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.

I did get bored with it quickly upon first purchase. I briefly woke it up again in 2025 because whaddaya know, a lightweight potato is actually the perfect stripped-down writing environment. It's also great to have a laptoppy computing device hanging around, for folks who want to browse or hack on something with less text neck.

Performing maintenance on it has been fun. In early 2025 it was 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). I now want to put Nix on it,

Naturally I need a remote build setup (who would build on this baby potato), so a prerequisite is getting Hydra up and running. (And using my little baby remote Hetzner as a remote build machine. (I miss my big machine.)) My whole setup gossips on tailscale, which keeps this expected chatter off the open internet.

Manjaro bug log:

• [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).