it booted into Armbian. I have a USB-to-emmc adapter. If I were to simply write the image directly to the emmc from my workstation, would that be expected to work? Regards, Dianne.

Hmm, ok. I don't want to wipe the emmc until I'm confident I can install Armbian successfully on the emmc; running from the SD card is not a long-term solution. I'll run a test with the emmc switch disabled to see if that at least lets me boot from the SD card. My SPI is empty also. Thanks, Dianne.

Is anyone successfully running a recent release of Armbian on the PBP?

UPDATE: For whatever reason, /boot/boot.scr was corrupt; it had a bunch of garbage prior to the "# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE" line. I removed that garbage and now the Pinebook PRO boots... into Manjaro. Here's the relevant serial console output: Scanning mmc 1 for bootable partitions... Scanning mmc 1:1 for extlinux or boot scripts... Found U-Boot script /boot/boot.scr 3113 bytes read in 19 ms (159.2 KiB/s) ## Executing script at 00500000 Wrong image format for "source" command SCRIPT FAILED: continuing... EDIT: Meh, I guess the junk is needed as it's a legacy uImage. So that's not it. But obviously the junk at the top of boot.scr is not the correct junk.

Hi, I put the image on an SD card, but the machine fails to boot. Looking at the serial console, it just sits in a loop with the CPU constantly resetting after an exception. Serial console log is attached. Regards, Dianne. bootloop.txt