Pinebook Pro Redux
OK several more weeks have gone by and I thought
it'd be good to go back and give an update on the
PBP experience. Some things I termed "rough edges"
in my original review have since been fixed, but
other issues remain or have newly cropped up.
I just recently reinstalled Manjaro and I'm at
the (as of this writing) most recent version
(20.04).
* Manjaro is now the default distro in future
shipments of the PBP. This is a great choice
in my opinion and I'm glad the Pine team has
recognized the superior quality of Manjaro on this
platform.
* Screensavers. Before I upgraded to the most
recent version of Manjaro, xfce4-screensaver
started simply freezing the screen rather than
locking, forcing me to kill X. It didn't do this
initially and I can't explain why it started.
I removed it and installed xscreensaver which
did not exhibit this issue. I've continued to
use xscreensaver on 20.04.
* The audio issues have been fixed. The headphone
jack now works as expected and that crackling
is gone. Good job Manjaro team.
* I got my RTL-SDR to work with gqrx! Turns out
the rtl-sdr driver that you install from pacman
doesn't work and you need to manually compile
and install from the Git repo. I don't think
this is specific to the PBP after I decided
to sit down and actually figure out what was wrong.
However, the PBP isn't quite up to the task
of running gqrx and live decoding without some
lag. It's nice that it works but I'll
probably stick to my regular laptop for SDR
work.
An aside on the above point: I spent a
significant amount of time wondering why the
libraries I had compiled and installed were
not being used by gqrx. Turns out Arch and
Arch-based distros do not look for libraries
in /usr/local/lib by default. I can find no good
reason for this online - it's a very standard
place to put user-compiled programs. I got
around it by putting a file called usrlocal.conf
in /etc/ld.so.conf.d that contained the string
"/usr/local/lib", but I shouldn't have had to
do that I mean c'mon.
* I have not yet tested WSJT-X but looking at
the arch package I suspect compilation will
still be broken :-(
That's All For Now!
The PBP keeps getting better and I've been
very satisfied with my purchase several months
in. If you're thinking about picking one up
and you don't mind dealing with occasional
issues like I've described, I highly recommend it.
@jboverf@mastodon.sdf.org
