pinebook pro adventures

In 2021, I acquired a PInebook Pro! It's a beautiful little device, something like a budget phone with a laptop form factor and without the presumption that it will be running Android. A good catalyst to learn about the ways an ISA affects you all the way up the stack. And hardware. I'm having fun, anyway.

I did get bored with it quickly upon first purchase, but woke it up again in 2025 because whaddaya know, a lightweight potato is actually the perfect stripped-down writing environment.

Performing maintenance on it has been fun. A nostalgic return to Arch, after years of NixOS on my personal driver (and a year of GDebian (I'm sure it's perfectly nice for other people) on my work machine). Technically I could put Nix on it, but I quail before the specter of the sheer extent of procrastination that that would represent. Naturally I'd need a remote build setup (who would build on this baby potato), and then of course I'd have no excuse not to customize the builds to be optimized for the RockPro... It has Manjaro on it out of the box, I'm keeping it that way. There's plenty of idiosyncrasy and one-off fixes to do for this thing as it is. (See below for those - most of the utility of this note.)

• [2025-02-13 Thu 16:12] switch to unstable branch

  pacman-mirrors --api --set-branch unstable --fasttrack 10 && pacman -Syu
  

  • pacman on manjaro-arm-stable was a full major version behind. Renders AUR completely unusable.

• [2025-02-13 Thu 19:10] wifi outage

  • https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=263442

    • can't reboot on this hardware and expect the network driver to be loaded 😔 must power cycle

  • https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=298025

    WiFi similarly stopped working after wpa_supplicant update (2:2.10-8 → 2:2.11-1) and it works after reverting to `sudo pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/wpa<sub>supplicant</sub>-2:2.10-8-x86<sub>64.pkg.tar.zst</sub>` .

    • had to downgrade wpa_supplicant because it stopped playing nicely with brcfmac (broadcom driver).