Working with Endless OS on the Pinebook Pro

#1

I have Endless OS installed on the emmc drive on the Pinebook Pro. It does run fairly well. It has been getting a few updates. The SD card reader still is not seen when running from the emmc, and sleep does not work. The battery gauge does not show up in the system tray. I did manage to get wifi working, and I am not sure what I had been doing wrong for so long.

Endless does not have fractional scaling enable, which would make the screen easier to read with my old eyes. I enable larger text in the accessibility settings, but it would be nice if the text were larger still. In a regular Gnome install you can use Gnome Tweaks to set the text to any size you wish. I have not found method to do that on Endless.

I had picked up an NVME adapter for the machine when I picked up a dock. I finally got an NVME drive for the machine. Generally on the Pinebook Pro with an NVME drive, one installs “/boot” on the emmc and installs “/” on the NVME. I am not sure that is possible to do with Endless OS, or really even how I would setup that up.

It would be nice to be able to move “/home” to the NVME anyway and well once again I am not sure that is possible with Endless OS or how to do that.

#2

Thanks for the feedback! I think you’re the first to report back from this platform.

There are some rough edges, this basically represents the state of “vanilla” Linux on the device, hopefully these things will improve over time.

I think you can probably enable fractional scaling by running in the Terminal

gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"

(you probably need to run that as your user account, not root)

For the /home thing you could try to set up a fstab.d or systemd mount unit that mounts your NVME disk at /sysroot/home during early boot. Not sure if this will work smoothly though, so be prepared to throw away the setup and start again if things fail badly.

#3

Thanks for responding, it is good to hear that “hopefully things will improve over time.”

The gsettings set in the terminal did work. Gnome does not implement that very well. 125%, 150%, and 175% settings take a big hit on preformance. The “Larger Text” works very well, however it does not allow the user to select the text size. Text size is exposed in Gnome Tweaks and does a great job, but setting the text size is not exposed in Gnome’s accessibility settings.

Nix OS has created an exceptionally nice boot loader for ARM devices, which allows for configuration of boot devices (see https://nixos.wiki/wiki/NixOS_on_ARM)

I think that Endless OS and the Pinebook Pro are a great combination. It is a solid running powerful and relatively inexpensive device.

#4

You could also try:

gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor 1.6

Experiment with the value - 1.0 is the default.

#5

Thanks for the gsettings info. Changing the text size worked very well. I can now read and use the UI, without the performance hit one takes when using scaling.

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#6

Typically I do not pay any attention to beta software, but since EOS on the Pinebook Pro has lots of paper cuts I decided to see if the beta of eos 4 was doing any better.

The first update to eos 3.9.x installed just fine and the update to the beta 2 of eos 4.0 became available and was download without a hitch. I was notified that I needed to restart to install the update. And well it just failed.

The Pinebook Pro restarted, but just hung with the red power light glowing. I believe that is an indicator that boot loader was unable to find or load the kernel.

I have EOS installed on the internal emmc and it also has the nvme adaptor installed. Endless instructions are for an SD card install, so perhaps I would not have had a failure if I were only using the SD card and had the emmc turned off. In any event as of now I am unable to get the update to install.

#7

In fact the updater is supposed to refuse to upgrade from eos3 to eos4 on arm64 exactly because the bootloader configuration has changed in a backwards-incompatible way. This is mentioned in the release notes. But evidently the code that prevents the upgrade on that architecture did not work on your machine!

#8

The release notes do mention incompatibility with arm64. Since the update to the beta proceeded automatically I just let it run. It is big downside to beta software.

I am not familiar with Endless development proceedures. Some development of beta software is kind of rolling with fixes always being applied, while other development has fixed releases.

I looked for a full beta image to try a clean install, but was not able to find one. Endless on Pinebook Pro does work, but comes with lots of rough edges making it very difficult to use on a daily basis. I am looking forward to it becomming more polished and perhaps even reaching the great usability I get from Endless OS on my desktop.

#9

We don’t routinely publish beta images for clean installs. Here’s a nightly eos4.0 build for pinebook pro:

eos-eos4.0-arm64-pinebookpro.210919-224553.base.img.xz (2.8 GB)
eos-eos4.0-arm64-pinebookpro.210919-224553.base.img.xz.asc (detached GPG signature)
eos-eos4.0-arm64-pinebookpro.210919-224553.base.img.xz.sha256 (sha256sum)

This is the basic version with few preinstalled applications. It’s preconfigured to track eos4.0 stable releases which of course don’t exist yet :slight_smile: you can use eos-stage-ostree to track the dev (nightly) or demo (beta) version instead.

The link will expire in a few weeks.

#10

Thank you for the links to the files. I downloaded image and it installed with no trouble. I will sum up my experiences and post them after I have had time to use it a bit.

1 Like
#11

I am not good with beta software. I tend to go on the computer to do some task, and if I run into glitches I just go to a system that has no glitches

The Endless 4 beta installed on my Pinebook Pro without any problems. I was not able to get the internal wifi working with the directions on the Pinebook Pros installation page, even after several tries. I have a USB wifi device that works about 3 out of 4 boots. Sometimes Endless just does not find it while booting.

Endless OS on the Pinebook Pro does not restart, it shuts down fine, but as it restarts the screen gets some moving bands and the system while it seems to keep booting, the screen never clears up. This is a kernel issue that is present in Manjaro and Arch as well. An Arch developer created a patch that fixed the issue, then dropped the project. It was picked up by and Endeavour OS developer and I beleive it is still active. Original Patched kernel https://github.com/nadiaholmquist/archiso-pbp/releases

After install I wanted to use a backup of my home folder made with Backups on my desktop Endless install. When I went to “restore” on the Pinebook Pro, Backups informed me that it did not have permission to write to my home folder or subfolders on the Pinebook Pro which was frustrating.

Overall after the Endless Beta has launched successfully it runs pretty well. The beta adds a working battery gauge which is very useful. Sleep, suspend and power management just to not seem to work. Either having power states enable automatically or specifically setting a power state just moves the system into a state where it is impossible to continue using it without a restart.

Sound did not work for me with the non beta install (3.9.x) and it does not work in the 4 beta either. Selfie shows a preview image, but any picture taken results in nothing more than a grey box.

#12

Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback!
We’ll continue working on these details as time permits. We recently made some progress towards having working audio and we’re trying to upstream that so it works on all Linux distros without device-specific efforts.

#13

Just a few hours after I commented on the first beta, a new beta was released (beta3). This beta installed without fanfare. I am now on Endless 4.0.0; Build ID: 210929-161309.

Generally the system boots fine, but about one in four times the boot stops after the boot splash appears and the Pinebook Pro needs to be powered off and restarted. Once up and running the systems runs smoothly and quickly, what one has come to expect from Endless OS.

I tried once again to turn on the internal wireless and this time the procedure you list worked on the first try. I have a NextCloud server running on a Raspberry Pi. It shows up in Files, however it does not show up in open or save dialog boxes. This could be a NextCloud problem, but on my desktop the folders and files on NextCloud show up. This makes syncing of my Zim notebook impossible on the Pinebook Pro.

Power matters have improved. The screen blanks as per the settings and tapping the keyboard or mouse wakes the screen. The screen brightness keys work as expected. The sound keys bring up an indicator, but of course sound is still not working. My guess is the sleep key (fn esc) works, but the system does not resume. I have disabled the power button. The power button is poorly placed and the options for its actions are not really useful to me. The Print Screen key works. The NumLK key turns on the indicator light but does not activate the num lock. PgUp, PgDn work as I expect. Home and End keys take you to the beginning and end of the line and expect them to take you to the beginning and end of the document.

Power consumpion appears a bit excessive. In use the battery will discharge even when plugged in, which is not uncommon on the Pinebook Pro, but generally a well running OS will not discharge the battery when plugged in. All Pinebook Pro OSes report a full battery as having a 10 hour run time, but in use the battery will only realistically provide half that run time.

I do apprecitate your efforts on the Pinebook Pro and it is great to see steady improvements being made.

#14

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