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Pinebook full documentation


The Pinebook

The Pinebook is an 11.6″ or 11.6″ with 1080P IPS panel or 14″ notebook powered by the same quad-core ARM Cortex A53 64-Bit Processor used in our popular PINE A64 Single Board Computer. It is very lightweight, hackable and comes equipped with a full-sized keyboard and large multi-touch trackpad. It runs numerous mainline Linux distributions as well as *BSD and Android.


Variants

The following variants exist of the Pinebook:

  • Pinebook 11.6″
  • Pinebook 11.6″ 1080p
  • Pinebook 14″

More information can be found on the sunxi wiki.


Software

This page contains a list of all available releases and tools for the Pinebook.

Linux

AOSC

AOSC OS is a general purpose Linux distribution that strives to simplify user experience and improve free and open source software for day-to-day productivity. To learn more about AOSC, please visit the official AOSC website.

Download:

Default credentials

Default user

aosc/anthon

Armbian

Armbian is a Linux distribution designed for ARM boards. They are usually Debian or Ubuntu flavored. To find out more about Armbian and available download options please visit the Armbian ROCK64 site.

Compatibility

Pinebook 11.6″

Pinebook 11.6" 1080p

Pinebook 14″

✅

✅

✅

Download:

Default credentials

Root user

root/1234

Debian

Debian is an operating system and a distribution of Free Software. The forum thread for release can be found here.

Compatibility

Pinebook 11.6″

Pinebook 11.6" 1080p

Pinebook 14″

✅

✅

✅

Download:

Installation:

Notes:

  • Installer offers automatic partitioning and full-disk encryption (LUKS), but only manual partitioning with a single ext4 partition has been confirmed to work.

  • Bootloader must be installed separately after installation, before rebooting.

  • WiFi driver kernel module must be provided during installation, or a USB network adapter used. (Android USB tethering works, with network driver rndis_host).

  • See also: Debian Netboot installer on the 1080P Pinebook under Software releases

DietPi

DietPi is a lightweight yet easy to setup and feature-rich Linux distribution, based on Debian. To find out more about DietPi, please visit the official documentation. Discuss the ROCK64 build on the PINE64 forum thread.

Download:

Default credentials

Root user

root/dietpi

Kali

Kali Linux is an Advanced Penetration Testing Linux distribution used for Penetration Testing, Ethical Hacking and network security assessments.

Compatibility

Pinebook 11.6″

Pinebook 11.6" 1080p

Pinebook 14″

✅

✅

✅

Download:

Default credentials

Default user

kali/kali

Slackware

Slackware is a very old, interesting, convenient and easy distribution. Visit the project’s website here (https://fail.pp.ua). You can follow the ongoing discussion about Slackware on the PINE64 forum (https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=9439).

Compatibility

Pinebook 11.6″

Pinebook 11.6" 1080p

Pinebook 14″

❓

✅

❓

Download:

Default credentials

Root user

root/password

BSD Image Releases

NetBSD

NetBSD community build. To learn more about NetBSD please visit the NetBSD main page.

Download:

Compatibility

Pinebook 11.6″

Pinebook 11.6" 1080p

Pinebook 14″

✅

❓

❓

Notes:

  • Instructions concerning enabling SSH can be found here

Default credentials

SSH and TTY user

root/[none]

OpenBSD

OpenBSD 6.6-snapshot, Community Build Image (FVWM2 WM). To learn more about OpenBSD please visit OpenBSD main page. If you need more information please ping: https://forum.pine64.org/member.php?action=profile&uid=12423.

warning

Outdated release

Download:

Default credentials

SSH and TTY user

pine64/pine64

Root password

pine64

Android Image Releases

Android 7.x

Android 7.1 Community Build Image [microSD Boot] by ayufan. It only works on the 14.1" and 11.6" Pinebook, not applicable to 1080P 11.6' Pinebook. Special thanks to ayufan, Icenowy, lennyraposo, longsleep, lukasz, tkaiser, Xalius and PINE64 community contributors. Please use good random IO access performance microSD card such as the Samsung EVO when trying out Android 7.1.

warning

Outdated release

Download:

  • ayufan’s GitHub, look for android-7.1-pine-a64-pinebook-x.x.x-xx.img.gz (for microSD cards with 4GB or more)

Notes:

  • Please allows some time (around 5 minutes) for the initialization process on the first boot.

Android 6.x eMMC

Android 6.0.1

Rootable build, online update (OTA) only works when the build is not rooted. The LCD resolution is 1366 x 768.

Compatibility

Pinebook 11.6″

Pinebook 11.6" 1080p

Pinebook 14″

✅

❌

✅

warning

Outdated release

Download:

Notes:

  • microSD to eMMC

Android 6.0.1

Rootable build. The LCD resolution is 1920 x 1080.

Compatibility

Pinebook 11.6″

Pinebook 11.6" 1080p

Pinebook 14″

❌

✅

❌

warning

Outdated release

Download:

Notes:

  • microSD to eMMC

Android 6.0.1

Rootable build. The LCD resolution is 1920 x 1080. Please use an high performance microSD card for Android. Please ignore the warning message regarding an corrupted SD on the home screen in the upper left corner.

Compatibility

Pinebook 11.6″

Pinebook 11.6" 1080p

Pinebook 14″

❌

✅

❌

warning

Outdated release

Download:

  • For 8GB microSD cards from pine64.org (553MB, MD5 of the Gzip file CD27DF6083E6A4A5E7C8B986EB92FAA7, build 20181001)

  • For 16GB microSD cards from pine64.org (703MB, MD5 of the Gzip file 1376AAE8382E96FD7B45B0998A5CD6E9, build 20181001)

  • For 32GB microSD cards from pine64.org (867MB, MD5 of the Gzip file B54E7F323B316750654E385B078AEC58, build 20181001)

  • For 64GB microSD cards from pine64.org (734MB, MD5 of the Gzip file C8DBC6293EB51E58F91E27364C8C587D, build 20181001)

Notes:

  • microSD boot

/e/

/e/OS community build. To learn more about /e/OS, please visit the official website. Please check out this article on the Pinebook /e/ build. For a thread discussion please visit the PINE64 forum

Compatibility

Pinebook 11.6″

Pinebook 11.6" 1080p

Pinebook 14″

❌

✅

❌

warning

Outdated release

Download:

Linux BSP SDK

Download:

Android SDK

Android Marshmallow (v6.0)

Download:

  • Direct Download from pine64.org (15.92GB, MD5 of the Zip file 12362D0B63EBF29FC363A50A942346D5)

Compatibility

Pinebook 11.6″

Pinebook 11.6" 1080p

Pinebook 14″

✅

❓

❓

Other resources


FAQ and tips

Key left of Z ( \ | )

How to map the key next to Z to the symbols on \ and | (rather than <>) ?

Choose the alternative international US keyboard layout and variant. The name will depend on you desktop environment:

  • English (US, alt. intl.)
  • English (US, international AltGr Unicode combining, alternative)
  • English (US, alternative international)

note

keyboard variants with similar names as the ones above change the upper left key for ` and ~. You have to press that key twice to get the desired char. This happens with the alt-intl variant. Choose the altgr-intl variant (or however it is called in your desktop environment) and it should work as expected.

To set the keyboard layout and variant in the terminal for X-Windows use:

setxkbmap -layout us -variant altgr-intl

The Archlinux Wiki has some good help if you need to tweak your layout further [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xorg/Keyboard_configuration#Setting_keyboard_layout]

Key between Fn and Alt (Menu)

How to map the key between Fn and Alt to SUPER / META ?

The initial setup in many desktop environments maps the key between Fn and Alt to MENU. Although the menu key can be useful as well (e.g. spell correction in the browser) many desktop environments and window manager use the Super key for many other useful functions. And users are probably more used to have the META key near Ctrl and Alt.

In X-windows the following command maps the key between Fn and Alt to META and the Caps-Lock key to MENU.

setxkbmap -option caps:menu,altwin:alt_super_win

Set display brightness in the terminal

To set the display brightness in the terminal use xbacklight (if available in your distro):

xbacklight -setXX

XX is the percentage (%) of brightness. E.g. for 70% brightness

xbacklight -set70

If you use LXQt you can also use: pkexec lxqt-backlight_backend –inc pkexec lxqt-backlight_backend –dec

For an alternative solution please see the scripts discussed in this thread: [https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=5062]

Get battery % in CLI

As ACPI is not compatible with ARM, to gather the % battery this can be used:

cat /sys/class/power_supply/battery/capacity

Firefox font size

How to get a useful font size with firefox ?

To have every web page displayed in a larger more readable font size type about:config in the search bar and confirm on the first page that you want to make changes. Then search for this parameter:

layout.css.devPixelsPerPx

and modify the value (right click) to something between 1.2 to 1.5 depending on your preferences.

In addition to that you can set in Preferences -> General -> Fonts & Color -> Advanced Minimum font size to 16

Disable wireless power management

If having issues with wifi connectivity, try to disable power management in the 8723cs module options, adding rtw_power_mgnt=0 in /etc/modprobe.d/8723cs.conf

options 8723cs rtw_initmac=00:ba:ch:16:85:46 rtw_power_mgnt=0

Touchpad acceleration and scroll direction

To set touchpad parameters from the cli you can use the command xinput. To use it correctly you first need to determine the device id / name for your touchpad. To do so, use:

xinput list

You are looking for a line like this:

HAILUCK CO.,LTD USB KEYBOARD Mouse      	id=7	[slave  pointer  (2)]

With the device id = 7 found you can list the parameters that can be set with xinput.

xinput list-props 7

The result looks similar to this:

device 'HAILUCK CO.,LTD USB KEYBOARD Mouse':
...
libinput Natural Scrolling Enabled (256):	0
...
libinput Accel Speed (265):	0.000000
...

To change the parameter use xinput set-prop

To set reverse scrolling for the touchpad use this command xinput set-prop 7 ’libinput Natural Scrolling Enabled’ 1

To set mouse speed xinput set-prop 7 ’libinput Accel Speed’ 0.95 Check different numbers for 0.95 to meet your needs.

For more details on xinput and mouse speed also see the Archlinux Wiki [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mouse_acceleration#Using_xinput]

Prolong battery life

How to reduce the max voltage the battery is charged to:

$ cd /sys/class/power_supply/axp20x-battery

note

The voltage_max_design is writable by root, values are in microvolts. The factory value is 4200000 or 4.2V on my device. This charges to 100% capacity.

$ cat voltage_max_design 
4200000

Check the factory value on your device, and record it if it is different. The value depends on the battery installed. You can reduce it to 4.1 V by running the following Linux command as root:

$ echo 4100000 > voltage_max_design

If you are fully charged and on AC, the battery will start discharging until it reaches 4.1 V. This will be about 98% capacity on my device. This prolongs the battery life when you don’t need the extra few minutes of offline power. The Linux driver will not let you set the maximum voltage to a value smaller than 4.1V (as of Linux kernel 6.3.8).

The setting seems to be retained across reboots.


Service guides

These are instruction guides for the disassembly:

note

The installation process is the reverse order of removal guide

11.6″ Pinebook:

14″ Pinebook:


Further information

Specifications

The Pinebook is based on the Allwinner A64.

Dimensions:

  • 299mm x 200mm x 12mm (WxDxH - 11″ Pinebook); 329mm x 220mm x 12mm (WxDxH - 14″ Pinebook)

Weight:

  • 1.04Kg (11″ Pinebook); 1.26Kg (14″ Pinebook)

Input Power:

  • DC 5V @ 3A

CPU Architecture:

  • Quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 Processor@1152Mhz
  • A power-efficient ARM v8 architecture
  • 64 and 32bit execution states for scalable high performance
  • Support NEON Advanced SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) instruction for acceleration of media and signal processing function
  • Support Large Physical Address Extensions(LPAE)
  • VFPv4 Floating Point Unit
  • 32KB L1 Instruction cache and 32KB L1 Data cache
  • 512KB L2 cache

GPU Architecture:

System Memory:

  • System RAM Memory: 2GB
  • Storage Memory: 16GB eMMC module, can be upgrade to 32GB or 64GB eMMC module

Battery:

  • Lithium Polymer Battery (10,000 mAh; 9,600 mAh in later batches)

Video:

  • Mini Digital Video Port (Type A - mini)

Audio:

  • 3.5mm stereo earphone/microphone plug

Network:

  • WiFi 802.11 b/g/n with Bluetooth 4.0
  • 10/100Mbps USB Ethernet Dongle (Optional)

Storage:

  • microSD - bootable, support SDHC and SDXC, storage up to 256GB
  • USB - 2 USB2.0 Host port

Expansion Ports:

  • mini Digital Video port
  • microSD card port - support SD, SDHC, SDXC uo to 256GB
  • 2x USB 2.0 port
  • earphone plug with UART console mux circuit

Datasheets

Allwinner A64 SoC:

X-Powers AXP803 PMU (Power Management Unit):

LPDDR3:

eMMC:

SPI NOR flash:

WiFi/BT module:

LCD Panel:

Touchpad:

Camera sensor:

Lithium battery:

Schematics and certifications

Mainboard schematics:

Daughter Board schematics:

Serial Console Earphone Jack pinout:

Certifications:

Other resources