Pine Pinebook

[Brian Beuken]

An odd thing to be sure, and with shipping and customs outside my $100 budget (total cost was around $160), but its related to a project I am working on for my university and I need to see if I can configure this to be a viable dev or target learning system for areas when computers are not so easy to find never mind learn to code on.
1st impressions are...well surprising, its slow of course and I'm not sure what OS they shipped with it, but it does work...apart from Firefox telling me that Google is an unsafe site and wont' got to it.. lol it may be right

Im doing a full update of its current OS now and will see if I can install some dev packages on it. Of course no visual studio, but I want to see which of the Linux IDE's can be made to work if that is possible it might be a viable option to use as a dev system targetting another machine or itself.

I'll also attempt to use it as a target, though previous Pine A64 attempts havn't gone well the software has had time to mature and does have a strong following. The Rock64 from  them isn't half bad but this is based on the older and more troublesome A64 

Build quality is surprisingly good, I had expected from reviews to find it really bad. The small keyboard isn't the greatest thing but nor is it the worst. If it can be married up to a decent OS it might actually be a cool little system.
The current default KDE based ubuntu (I think), installs GLmark2-es2 fine and recognises the mali 400mp2 but it isn't showing any sign of acceleration and the score is naturally very low at 27 on screen but a surprising..188 offscreen..hmmm.. I'll have to see if I can find an A64 OS that has drivers.

I will report back when I manage to get things up and running