Very much dependent on the particular hardware - here, the pinetab2 has some support. The danctnix mobile linux community maintains builds for it, so it’s a subset of Arch on Arm.
https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/danctnix-packages/tree/main/pine64/device-pine64-pinetab2
outside of that, there’s some limited support for postmarketOS and mobian
A good place to start understanding the challenges you’d face would be on the wiki:
I just bought one. The default KDE is a bit heavyweight for it, I’m thinking something lighter might be better.
I would say that they perfectly nailed the description, this is not a beginner device. You’ll not be distrohopping without knowing how to patch your own WiFi drivers and fix the auto rotate (90° clockwise further than it should be out of the box).
I love it, really cool. But not an easy in for beginners.
Feel free to ask me questions or check something, or send a picture of something!
I replaced an NVMe drive on a Windows 11 machine the other day. Cloned to new disk, booted up. After posting and entering the bootloaders, it said “BOOT DRIVE INACCESSIBLE”. The drive needed a driver to BOOT once Windows took over.
A Western Digital 850x black 2TB. This is not an uncommon drive, but I had to patch in the driver to the disk from a live CD.
I don’t see how people put up with this crap.
What sort of standards are these packages built to?
FYI, scrcpy can be an excellent tool for remote support, but you’d better trust the network the interface is on
I would dearly love to know how many if statements are between me and the brakes.
Also, being able to prove that that the CAN bus and RTOS system was air-gapped from whatever bullshit uplink to the internet ends up in there would be worth ~20K extra to me.
It will be the final form of all emulation I do from now on.
Currently syncthing to a server manages sharing my states and saves between steamdeck, bazzite home rolled steam machine and Desktop. This would be the dream for portability, and user sharing!
That’s why Vader stomps on the cloak. He’d never forget that presence. A presence he’d not felt since…
Looks like you could set it up with a burner or a code display and buy and configure a chip for reasonably cheap. You could keep the code display as backup and use the chip for day-to-day.
I’m not sure how much hassle that would be, or how secure it would be. Based on the alternatives, I’m guessing the app is some sort of TOTP code gen based off a certificate issued to you by the gov’t?
Device pricing:
You can never be vulnerable to an exploit if you never reuse the same code twice
It’s basically a requirement if you’re using M365 mail - there’s still a massive problem where you can impersonate a Microsoft tenant to a victim’s tenant from a third unaffiliated tenant.
And their default spam filter is garbage anyway.
Instead of trying to build reputation, you can buy it. Pick a reputable spam solution that offers accounts for like $3-5/m and route all mail through it.
Still your server, your mail, but you’re buying their business reputation, and getting some spam filtering back. Plus you might get some protection from outages or maintenance windows if they can cache some mail for delivery for you
The 8 is a pretty big upgrade, 9 more so. Much more solid, much better battery life, much better performance (searches/loading/brightness)
I found a homemade Ubuntu 8.04 installer disk the other day, simpler times. It had it’s place.
I will never forgive the amazon partnership with the desktop search bar.
The right way is some sort of inline water flow sensor, so it’ll trigger within seconds of you turning on the shower to warm it up. With an esp32 and a sensor, and some clever use of the sleep function, it’d probably last a year or so on a couple of AA’s.
Low effort and price tech is probably better in a wet environment though! If you just want the mood lighting, get a wireless button and stick it somewhere near. Tap it on, tap it off!
If you want to feel that automatic magic, consider a cheap battery powered temperature sensor. If you fix the chassis to the shower head pipe it’d probably be accurate enough. Also, assuming you need to wait for your shower to heat up, you’d have a pretty good idea when your shower was hot too - when it triggers your automation for the lights!
Just make sure the sensor polls often enough or can be made to report on a significant temperature difference in a timely fashion. Something like this might do it: https://sonoff.tech/products/sonoff-zigbee-temperature-and-humidity-sensor-snzb-02p
Also avoid WiFi for buttons, connection and addressing takes ages and sicks for an instant response needed for something like lighting changes
tl;dr:
If you think something is blocking DNS traffic, you could try configuring DNS-over-HTTPs or DNS- over- TLS and picking a reputable upstream. This should obfuscate the traffic somewhat and get past common DNS interference issues and tactics.
So building on what yourself and everyone else has said, it does seem to be a DNS issue.
I found that at select times my local ISP was up to shenanigans with DNS.
I live in a very small country and work in IT. The NOC for all three ISPs and I have met. It would surprise me if they were competent enough to do this intentionally for malicious purposes.
If you can get access out to the internet via ping, see if you can do other things - get on a VPS and test with tcpdump at both ends. There’s a few free ones or trials great for disposable purposes like this. Set it up in advance…
You won’t know what it is til you troubleshoot.
I’ve had huawei firewalls reaching some simultaneous connection limit and fail, reversing their ruleset - blocking everything except ICMP, tr069 and ssh (concerning) outbound…
I’ve had problems with specific DNS servers, through the ISP’s network.
I’ve seen regular BGP changes causing outages all over the place (the ISPs locally don’t peer with each other…)
Post your findings, would love to help/hear!
Also slimbook! They’re offering similar machines to tuxedo, but my Executive 14 13700 was slightly cheaper than the equivalent Tuxedo Infinity book pro (same clevo laptop base), and dropped the second nvme slot for a full 99Wh battery.
Additionally, I has no problems shipping from Spain to the US.
Preinstalled OS is useable, though you’ll want to update it.
Installing the updated OS on an SD card is easy enough. I haven’t tried flashing it to disk yet. I’ve not felt hampered by major performance penalties.
The WiFi dongle workaround is that simple, yes. Pick one that’s supported in the mainline kernel, and you’re off to the races.
Be aware, you’ll need to pick one that’s USB C if you don’t want a second converter attached.
My preference would be to tether my phone I think - but my USB C 2.5G Ethernet adapter worked pretty well too.
Some more presient info from my investigation:
I got the latest Danctnix 20260630 running on it, and it’s working better now. Suspend is unmasked in that version, but it is not working all the time.
The WiFi driver is still unstable, but you can disconnect/reconnect quick enough when it drifts off.
Running phosh and sxmo/sway was a fair bit faster than full KDE.
The primary problem is hardware acceleration. For video, it’s just not there yet. You can make some video formats work, but this SoC is limited in what it can do in hardware, on its VPU. What little can be done, isn’t available without compiling your own ffmpeg.
This link shows what can be done with the 3566 hardware:
https://pine64.org/documentation/General/Mainline_Hardware_Decoding/
This link shows how it can be done:
https://clehaxze.tw/gemlog/2023/09-17-hardware-accelerated-playback-on-pinetab2.gmi
The bottom line is, without hardware acceleration for video decoding, it feels very underpowered.
I did bother to set it all up, and it’s a damn competent little tablet when you do - but all your effort won’t apply to streamed video unless you use MPV or something to play it, to take advantage of the ffmpeg. Straight up Firefox and chromium don’t offer selectors for YouTube etc to pick the right encoding format for your CPU, and they typically use more modern encoding formats. (e.g. VP9 over VP8)
Also, battery life is great! I’m sure not playing video helps…