Pine64 1st Impressions

ermmm not good

Lets be honest, the size is strange, and the forum moderators strange justifications for the size, seem odd.

But never mind, I never like to be negative for no reason, its a brand new board, by brand new makers, who are bound to make mistakes..

Like for example hosting their images on the slowest server I've yet encountered, 13 hours to download a zipped Debian img....ermmm thats not classy.

But worse, was once burned on to a class 10 8Gb microSD it failed to finish a boot, that's frustrating...a new board taking its img direct from the makers wiki link, which clearly states works on a 2Gb board...should at least boot to a prompt..
I have set up the laptop to download Ubuntu, its going to take 13 hours too....yipe.

Its pretty bad to wait so long to download an image, only to not have it work, then take the same amount of time again to download another, with a certain amount of trepidation that it may not also work.

umm ok, well I was able to torrent Remix OS from their wiki, took 3 or 4 hours, I am not sure, I left it running, but it was a lot better.  But its an OS I've not used before, so not sure what to expect from it. As I type, it just booted up, looks a lot like a Windows version of Android....but it does show the board is working...

Sadly since its basically an android system I can't SSH code to it, so will have to try harder to get hold of a working Linux.

There is a basic Ubuntu system available from a user on the forums, so will try that next.

It didn't work!! I tried Debian again on a different card...it again didn't work...
sigh! The most fundamental thing you have to make sure of when releasing a board is that there is a working OS..even if its crap, as many are, it gives you something to work with...not even being able to boot is a pain. Though it may be a hardware fault. that the Android one is able to skip past!

There are some reported issues with 2Gb machines....not sure exactly what, and there are comments that state that the issues are resolved, but clearly not on my board.
So I guess I will have to put it aside for a while until they release a stable Linux build that works on my machine before I can consider doing much with it....it will make a cute paperweight.





Edit...see later posts, I found the issue, and its now working.