The Pinetab2 Thread

Great news that you work on this. Thank you! I’ve been wanting a tablet with Sailfish os for quite long.and maybe this could be it.

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Summary of Pinetab 2: (so far)

  • It seems to be a pretty stable port. The biggest problem is the wanky wifi (which I’m sure will improve over time!). For me, it improved a lot when I started to use the ‘guest mode’, where the authentication method is ‘open system’ and no wpa key is used.
  • I don’t think Bluetooth is working (driver needs to be implemented).
  • Notification sounds are not heard. (otherwise the sounds work).
  • There seems to be no GPS? (but I don’t need it)
  • Camera does not work (yet)
  • Waydroid works
  • There is enough RAM (8 GB), no oom killer / low memory killer so far.
  • Moderate battery life (could be worse)
  • The installation on the memory card was easy to do.
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My PineTab2 also arrived, yeah! Thanks @piggz for the great Adaptation. It runs very smooth. Did someone know, how to setup DualBoot, so i can keep the microsd card inside the pinetab2 and choose which os to boot?

And what is the best way to transfer SailfishOS to the intenal emmc?

Thats very cool, that @piggz got WiFi Working. I ask me, if this solution could help somehow on other Linux Distributions of PineTab2. On Arch Linux and on Mobian, the internal Wifi Chips is not working.
@piggz do you think, your wifi hack could also work on Linux?

Thanks

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This Friday my tab has been delivered. I tried Arch Linux, Rhino, Sailfish and Mobian. There are nice distributions but Sailfish is very ok for this device. Sometimes the tablet needs some time for thinking but it’s runing stable and I’m very happy with the current progress. My wish would be to flash the OS directly to the internal eMMC. is it now possible? Could I flash the downloaded image with dd to the internal storage or do some files need a change from you?

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you can flash the os to the emmc from the sdcard. Because the flash-it script uses sudo you have to edit the script, replace all sudos with devel-su…if you use SFOS. Otherwise, you can run the script from another distro: I’ve only ever used danctnix arch, for this you have to first install unzip, wget and jq (sudo pacman -S unzip…). Then run the script as normal. Be careful to choose the correct partition for the emmc!

Or remove and run as root, or install sudo…

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Two PineTabs 2 have been flashed with sailfish directly to emmc. I had to add the thrid partition to fstab because the system wanted to format the last partition (without success). The home mount point will be present now but everytime I will get a question to encrypt the disk (after reboot or turn in).
@piggz You are done very nice work! This port is very nice in a comperation to other distributions.

Does somebody know how I could fix a problem? After every reboot the tab has a new mac address. I tried to use udev but the problem is still existing.

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Cool, would you like to share your script ?

Hi @piggz WLAN connection works, but it generates a new MAC-Address on every reboot. The same bug exist on Arch Linux when you downgrade bes2600 Firmware and use self compiled bes2600 Module. Any chance, that it can be forced to use the same MAC-Address ?

New kernel and config is available for the PT2

Because of an error in the old config, you need to modify a file to get the updates
edit /usr/share/ssu/features.d/adaptation-pinetab2.ini
In the second last line, change pinephonepro to pinetab2, save and exit
ssu ur
zypper ref
zypper dup

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So the Pinetab2 is updated and the internet is working great. Thank you very much for the great work!

Does the Pinetab2 with SFOS actually have a fixed MAC address or is there a way to set it permanently?

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No, there is talk about fixing this in the bootloader, its an issue across all distros.

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I have updated Pinetab 2 with new kernel and config. After the update, the tablet reboots every time it goes into sleep mode (aka the screen goes black). I wonder if anyone else is having the same problem?

Ive not had that, infact, its been way more stable than before with the old driver

I also had the problem with the old driver, which then strangely started the emmc arch

I got this yesterday for the first time. I was testing battery performance during sleep. I don’t know what state it’s in, screen blank…the only option is to force power down and reboot.

The reboot problem went away when I turned off suspend. “mcetool -searly” .

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Latest update fixes system sounds

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flash-it.sh script produces 403 error. When you open the link printed to console in a browser though you get the zip file. Flashed it to an SD card with custom option by modifying the script a bit but it wasn’t enough to get it booting. If you open the link the wget ultimately goes to in a browser you get the same 403, which makes sense.

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Seems like PineTab2 is quite a stable port, at least compared to other distros. Seems good.

I am wondering for what a Sailfish OS user (like myself) would need a keyboard? I mean there is no way to do word processing on SFOS, right?

I am thinking about buying a small computer or tablet and thought about PineTab2 because of the affordable price and the luxury of using SFOS on it, but I might want a regular Linux distro in stead so that I could use Libre Office or something similar.