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from Pinebook to Pinebook Pro

Approaching winter solstice, and thus reduced available solar power, I

have been using my Pinebook more. This year, I am also noticing more

and more how slow the browser is; maybe spending summer and fall on

faster laptop is part of it, but running a browser in 2GB of system

ram is increasingly not an option.

https://www.pine64.org/pinebook/

I have had a Pinebook Pro for a while, which has features like 4GB of

ram, faster cpu cores, a nicer screen and capable of using NVMe for

storage. It also has a black metal case instead of a white plastic

one. Still not a powerhouse, but actually fairly usable, at least by

comparison to the earlier Pinebook!

https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/

I've run GNU Guix on the Pinebook Pro for a while, largely because it

was a little easier early on to add support for a custom kernel to

guix.

GNU Guix

And while guix is fun enough, at the end of the day Debian is a

little better choice for me on an arm64 laptop.

Debian

I had already experimented with creating a Debian live image that

supported booting both the Pinebook and Pinebook Pro, and that worked

well enough to test it.

Two Pinebooks Walk into A bar

In debian-installer, had worked on enabling support for the Pinebook

Pro earlier in 2021, but only tested a basic installation; the

installation went pretty smoothly.

debian installer support

Unfortunately, on first boot, there was nothing on the screen; it was

only responding on the serial console, waiting for a passphrase for

the encrypted volume. This vaguely rang a bell, and sure enough, in

the initramfs-tools git repository is a patch I had added some months

ago that enabled the display on the screen.

enable display

So, I log in via the serial console, but for some bizarre reason, sudo

isn't installed, and there was no root password. Fun! I workaround

this with the old init=/bin/bash trick and set a root password.

I added the kernel module (pwm-rockchip) needed to the initramfs to

get the screen loaded early enough to enter the decryption passphrase,

but... the prompt was still asking on the serial console. So I added

to the kernel boot arguments console=tty0.

Now I have a display on the screen where it is asking for a

passphrase! Great! I type the passphrase. Nothing happens. At all. I

can see on the serial console some boot logs, but it is not asking for

a passphrase there.

Reboot. Er, power off and power on, because reboot is a little

sketchy.

Switch back to serial console, boot. Keyboard works fine. After a few

tries, including a botched attempt at adding all kernel modules

manually was thwarted by usrmerge (the modules are now in /usr/lib

rather than /lib, needed to append the modules in the correct place),

I find the right kernel module (fusb302) to enable the keyboard in the

initramfs.

Switch back to console=tty0, enter in decryption

passphrase, boots! Pushed fix to initramfs-tools git.

keyboard patch

I installed a graphical environment (sway), and also a web browser

(firefox-esr) and tested a few web pages; it seemed quite responsive!

Everything seemed to be going quite nicely.

So I turn off the Pinebook which I was using for a serial console,

boot the Pinebook Pro, enter in the decryption passphrase and it

proceeds to boot... and then just shuts down immediately before the

login prompt appears. This rang a bell back from one of my earlier

installs on GNU Guix.

Something was deciding it would be a good time to suspend, and while

odd timing, would be kind of ok if resuming from suspend was

possible. It is not, to my knowledge.

I plugged back in the serial console to see if I could get the message

about what was failing. And it booted fine. I unplug the serial

console, boot, and it goes to suspend. Plug serial console back in,

boots fine.

Worked around this by configuring suspend right out of the picture.

/etc/systemd/sleep.conf.d/donotsuspend.conf:

[Sleep]

AllowSuspend=no

AllowHibernation=no

Now it boots without having to have a serial console plugged in! No

need to carry two laptops around just to boot one of them!

I log in, I start installing all my favorite packages, and start

getting it ready to be my New Computer.

Firefox just started freezing, or only displaying some things on the

screen. I tried upgrading to the newer firefox-esr from debian sid;

that didn't even start at all.

Next steps... I might try installing firefox-esr from debian bullseye

(the "stable" release). At some point firefox used to be finicky on my

now tried and true, if a bit slow Pinebook, maybe it just needs time

to adjust!

Almost ready, almost ready.

2021-12-09