Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

wove · 2021-04-26 21:23

I was just curious if there was any work still being done on Q4OS for the Pinebook Pro. The R4 testing still works alright, with a few minor hickups. It still gets updates from Armbian/Debian but I am not sure I have seen any updates specific to Q4.

I noted that Armbiam seems to have dropped support for the Pinebook Pro, which probably does not bode well for Q4OS. Debian announced a while back that the Pinebook Pro would be supported by the up coming release, so perhaps Q4 OS will move in that direction. Trinity Desktop has been upgraded to 14.09 and it would be nice to get that update, from what I had read it does include a couple things that are specific to the Pinebook Pro.

In any event thanks for providing a release for the Pinebook Pro, it is much appreciated.

bill

q4osteam · 2021-04-27 08:08

The Q4OS 3 Centaurus for Pinebook Pro is alive of course, however still testing. If you would be willing to make an installation and brief testing on your PBP device, we could release a new update and perform testing as well. The next Q4OS 4 Gemini version will be compiled for PBP, if Debian Bullseye and Trinity desktop will support the PBP hardware.

wove · 2021-04-27 13:41

It was nice to read that the Pinebook Pro is still in your thoughts. Personally I have found Q4OS with the Trinity Desktop to be the nicest and most productive setup on my PBP.

I have the r4 testing installed on the emmc of the PBP, so it would be no trouble to install a newer testing version to an SD card and not interfer with my current setup. I look forward to giving any new testing release you provide a try.

Thank you and have a nice day.

bill

q4osteam · 2021-04-28 20:09

A new testing image "q4os-3.14-pinebookpro.r4-testing1.zip" is available for download from here https://sourceforge.net/projects/q4os/files/testing/ . A testing and feedback would be appreciated.

cefre00 · 2021-05-12 15:01

Hi!

Great to see Q4OS is an option for the PBP.
I did flash it with dd on my SDcard and the PBP seem to boot from it bot to a black screen. Currently I have Armbian installed on my eMMC. Any ideas what the problem is?

Thank you!

cefre00 · 2021-06-02 14:54

I have a feeling that Pinebook Pro is not a hot topic.

q4osteam · 2021-06-02 17:44

Unfortunately, we are not able to reproduce the issue. The system is booting fine from SD card here. How did you flash the SD card, did you follow instructions from here ? https://www.q4os.org/dqa013.html

Any connected findings from anyone would be appreciated, please post them here.

cefre00 · 2021-06-03 09:19

Thank you for coming back.
No, I did not follow those instructions, I tried using the testing image from here:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/q4os/files/testing/

So it gives a blank screen with a green LED, so I guess it could boot but not load the system.

I tried to do this:
https://q4os.org/dqa012.html

It was not working, installation goes through, but Q4OS does not load at the end.
I'll try the link you shared in your post and come back here with my findings.

EDIT:
There is no option for the Pinebook Pro to install Q4OS. Which board should I select to try Q4OS?
Pinebook Pro is actually using the RockPro64 board, and for that board there is no Q4OS option either.

Last edited by cefre00 (2021-06-03 09:47)

q4osteam · 2021-06-04 07:06

cefre00 wrote:

So it gives a blank screen with a green LED, so I guess it could boot but not load the system.

Please post the exact way you flashed the SD card.

cefre00 wrote:

There is no option for the Pinebook Pro to install Q4OS. Which board should I select to try Q4OS?

Please specify more info. In which application do you want to select a board ?

cefre00 · 2021-06-04 12:51

What I tried to do is:
1. Got the image from here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/q4os/f … p/download
2. Unzipped with 7zip
3. Flashed onto a 16 GB, Class10 micro SD card using Balena Etcher on Windows 10
4. Inserted into the PBP and boot.
5. Now I am looking at the PBP, the LED is green, but the screen is blank.
+1 I have Manjaro KDE installed on my eMMC

To your second question:
1. I went here: https://www.q4os.org/dqa013.html
2. I went to the 2a option and clicked on the tool: https://github.com/pine64dev/PINE64-Ins … ses/latest
3. Installed the modified Balena Etcher and actually followed the instructions on the GitHub page.
4. Selected Pinebook Pro or RockPro64 (as PBP has a RockPro64 as main board) and searched for Q4OS.
But as I wrote before, there was no option for Q4OS.

I hope this clarifies my efforts so far. I saw ppl sharing the same experience on the Pine64 forums.
If you can't replicate the error at your side I guess the uboot must be different what you are using. For you it will work, for me it will not. Is this something you have any idea to mitigate?

q4osteam · 2021-06-08 08:09

cefre00 wrote:

... +1 I have Manjaro KDE installed on my eMMC ...

Did you try to reinstall the uboot bootlader ? See https://www.q4os.org/forum/viewtopic.ph … 051#p20051

cefre00 · 2021-06-08 23:48

Hi!

Thank you for the suggestion, it actually worked.
So simply changing u-boot did not help, but disabling the eMMC after that did the trick. I think I might be able to switch it back while running Q4OS from the SD card and install the system to the eMMC, but I think I`ll wait with that a little bit. This system seems really a testing system.

I did an apt-get upgrade: no issues. I did try out my favourite testing Youtube video and even 1080p was playing fine. F1TV was too much, but I think it is rather F1TV`s crappy site!` fault.

I miss the touchpad settings quite much, but otherwise so far so good.

How can I help you? Do you want me to test something out?

EDIT:
bad news, it does not boot anymore
I literally did nothing since I used it the last time. So no idea. I'll try your next image definitely.

Last edited by cefre00 (2021-06-11 13:14)

q4osteam · 2021-06-14 12:35

@cefre00
Thanks for reporting. Please keep in mind Q4OS for Pinebook Pro is a testing release. It would be helpful, if you could test the Armbian Buster image
https://mirrors.netix.net/armbian/dl/pi … o/archive/
https://mirrors.netix.net/armbian/dl/pi … top.img.xz
and post back, if that boots on your PBP with Manjaro preinstalled on eMMC.

Does the Armbian Buster boots and is working with eMMC on ?, or do you have to switch eMMC off ? Does it work at all, even after full upgrade ?

cefre00 · 2021-06-14 22:08

Sure, I am writing these words from the Armbian Buster you linked.

So I downloaded the img and dd-d it onto the SD card. I have Manjaro MATE installed on the eMMC. I did not have to switch off manually the eMMC.
When I switched on the PBP I see the Manjaro ARM u-boot booting then Armbian starts to boot from the SD card. I tried this 3 times already and once after an apt-get update && upgrade. It seems to be working fine and performance is OK too.

I tested it with my favourite performance testing video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zh9yZNrb62U

What is not working:
- volume controlling hotkeys (FYI: screen brightness hotkeys are working fine)
- no touchpad settings
- sometimes micro-freezes... almost unnoticeable

Let me know what do you want me to do next.

q4osteam · 2021-06-15 08:48

We will compile a new Q4OS for PBP based on this latest Armbian Buster image in a few days, and let you know with a request for testing that out on your hardware, if possible. Thanks for that helpful and valuable testing.

cefre00 · 2021-06-15 08:53

q4osteam wrote:

We will compile a new Q4OS for PBP based on this latest Armbian Buster image in a few days, and let you know with a request for testing that out on your hardware, if possible. Thanks for that helpful and valuable testing.

Sounds good, let me know once you have the img. Happy to test it out the best I can.

q4osteam · 2021-06-18 13:32

We have just released a new Q4OS for PBP version based on the latest Armbian Buster, see https://www.q4os.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=3639
Any testing would be really appreciated, especially booting from SD card on machines with Manjaro preinstalled on the eMMC.

cefre00 · 2021-06-19 16:54

Hey!

Got the img, flashing and bootign was successful, no issues, there. I saw the Manjaro u-boot to load, then Armbian took over.
Dekstop profiler was successful, and updates too. I did several restarts and full shut downs, not issues there.

It seems that less fn+ shortcuts working now, touchpad is really slow and there are no options to change that. Wifi and sound is working, but this system is less responsive then the previous one was. Especially Firefox seems to be slow. Chromium is quite OK, generally sound is like it plays from somewhere far away and the hotkey jumps 33%s...

As a testing system it is fine, but it would not be suitable for a daily driver because of the bad performance of the browsers.

Let me know if there is anything specific you would be interested in?

q4osteam · 2021-06-19 16:59

Great, we will investigate the web browsers performance and post back a progress.

wove · 2021-06-19 21:22

Thanks for the fresh release of Q4OS for the Pinebook Pro. Over all it works very well and is a nice and much needed update.

I really appreciate the sound working well out of the box with no need for attention. The volume control buttons as noted in an earlier post step by 33%, which is an improvement over earlier builds which basically did not work at all.

The Pinebook Pro's screen turns off when the lid is closed and most importantly comes back on when opened. This is not a low power sleep mode as it still uses ~7%/hour of battery, so it is not useful for overnight sleep, but is exceptional handy for using the laptop all day. That behavior is consistent with other builds based on Armbian.

The synaptics trackpad driver is not installed so one could delete /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf can be deleted, which from my observation makes the trackpad operation a bit smoother. Changing "edge" to "twofinger" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/60-libinput.conf will enable two finger scrolling rather than edge scrolling.

I was curious why Trinty was not updated to 14.0.10. I created a small SD card with Q4OS, then added the Trinty repsoitories and updated. This went well and restart had TDE 14.0.10. This appeared to work fine, but I did not give it a very long try. I also felt there remained a fair amount of xfce cruft from the Armbian base(?), which seems to be safely deleteable.

In configuration selecting "Current application's menu bar (Mac OS-style)" results in an application menu bar with another bar below it that does nothing. I think this style bug has been around for several releases.

Akregator does not work on ARM64. It does not work in Trinity, nor does it work in Plasma. It does not work in any disto that is ARM64, any verson of TDE nor KDE. It has been that way for as long as I have tried using it on ARM64. It is not specific to Q4OS.

I did find places where Q4OS appears to slow down. Synaptic can be painfully slow when scrolling though a long list of packages.

q4osteam · 2021-06-20 09:35

Thanks for the helpful reporting. we will investigate the bugs and possibly try to fix the issues.

wove wrote:

I was curious why Trinty was not updated to 14.0.10. I created a small SD card with Q4OS, then added the Trinty repsoitories and updated. This went well and restart had TDE 14.0.10. This appeared to work fine, but I did not give it a very long try.

That can't be done without break of some essential Q4OS functionality, for example screen scaling capabilities. Q4OS and Trinity repositories are not the same, even not compatible, so you can encounter an unexpected bearing and errors. In anyway the compilation of TDE 14.0.10 for Q4OS/Arm64 is underway.

wove · 2021-06-22 03:22

I was updated today to Trinity 14.0.10. Thanks for the update. I have just been using it for a couple hours and have found no problems with the update.

Thanks again for your efforts. It is good to have a solid Trinty Desktop running on the Pinebook Pro. Q4OS is an excellet fit with the resources available on the laptop.

q4osteam · 2021-06-22 08:56

cefre00 wrote:

... touchpad is really slow and there are no options to change that. ...

Touchpad speed can be changed in "/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/60-libinput.conf", add the line:

Option "AccelSpeed" "0.80"

cefre00 wrote:

Let me know if there is anything specific you would be interested in?

You could focus on the Firefox performance and describe a possible findings in more detail. Is it common across distributions or specific to Q4OS ?

cefre00 · 2021-06-23 10:08

Thank you for the info regarding the touchpad, now it is much better!

I did some tests on browsers and collected the data in an Excel file. So it seems that I must had the wrong handfeel, as FF ESR is almost the best performing on the Q4OS. Please have a look at the data, red is the best FF score, blue is the best overall score. No wonder: Chromium is beating FF, but it is the case even on Windows.

So cause I had the wrong idea regarding FF performance, is it possible there is no 3D or HW acceleration enabled on Q4OS on the PBP?

Attachments:

Book1.xlsx, Size: 11.57 KiB, Downloads: 493

q4osteam · 2021-06-24 11:45

Yes, it's an interesting testing. We will check Firefox hardware acceleration in Q4OS. You can also get some useful information at "about:support" in Firefox address line.

Q4OS Forum

#1 2021-04-26 21:23

Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#2 2021-04-27 08:08

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#3 2021-04-27 13:41

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#4 2021-04-28 20:09

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#5 2021-05-12 15:01

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#6 2021-06-02 14:54

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#7 2021-06-02 17:44

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#8 2021-06-03 09:19

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#9 2021-06-04 07:06

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#10 2021-06-04 12:51

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#11 2021-06-08 08:09

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#12 2021-06-08 23:48

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#13 2021-06-14 12:35

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#14 2021-06-14 22:08

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#15 2021-06-15 08:48

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#16 2021-06-15 08:53

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#17 2021-06-18 13:32

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#18 2021-06-19 16:54

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#19 2021-06-19 16:59

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#20 2021-06-19 21:22

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#21 2021-06-20 09:35

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#22 2021-06-22 03:22

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#23 2021-06-22 08:56

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#24 2021-06-23 10:08

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

#25 2021-06-24 11:45

Re: Q4OS for Pinebook Pro

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