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Yes the WTL-40110175 3.8v 10.000mAh battery has 3x red (PB+) and 3x black (PB- GND) and 1x yellow (Overvoltage?) or Temperature) Here in Turkey I do only find a 3.7v 10.000mAh Cell, but without the yellow cable (only red and black): https://www.n11.com/urun/1260110-37v-10000mah-li-polymer-pil-devreli15a-87767963 The battery PDF gives me very less clues Pinebook-WTL40110175-3_8V-10000mAh-14inch.pdf

There are schematics available for this device, so one could get a hint from those, but depends if you have electronics background or not. To me it seems that higher level software in Debian/Linux enables power management handling all the way using info it gets from the power management chip/circuitry. You can guess that for this device, same as smartphone, battery operation is considered primary/essential, so decision is 'low-batt' and shutdown. I have a BananaPi M1 that also has LiPo charging, but that is DIY soldereing, so no OS component bothers with not-connected cell, but if a cell is connected/soldered which I did, is charges and runs on that cell if microUSB PSU (they call it 'AC' in the chip signal names) is disconnected, although its SATA port is unpowered then. Runs Armbian Trixie CLI only (eth + serial console). An old business HP 2-core laptop that I got without battery and HDD runs fine on just the original HP power adaptor (has 3rd wire for some genuine HP charger purposes). For USB-C powered devices, there might be many things to deal with, e.g. my ROCK5B after un-boxing goes in a bootloop with a RPI5 PSU, was/is know, so I feed it with own 12V USB-C pig-tail. For the Pinebook, it might be that the 5V is perfectly 5.000V but drops to 4.900V or so in spikes under load, so the typical 5V SBC powering issue well-known from RPi and other cheap SBCs that cannot handle >5V USB PD voltages. The Pinebook might do well if you fake the battery, so look at colored wire/connector. I have used that several times in the past decades. The yellow wire might be for temperature so besides a proper voltage on black and red, you also need to do something with the yellow wire I guess. It also might be that is you skip/disable the parts of software that do power management handling, that it runs fine. So I would boot/run the 'image' of the pinebook in a systemd-nspawn container or libvirt VM (at least the user space) and see what is what. Maybe it is something like purge 'laptop-tools' package or so, or blacklist the kernel module for power management.

Yesterday I did start to install armbian trixie iot on my Pinebook. Second part in debian - after the u-boot) starts, but then the Pinebook shuts off, because of a low battery(?) I did charge the whole day and powered off in the evening. Today the Pinebook stand on my table with a swollen battery. I removed it and happily it doesnt crash anything else than the battery holder. But now it doenst boot up complete like with a low battery. After the u-boot debian trixie does boot , but at the middle of the messages it does shutdown Can it run completly without battery? I have normally a 5V/2Ah power-supply connected and that did work the last years. Now I can only try to use a 5V/60W quick-charge Power-Supply. Anyone has experiences with that? Thanks for info in advance...

Many thanks for the reply! Good news is that with your guideline and a bit more information from qwen-code, I managed to chroot to it. It's a bit more complicated to do from a Ryzen Linux machine. A translation layer called "qemu-aarch64-static" is required. It's far more straightforward on a PineBook Pro due to the same architecture. Not so good ones is that reinstalling the old RPi5 specific 6.6 kernel still fails to boot. update-intramfs was automatically run during reinstalling the old kernel and uinitrd in /boot was updated by some scripts(according to last modified time stamp), with symlink as described in armbianEnv.txt. Everything seems to be at the right place and wired in the expected way. Quite confused. Great news is that despite the unsuccesful to restore the kernel, the chroot provide me an enough environment to utilize calcardbackup to extract the personal data from NextCloud database. Better news is that I took this opportunity to start fresh with Armbian 25.8.1 Debian Trixie with Kernel 6.12.44. So far it works beautifully on RPi5.

Getting the grub bootloader right with tow-boot's efi implementation seems like the most urgent as it is a hard blocking anyone trying to install. As tow-boot isn't unique to pinebook pro my guess is that handling it impacts other systems. I don't know what would be involved in maintaining it.

Lovely @djzort, thank you for sharing. Do you think you can come up with a list of things that need fixing in Armbian to improve the user experience? Would you be interested to join as Maintainer for the Pinebook Pro in Armbian alongside @rpardini?

Description Fix Type-C DP altmode on some rk3399 boards. Currently only on rockchip64-6.15. The old implementation is tricky, and only works in normal orientation. If the plug is flipped, there will be only USB2.0 connectivity. With the proposed changes, the type-c ports on related rk3399 boards should work in both orientations. A few patches from Megous are picked(some of them already present in sunxi64 kernel patches). The tricky part is how to notify rk3399 cdn-dp driver about DP HPD(hot plug detection), and a workaround is written. A caveat is that the c port has to be OTG mode, otherwise it will behave very similar to the old implementation if DP is enabled. I'm not sure if orange pi 4 / 4 LTS support this, so there's no change to their dts yet. Apart from the work above, the missing fan node is added to tinkerboard 2's dts. list of changes fix type-c dp altmode Megous' glue driver and related improvements are imported this involves enabling the driver in defconfig CONFIG_TYPEC_EXTCON=m a workaround for notifying DP HPD to cdn-dp is written(not merged anywhere) related device tree files/patches are updated accordingly(what about orangepi 4?) add missing fan node in tinkerboard 2's dts along with some minor tweaks How Has This Been Tested? [x] build tinkerboard-2 with edge kernel [x] test on tinkerboard 2s with a hub [x] hub alone works in both orientations [x] hub with display connected works in both orientations [x] when hub is connected, display hot plug/unplug works [x] USB 3.0 type-c drive works in both orientations [ ] test with a DP-only dongle [ ] test on pinebook pro [ ] test on nanopc-t4 [ ] maybe test on orangepi 4 (need dts change) [ ] maybe test on orangepi 4 LTS (need dts change) Checklist: [x] My code follows the style guidelines of this project [x] I have performed a self-review of my own code [x] I have commented my code, particularly in hard-to-understand areas [x] My changes generate no new warnings [ ] Any dependent changes have been merged and published in downstream modules View the full article

Hi every time I start firefox an error message appears stating "Could not read configuration file - contact your system administrator" 🙃, i. e. me. Does anyone know how to fix it ? It is simply an annoyance - firefox works as expected so far. Kind regards Norbert

Hi I can access my nextcloud in the firefox browser, but the client always states "signed out". From time to time there is a request in the browser to confirm access of the client to the nextcloud server. Howeveer, this doesn't seem to work. I guess, I should add an online account (in Preferences). But there is no button to "Add account" shown. Do you have a hint to a missing package ? I am out of ideas how to solve it. Kind regards Norbert

Hi Yesterday I spend the whole day to install Armbian Desktop (XFCE) on my Pinebook Pro. Why Armbian ? The PBP was delivered with Manjaro Arm on it. Everything worked fine until Manjaro stopped support for the Arm platform. For about one year there is no update on stable and the unstable branch couldn't establish a connection to Wifi. I used Manjaro Arm to install tow-boot to the SPI following this website: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=17529 I downloaded the current Bookworm XFCE edition and wrote that to an SD card. Booting from the SD with tow-boot went fine. I installed armbian on the SD card and used armbian-config to install it on the internal eMMC. That didn't work. fsarchiver to the rescue ! I created a GPT partition table on the internal disk, created two partitions with the correct flags and restored both partitions from the SD saved with fsarchiver to the internal disk. Booting went fine from the internal disk after that. Now I am fighting with firefox ("Can't read configuration file - contact your systemadministrator") and the nextcloud client. I can't add a online account anywhere. The application starts up but there is no button execpt (Information about ...) which shows the supported clients a.o. Owncloud (which will work with nextcloud) but there is no way to add an account. I'll open other posts to track that.

Just posting my experiences getting armbian going on pinebook pro. I had a pinebook pro on a shelf for a while, picked it up and ran "apt-get update" after which booting the system broke. So without anything important on there i figured i would reinstall. Tow Boot I had already installed an older version of Tow Boot, but i updated it to 2023.07-007 This is a simple process. Write out the spi.installer.img to an sd card (i used dd). Insert the sd card in to the slot on the side of the pinebook. Start the system. Follow the prompts. Shut down the system. Remove the sd card. Power on the system and hit "Esc" to see the Tow Boot menus and verify the version has been updated in the "Firmware Console" by typing "version" A major change appears to be that Tow Boot has inherited a minimum viable EFI interface from U-Boot. This allows generic efi arm images to boot, but because the efi configuration is stored in the efi partition rather than spi flash, tools like efibootmgr don't work. Read more here in github (I don't think its worth trying to run without Tow Boot installed on the spi, despite the limited efi) Install Armbian I downloaded the Cinnamon Debian version listed on the Pinebook Pro page - the exact file was Armbian_25.2.1_Uefi-arm64_bookworm_current_6.12.13_cinnamon-backported-mesa_desktop.img.xz I then unxz'd that file and dd the image to the sd card. Insert the sd card in to the pinebook and power on. Armbian boots! Install works as normal, but you will notice that efibootmgr commands are failing in the install script although they are non fatal at this stage. This is due to the Tow Boot efi limitations mentioned above. Unfortunately, Armbian will install the grub efi binary as /EFI/Armbian/grubaa64.efi and failing to add a boot entry, the system will fail to boot. You have two options. The first is to copy /EFI/Armbian/grubaa64.efi to default location /EFI/BOOT/BOOTAA64.EFI - this is also perhaps the safest in the short term. (note that on the installer sd card the file is located at /EFI/BOOT/BOOTAA64.EFI). You may need to manually mount the new EFI partition on the mmc and copy the file - do this before rebooting the system so the system remains bootable. If you don't there is no need to panic, adding a boot entry to Tow Boot's efi is very simple from its menus as i will now describe... The second is to add a boot entry in the Tow Boot menus. Contrary to the github issue linked above, it seems that in Tow Boot the "efidebug" command has been replaced with a more convenient set of commands to manage boot options. Power on your pinebook pro, press "Esc" to see the Tow Boot menu and go in to "Firmware Console". Type "eficonfig" and use the convenient menu to add a new boot entry - not that the tow boot console has tab completion which is very convenient. In "eficonfig" hit enter on "Add Boot Option", set "Description" to "Armbian", hit enter on "File" then "Select File" then "mmc 0:1" and find the Armbian/grubaa64.efi file. Then "Save" (initrd and optional data left empty). Then "Change Boot Order" and move the new Armbian entry to the top with -/+ keys then Save. Exit "eficonfig" and continue with a normal boot by typing "bootefi bootmgr" I suggest do both, and once the system is booting from the new boot entry you can remove the BOOTAA64.EFI file as good hygiene I also observed that the Tow Boot menu does freeze up occasionally and the only solution is to press the power button. Also you do seem to need to press keys slowly. Minor issue at log in I observed that for a brief period the keyboard doesn't work at the log in prompt. The speakers give their normal tick sound and the cursor stops flashing - which presents like the system has frozen. I found that pressing the power button causes the system to gracefully shut down - so the system hasn't locked up. Be patient and a moment or two later, the cursor starts flashing again and the keyboard works. I dont know what is causing this behavior but perhaps someone else is interested to dive in to it. Apt update and beyond With the system booted and logged in, i ran updates and rebooted. Things continued to work properly

What is the current status of Pinebook Pro? I see there were Pinebook-Pro-specific install images for older version of Armbian, but there doesn't appear to be any for more recent versions, and currently, the download page points to (non-machine-specific?) UEFI install images. Is this a transition that was discussed/announced, and can I read the discussion/announcement in archives somewhere? Also, does anyone have any installation/testing reports? Is 25.02 known to work on the Pinebook Pro? I've tried a few different times to create a Armbian SDCard for my Pinebook Pro. I've only had one success, one one of my early attempts. Unfortunately, I did not take very good notes, and I've lost track of which downloaded image file I used to create it. I still have the successfully-created SDCard, and it still works, but I haven't been able to create another. When I inspect the contents of the good SDCard, it appears to be 24.8.1, and it boots via GRUB, but I'm not sure if it was made from a PinebookPro-specific image or a UEFI image. There's plenty more testing I could do on my own -- my supply of SDCards is running low, and I should buy a few more, and in an assortment of sizes (successful SDCard was 32GB, some of the most recent attempts (which failed) were to a 256GB SDcard)

Hello, for the ttyS1 ==> I don't have overlay folder on /boot/dtb I have only allwinner: root@domotique:~# ls -al /boot/dtb/allwinner/ total 2888 drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Mar 1 14:37 . drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Mar 1 14:37 .. drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 12288 Mar 1 14:37 overlay -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 14088 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a100-allwinner-perf1.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 41557 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-amarula-relic.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 41882 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-bananapi-m64.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 40750 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-nanopi-a64.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 40197 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-oceanic-5205-5inmfd.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 40744 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-olinuxino-1G.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 42171 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-olinuxino-1Ge16GW.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 42137 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-olinuxino-1Ge4GW.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 40954 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-olinuxino-1Gs16M.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 40900 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-olinuxino-2Ge8G.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 42041 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-olinuxino.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 42455 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-olinuxino-emmc.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 42575 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-orangepi-win.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 41503 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-pine64.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 41553 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-pine64-lts.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 41629 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-pine64-plus.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 43455 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-pinebook.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 54389 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-pinephone-1.0.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 54416 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-pinephone-1.1.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 54715 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-pinephone-1.2b.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 54427 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-pinephone-1.2.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 44752 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-pinetab.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 44784 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-pinetab-early-adopter.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 41433 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-sopine-baseboard.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 42618 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-a64-teres-i.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 37413 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h313-tanix-tx1.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 40110 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h313-x96q-lpddr3.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 33770 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h5-bananapi-m2-plus.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 34211 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h5-bananapi-m2-plus-v1.2.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 32413 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h5-emlid-neutis-n5-devboard.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 32650 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h5-libretech-all-h3-cc.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 31308 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h5-libretech-all-h3-it.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 33245 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h5-libretech-all-h5-cc.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 34882 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h5-nanopi-k1-plus.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 32150 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h5-nanopi-m1-plus2.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 31847 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h5-nanopi-neo2.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 31839 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h5-nanopi-neo2-v1.1.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 32090 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h5-nanopi-neo-core2.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 32669 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h5-nanopi-neo-plus2.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 32987 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h5-nanopi-r1s-h5.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 32687 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h5-orangepi-pc2.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 32710 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h5-orangepi-prime.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 30401 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h5-orangepi-zero-plus2.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 31940 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h5-orangepi-zero-plus.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 42648 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h616-bigtreetech-cb1-emmc.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 42395 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h616-bigtreetech-cb1-manta.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 42587 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h616-bigtreetech-cb1-sd.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 42371 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h616-bigtreetech-pi.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 41523 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h616-orangepi-zero2.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 40136 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h616-x96-mate.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 43383 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h618-bananapi-m4-berry.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 41208 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h618-bananapi-m4-zero.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 39526 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h618-longanpi-3h.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 43298 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h618-orangepi-zero2w.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 40929 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h618-orangepi-zero3.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 39205 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h618-transpeed-8k618-t.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 41675 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h64-remix-mini-pc.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 39303 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h6-beelink-gs1.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 36421 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h6-inovato-quadra.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 38912 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h6-orangepi-3.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 39056 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h6-orangepi-3-lts.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 38643 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h6-orangepi-lite2.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 38172 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h6-orangepi-one-plus.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 39055 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h6-pine-h64.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 39082 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h6-pine-h64-model-b.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 36193 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h6-tanix-tx6.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 35970 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h6-tanix-tx6-mini.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 42815 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h700-anbernic-rg35xx-2024.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 45114 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h700-anbernic-rg35xx-h.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 43609 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h700-anbernic-rg35xx-plus.dtb -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 43965 Feb 26 21:14 sun50i-h700-anbernic-rg35xx-sp.dtb

Last week installed Armbian for the first time on my Pinebook Pro that was basically bricked from Manjaro. Everything worked great! Audio is a little weak, but will look into that later. Today I pulled down the 25.2.1/6.12.16 update. On booting in Grub, I now get a message "Loading Device Tree Blob...", followed by "Error: not a regular file Press any key to continue". The boot then continues after a bit, and system seems to work fine from a user perspective after that (posting this from the machine). But there are some rockchip-pcie, rk3399-dmc-freq and brcmf errors in the armbianmonitor output (attached url) . I'm an Armbian noob, so dunno if the errors were there on the previous version. The 25.2.1 install re-wrote the grub entries so I don't have the previous kernel to boot into to do any debugging, but it used to boot cleanly before the update. Wondering if there is a known situation here, before I dig into the whole dtb thing. Thanks!

Hello I don't know if anyone is currently looking for how to fix these problems. I have a Pinebook 14" (720p) and tried the following: Last published image: Armbian_community_25.2.0-trunk.377_Pinebook-a64_bookworm_current_6.6.72_minimal.img.xz The boot screen is displayed After the message "Starting kernel" the screen turns off completely for about 1 minute Then the backlight turns on but the screen stays black indefinitely The system is unusable Last image available in the archive: Armbian_23.8.1_Pinebook-a64_bookworm_current_6.1.47.img.xz The system boots without showing the boot screen The message "Welcome to ARMBIAN" is displayed and the configuration process begins The system works correctly and allows installation on the eMMC After performing an "update" and "upgrade" the system is unusable as in the last published image.

I found a workaround for this problem. Need someone to confirm if this works: 1. Download https://archive.armbian.com/pinebook-pro/archive/Armbian_24.2.1_Pinebook-pro_jammy_current_6.6.16_gnome_desktop.img.xz 2. sudo apt update & sudo apt upgrade 3. reboot 4. install to eMMC or nvme Does it survives?

Description This provide an option to set last good kernel for dedicated device. It will prevent upgrading to higher kernels which are known to be broken. For example. At this moment we have Rockchip BSP kernel which was fixed that Radxa ITX has working ports, while this fix will break NVME support on Orangepi. Also this we can use for Pinebook PRO. Configuration: BOARD BRANCH LINUXFAMILY Last good kernel package from repository orangepi5 vendor rk35xx 24.5.3 orangepi5plus vendor rk35xx 24.5.3 orangepi5|vendor|rk35xx|24.5.3 orangepi5plus|vendor|rk35xx|24.5.3 How Has This Been Tested? [x] Test with locally generated repo that contained higer version of kernel. It was hold back. Checklist: [x] I have performed a self-review of my own code [x] I have commented my code, particularly in hard-to-understand areas [x] My changes generate no new warnings [x] Any dependent changes have been merged and published in downstream modules View the full article

What about custom hardware, called Pinebook PRO, that needed years before opensource routines were developed by 3rd party (community)? Until then, hardware already become obsolete, maintainace expensive. I am sure Armbian works perfectly on it I am running it on my x86 Lenovo laptop and it works perfectly too. Armbian Ubuntu is exactly the Ubuntu I want & need for everyday work. Do you run Armbian there too and why not? Are you sure? Start volunteering and after a year, you will understand something, after few years you could understand our perspective. I totally agree with you. We do have a mechanism to determine when to adjust status, but it runs every 3 months and with best effort principle. Its not a professional service and runs without any budget. We have no interest to fool you or deliberately waste your time, like everyone wants to waste ours. We try to educate people, but that is usually difficult and expensive as general expectations are shaped by much bigger forces and not with common in mind. This is our try: https://docs.armbian.com/#what-is-supportedmaintained vs. trash proprietary hardware and naivety of people. This is the only way: "Supported/maintained is not a guarantee." As in this world, this is the best you can expect. They sold you demo device without software support and you don't support us to support you! And other big side is telling you something else. We can't compete with that brainwashing. Keeping status synchronized with reality is also expensive, a professional service and also paid from our private pockets. If we would have a volunteer to talk and motivate maintainers, testers round the clock - perhaps you? - we would know faster, before you complaining that something is not o.k. Its a serious logistic operation, while nobody support that so its a complete waste of our time. Why would you waste your time to save everyone's time? While telling me how we should do thing differently to save everyone's time. Step up, make this change so that everyone's time won't be wasted. Also feel free to use any other Linux for Pinebook PRO if ours stop working. Why there are so many alternatives on non-proprietary hardware? And all of them works perfectly. Everyone covers only 0.5% of all maintainers time. Think from that perspective. Armbian is not random Linux me-too distribution. There are no justifications for that and is IMO stupid. It might get fixed upstream, someone might sponsor our work to fix it for you & everyone and you will be happy again. Once support is moved to community, it costs us close to nothing / same as other Linux distributions, which "supports" the hardware. And most people understand that they have nothing to complain about. And are happy when downloaded image works. We needed several years to come out with something that works better then chaos - if you care to understand: https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Board-Support-Rules/

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.

I've installed https://github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/releases/tag/release-2023.07-007 Towboot to SPI and https://dl.armbian.com/pinebook-pro/archive/Armbian_24.5.3_Pinebook-pro_bookworm_current_6.6.36_minimal.img.xz to a uSD card but it will not boot. I thought it was a Towboot problem, but it boots to Manjaro on a uSD card (and on eMMC) just fine also. https://github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/issues/319 Which Towboot version and which Armbian image did you use?

Hello. I just tried the latest Armbian jammy for PineBook Pro and the kernel refuses to boot. I tried to replace the 6.6.31 kernel with 6.1.63 from older image and it works without problems.

You are looking at the master branch. We need an orange-pi-6.9 branch. See: https://megous.com/git/linux/tree/arch/arm64/boot/dts/rockchip/rk3399-pinebook-pro.dts?h=orange-pi-6.9#n729 But simply adding this node will not bring results. A set of patches from this rk3399-typec-6.9 branch is needed and there may be something else. Use the instructions to get the necessary README Look at the contents\history (git log -p megi/rk3399-typec-6.9) of the received branches. Special attention is paid to: megi/tcpm-6.9 megi/typec-extcon-6.9 megi/rk3399-typec-6.9 megi/fusb302-6.9

I got in contact with the kernels author and got told, that DP-Alt is not yet implemented for the rockpro64. Looking at the schematics, the usb-c controller seems identically to the pinebook pro. I am ready to start digging in the device-tree file for the rkp64 by comparing the pbp to the rkp64. But I don't know how to create and test the Kernel from these files.

Generating images, once device is in the system, does not burn our expensive time. It costs a lot less then answering this support question. Updates are generated for all devices (of one family) at once. Adding and removing is expensive and perhaps someone fixed this problem? Then we need to put it back. Those are already maintaining activities, which we don't have resources for ... keeping devices in auto-build costs us close to nothing (until compilation succeeded) and this is the same way all others distros do, while they are marking those random auto-build as "supported by Linux X" ... We at least tell you "we don't know if it works", as checking is expensive. Or even impossible as nobody from the team has this device. It was added by someone like you, user, that wanted to keep this device in the Armbian system, which system provides a lot of common fixes and generally helps maintaining those devices. Our interest is that Armbian runs well on as many devices as possible, but the costs of that is super extreme - as you know, we can't sell you our work, you don't want to pay our bills .... Once we bring support on some device, we have copycats that does absolutely nothing but also "supports" this device. It is really difficult as costs dealing with those devices is close to impossible to cover. If you want that device function perfectly and when there is close to nobody helping, one needs to spent serious time / money to support HW dealers business, copycats and you. Its not sustainable. The same applies to other devices that were thrown to the market ... We are maintaining this system, some devices, while the rest are on you - community. Providing images, keeping this device in the system that is getting common updates all the time, is already great added value. Bugs are shared among similar devices, which means when this bug will be fixed for Pinebook PRO, this device will also have working images ... Its pure economy. They can't afford that. Device is here - and if you want to keep it operational, its your problem. Well, our common problem. We add our share and we can't add more. We don't have this device, we don't have anyone maintaining it. Not anymore. Now, a lot of those devices will still work even nobody maintain them. This indicates it stops before loading user space, probably kernel is crashing. Sometimes you need to solder those pins. HW designers aim is to make a device that they can sell well ... Does this device matches that? Yes, its a nice toy. There is no GRUB on those devices, but yes, problems with boot loader are possible. Every major kernel bump renders some devices into not usable state. That is why we have so much work that nobody notice and very little help. If we could allocate needed resources, all of those "Community (not) supported" will be working. This is certainly not in HW designers interests (as they want to sell you new device), while end users can't understand that buying hardware is just a fists step and means nothing. You need to add a lot more to have this device functional. This is not RPi, who has masses of people that will maintain it for free.