Why I left Pine64 • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I left Pine64

#211

Post by philkrylov » Thu, Aug 18, 2022, 11:12 AM UTC

t-3 wrote: post #167

pbronez wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought a PineBook Pro and was pretty excited about it. Unfortunately I just couldn't get it to boot reliably. I was ready to do a lot of fiddling with it, accept the slow overall speed, but just fighting with the boot system all the time was not fun. Haven't touched it in months.

I wa in the same boat, but flashing Tow-Boot to SPI flash made booting much nicer. Mine's currently booting from an SSD and works great.

Tow-Boot SPI installer reports something like this for me:

Expected board: 'pine64-pinebookPro'

Found board: ''

Re: Why I left Pine64

#212

Post by jvanveen » Thu, Aug 18, 2022, 11:41 AM UTC

Response from Pine64: https://www.pine64.org/2022/08/18/a-response-to-martijns-blo...

Re: Why I left Pine64

#213

Post by pbronez » Thu, Aug 18, 2022, 12:18 PM UTC

jvanveen wrote: post #212

Response from Pine64: https://www.pine64.org/2022/08/18/a-response-to-martijns-blo...

Thanks for flagging. This should get its own post too. Maybe @dang can pin this to the top so it’s easy to find?

Re: Why I left Pine64

#214

Post by shrimp_emoji » Thu, Aug 18, 2022, 2:43 PM UTC

megous wrote: post #187

LtWorf wrote: post #124

> And in my role for the postmarketOS distribution, I developed the camera stack. So now i know whom to blame for the fact that the camera app crashes 90% of the times before I manage to take a photo.

Haha. Don't forget to blame me for the green tint of your face. ;-)

Who are you, Mannoroth?

Re: Why I left Pine64

#215

Post by greatgib » Thu, Aug 18, 2022, 2:45 PM UTC

There are already physical switch on the back of the phone. I don't understand why there couldn't be one to select the CPU boot drive: eMMC or sdcard?

Re: Why I left Pine64

#216

Post by dTal » Thu, Aug 18, 2022, 3:48 PM UTC

MartijnBraam wrote: post #56

zozbot234 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the end the SPI hardware did get added and it just works What about their new PineBook Pro, though? Is that situation still in flux? > The issue with that is it's really easily wiped or changed when installing an OS. I'm not really seeing this. If the OS supports this special scheme, they need only deal with the soft block device that's created by mapping "the rest" of the partition. And if they don't, then all…

It seems like in the end the pinebook pro did get the SPI chip on it, but then they flashed a closed source U-Boot to the eMMC instead which does not allow booting from SD. So it's again a complete pain for the other distributions to help these users. For the wiping issue, a lot of times I see suggestions to wipe the first few MB of the storage when there's booting and flashing issues to get rid of an old U-Boot, whi…

>a closed source U-Boot

U-Boot is GPL. How is this possible?

Re: Why I left Pine64

#217

Post by WhyNotHugo » Thu, Aug 18, 2022, 4:24 PM UTC

desertraven wrote: post #160

I’ve read that in espionage, open source companies are disrupted from the inside. Is an open source, non trackable device with future potential to replace the current situation worth that level of action? Pure speculation!

What you're suggesting is not at all new, there's even a nice declassified manual on sabotage and how to carry it out: https://www.hsdl.org/?view&did=750070 (or https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=750070 )

A lot of projects claim to be privacy-centric or love open source, but behave quite the opposite. After reading the above manual, I've been wondering if it's pure incompetence or someone deliberate pushing things that way.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#218

Post by linmob » Thu, Aug 18, 2022, 4:35 PM UTC

matheusmoreira wrote: post #110

It's really unfortunate. I remember being excited about the pinephone. I had no idea this was happening behind the scenes. Why elevate Manjaro if others were doing the work? Why was that decision made? It doesn't make any sense to me. Thanks for all the work you've done!

IIRC it was something about personal and/or business relationships and commitment of resources. Actually, going with Manjaro was only half of what made me question the decision: At the time, when PINE64 introduced the "Beta Edition" Plasma Mobile was still quite bad (it improved a lot since).

Re: Why I left Pine64

#219

Post by megous » Thu, Aug 18, 2022, 5:15 PM UTC

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #214

megous wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha. Don't forget to blame me for the green tint of your face. ;-)

Who are you, Mannoroth?

I wrote the camera driver for the selfie camera, and parts of a sensor interface driver, and the driver gives you a green tint by default. So I'm blameable if the parent commenter dislikes the green tint. ;)

Just a bit of a fun joke, for people who know the context.

Re: Why I left Pine64

#220

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Thu, Aug 18, 2022, 5:26 PM UTC

eschaton wrote: post #201

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or UEFI, which works fine on ARM & RISC-V.

And which is also quite a bit more complex, compared to Open Firmware.

Sure; I would have preferred a world where OF won, but that's not where the ecosystem went. And UEFI is... fine, and in this case I think the network effects are worth it.