Endless OS 5 and Pinebook Pro

Sometime back I flashed the Nix boot loader on the Pinebook Pro in a messy attempt to install Endeavour OS. It is s great boot loader and I just left it on the laptop. I downloaded the release of Endless OS 5 and using Raspberry Pi imager I wrote the Endless 5 image to a USB drive.

I booted the USB drive using the Nix boot loader and did a quick set up of Endless to run from the USB stick. With Endless setup I install the Raspberry Pi Imager via flatpak and used Imager to write the image to an NVME drive I installed in the Pinebook Pro.

The Nix boot loader saw the NVME drive as being bootable, so I launched again into Endless OS 5 and did a more completer. install. Manjaro has changed the name of one of the components needed to get the wireless work, which took a bit for me to get sorted out. However in the end Endless 5 is booting and running very nicely from the NVME drive. After two years of fiddling around and hoping to make this a useful laptop, Endless OS 5 has made that so. Thank you for supporting this hardware.

It is not 100% perfect. Sound does not work through the internal speakers, and bluetooth reports that no bluetooth hardware is present, so Bluetooth is not working either. Sleep and wake remain something of a problem, which is the case with almost all the distros that support the Pinebook Pro.

Overall though it is finally a very nice laptop and easily meets my needs a a very portable productive piece of hardware. I really do appreciate the Endless teams effort to continue supporting this hardware.

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