i have my pine book
pro this sleek little machine is
absolutely stunning look at the like
do you get the sense for how lightweight
this is
[Music]
for how sleek and slimline it is one of
the other things is there are no moving
parts that means
no fans no active cooling there is
therefore
no noise none have you ever held a
laptop on your lap
that generates absolutely zero
noise that's the pine book pro the only
reason i have it plugged in right now is
so that i can bring up its screen
for you that's the only reason otherwise
it's completely wireless
i get about six hours battery life on
this thing on a single charge
and there are some hacky little things
that you learn about your pine book pro
as you go so i'm going to tell you one
of those
i lost my power adapter i lost my little
barrel plug
to be able to charge it and i was like
what am i going to do
and then i got into the forum and there
were people in the
chat speaking about the ability to
charge it
with usb c
so i thought what wait a minute so so
i started looking through the thread and
wukash who has been on our show
was talking about the fact that yes with
a standard phone charger
you can plug usb-c into the pine book
pro and charge it
so that that's crazy i'm using usb-c
for hdmi output but you're saying i can
plug in an hd
a usbc power adapter and that's going to
charge my pine book pro so i took the
risk
the risk i mean mukash arkinsky was in
the
forum saying uh you know he's from
pine64 and given the thumbs up and
saying yeah you can use your usbc phone
charger
so i did it and it charged quickly
very very impressed so that's one little
hacky thing that i didn't realize
out of the box i could do with my pine
pinebook pro
i thought i had to have that adapter i'm
sure i'll find it somewhere and i'll be
like what is this for
i don't need this anymore but one of the
other things that you can
hack on a pine book pro is the operating
system now understand this little guy
as sleek as it is as beautiful as this
is
as a laptop it is
i'll call it a developer system so
where something that is this sleek and
this powerful would you know maybe you
would expect to pay
six 800 bucks um 10
000 if it's an apple product uh with
this it's only 200 bucks
so what do you get for 200 bucks i mean
that's the
temptation is oh wow a 200 linux laptop
it's so sleek and it's so great and it
is
but i want to be clear that the pine
book pro is not for your average
everyday user it's for
the tinkerer it's for the people who
like me
want to be able to find hacky little
things and build my own operating system
and
figure out how to make things work and
it's a it's really
a development platform laptop it's
amazing for programmers
i mean i program in bosch all the time
i'm also a php developer
who uses nano as my ide so you know like
i
i love this kind of form factor in this
lightweight
long battery life but it's not for my
kids
because they can't you know it's not a
gaming system it's not meant for that
and it's they're they're gonna it's
gonna lead to disappointment so if
you're looking at the pine book pro we
need to look at it
with that kind of just going into it you
need to understand that it's not
the same as the three thousand dollar
laptop or the two thousand dollar laptop
or the one thousand dollar laptop this
is
basically the power of a really good
high-end chromebook
but with genuine linux on it but it is
open source
and it's continually growing so right
now you may install
an operating system and find it's a
little buggy or you've got problems with
this or that
but then it'll get better and better or
you try a different distro and because
it's open source
you will find you know maybe you'll find
one that you'll love
but i want to you know i hope that
that's clear because i don't ever want
you to go out and buy something like
this a pine book pro
and then be disappointed i am very
impressed by contrast but the
average joe user somebody who's not a
computer guru or
you know you don't have to be a guru
don't get me wrong but you've got to
want to tinker you have to have that
desire
to mess around and and play with it
if you don't have that desire then maybe
the pine book pro
isn't for you um and so i want to give
that to you up front because i don't
want you to be disappointed with that
purchase
if you love to tinker if you're like me
you love to hack and
and program and get into the linux
terminal and compile things yourself
this is probably for you it's got a
1080p
screen it's again super super sleek
great battery life it's got 802 11
uh 5 gigahertz so it'd be like
a c n g
b i don't know it's got
it's got five 2.4 gigahertz bluetooth
and
everything else but again like it's it
is what it is it is fantastic
for what it is so as i
seek to kind of customize my pine book
pro
it came with manjaro linux and i
love what the manjaro team are doing
with the pine book
pro again it's open source right so so
this team is
creating a distro that pine64 has said
okay well this is probably
the most rock solid right now so let's
put that on as our default
and so that's what they're doing but i'm
not an arc fan
and that's what it's based on and and i
am
very much a debian fan so debian can be
any derivative of debian so that can be
ubuntu
on my desktop computer my production
computer
i'm actually using linux mint which as i
understand it is based on
ubuntu and ubuntu is based on debian
so it all comes down to for me loving
the debian distro so my servers run
debian pure and i wanted to
i wanted to seek out being able to
install
debian on my pine book pro like legit
debian and then lo and behold
community member daniel thompson got in
there and uploaded a script
that allows you to compile upstream
debian 11 on your pine book pro
so that means that it is
debian as if it was debian downloaded
from debian.org
essentially there's a couple of tweaks
there with the kernel and things like
that and
daniel's done a really really great job
of making it really really easy to do
and really really easy to get through
but it is bullseye at its heart so
you're ending up with a true debian
operating system on your pine book pro
well why would you want that other than
just
the bragging rights to say hey i
compiled my own operating system
so i'm talking like you're not taking an
image and flashing it to the emmc no
we're actually
creating the image ourself why would you
do that other than the bragging rights
there is that but when you download an
operating system manjaro
or any other distro you're basically
taking
what the distro developers have said
this
is what we like or this is what we want
our distro to look like and feel like
and act like these are the the included
pieces of software that we want in our
distro and that's what's included
so when you install a true
base raw debian upstream
distro you are getting basically just
a bare shell that you can now decide
how do i want it to look how do i want
it to
function what office suite do i want
what browser do i want i get to choose
all of those things so how easy can it
be
well all you need is now i'm running
from my micro sd on my pine book pro
so i need an sd card because if i'm
running from
pardon me i'm running from the emmc so
if i'm running from the emmc
i can create my image on an sd card a
microsd
if i'm running my operating system from
the microsd
i can similarly create the image on my
on my emmc internally so i don't
actually have to take that chip out
that's pretty cool so all you need to do
is just insert
your micro sd card into the side
of your pine book pro and just give it a
little
push and now the first thing that
happens is these windows will pop
up for the partitions just make sure you
eject those
all right so we want to basically
unmount those so they're not
actually mounted on our
on our operating system and then i'm
going to go into applications internet
and firefox on my system whatever
browser you're using
that's fine chrome whatever and i've
made a little shortcut for you cat 5 dot
tv slash pbp
deb and that's going to take you to this
page by daniel thompson
that has a link to well it's got some
great information about any bugs that
are outstanding
things that you can come to expect from
this build
but it's got the link to the github
repository so let's copy that by right
clicking
and copy the link location and then
we're going to jump into our terminal so
on my system here it's system tools mate
terminal
and git clone is going to clone that
repositories and then paste
that link but i haven't installed git
yet so sudo apt
install git and just enter your password
that's going to install the get
program to be able to synchronize
our git repositories and download this
installer script so now just run that
again git clone and then the paste
and now go into the folder pine book pro
debian installer and sudo dot slash
install dash debian is all we need to
run
so hit enter so now it's actually
going through and get cloning
all kinds of stuff
directly from the repositories that that
that daniel has set up so let's just let
that go
and for the most part i'm gonna do this
in real time i'm gonna speed it up a
little bit for you just because hey
this is tv and i don't want it to be you
know 45 minutes of just watching a
compiler on an arm
processor let's see here so this is now
creating the file system on my drive
that's the sd card
now you see unable to resolve host
robbie dash pvp do not worry
about that that is my distro i'm missing
the host entry for
uh one nine sorry to be 127.0.1.1
should resolve to robbie-pbp but i
haven't added that entry to my host file
yet
so just keep that in mind that is not an
error that is just a host entry that is
missing from my host file
so this goes through you can see there's
really no questions here it's just
going through doing its thing it's
installing all the components for debian
and getting our base installed there you
go i see bash
i see calendar i see ncal and busybox
look at that
all right so now we need to enter a
hostname so i'm going to call this pine
book
pro you can call it whatever you want
and then create your user i'm going to
use
robbie and enter a password to create
that user so this is what i'm going to
use
to log into my computer enter your name
if you want
and this is just the typical uh user
creation process on linux
say that's correct and let her go so
that's now
uh installed and and ready to go so now
i got to go through like the keyboard
setup this is all pretty straightforward
you've seen this before
i'm selecting the us keyboard layout and
the default i don't want to mess with
that and no compose key is fine
now this is very important make sure you
select your locale this does not
include any locales out of the box so
i'm going to scroll down to en
us utf 8 and hit space
to include that and then tab and ok if
you don't include a locale you're going
to have some missing language support
and make sure you set it as the default
as well okay
that is very very important
all right wait for it
here it goes all right we generated our
locale now it's asking us for our time
zone
standard debian installer right so i'm
going america and we'll go down to
toronto hit t
there we go toronto america
and this is very important now this is
pretty cool you can select what
desktop environment you want now first
of all i want to say
i jumped on twitter and i let you decide
so i said let's pretend i'm going to
install debian on a pine 64 pine book
pro tonight
on live tv which desktop environment
do you want to see me install
from 300 311 votes
11 said lxde
lxde is a very lightweight desktop
environment so
if you want incredible performance it's
probably going to work really really
well it has a similar kind of interface
to like windows 98
but a little bit streamlined not quite
as many features as mate
but it runs really really fast and
doesn't take a lot of system resources
18 of folks said they want to see me
install mate
i love mate that's what i'm actually
running normally on my
pine book pro that's what i run on my
on my linux mint system i use the mate
version
and anytime i install ubuntu guess which
version i install
zubuntu no i'm just kidding it's ubuntu
mate uh
32 percent speaking of zubuntu uh
32 percent of our twitter poll
uh respondents voted for xfce
maybe even more lightweight than lxde
but
a little less like the paradigm of that
kind of windows
operating system i'm going to use that
as like my example for the paradigm
but you know like the start menu the
applications menu of lxde and mate
xfce is a little bit different you kind
of right click on things and
bring up pop-up dialogs by doing it that
way
and 39 for the win
said they want to see me install gnome
gnome it's like a klingon word it needs
an apostrophe after the g
so gnome is
quite the contrast to lxde
it's heavy it's
it's it's pretty heavy i'm going to put
that on a 200
pine book pro are you sure is this
to challenge robbie and see if this will
work
well let's go through so i'm going to
select debian desktop environment
followed by
what gnome
you can install multiple if you want and
then you can select it at
your profile selection and i'm going to
select laptop that's just going to
install some
tools like my battery manager and things
like that and hit ok
and here we go thank you to everyone who
responded to my twitter poll
311 people
voted and 39 percent of those voted for
gnome so we're going to see how that
performs
on a pine book pro this is going to take
a little bit of time
there's really no more interaction
required
at this point it's just going to go and
it's just going to install
remember i'm installing to my micro sd
card right now
i could then from the micro card turn
around and install by doing the same
process
to my emmc and now i've done it without
having to open up the pine book pro
so when we come back from this short
break
this whole process will be complete the
installer will be finished
i'm going to fire up my pine book pro in
the shiny new
gnome desktop environment using debian
11 upstart stick around
[Music]
welcome back this is category 5
technology tv and today we're looking at
gnome on the pine book pro 200
pine 64 linux laptop and it worked
i can't believe that here we are in
gnome
and it's running at least now
first quick question from our chat is
bp9 wants to see me open
a terminal and drag it around on the
screen just to see what the performance
is like
oh i just maximized it unmaximized
all right let's see uh my
mouse seems odd there we go all right so
there i am moving it around
apparently i'm in like left-handed mode
on the mouse though
that's strange so let's see if there's a
quick way to fix that
it's a little bit slow too so i might
want to accelerate the mouse
so let's see if i can just like turn it
up a bit
there we go
i'm using the touch pad so it seems a
little janky out the box
so you can kind of see what i'm talking
about how hey maybe you got to kind of
play around with things a little bit and
i'm doing this
on the fly oh that feels a lot better
okay is there a way
real quick does anyone know to reverse
oh okay there we are primary button
left yes does that fix it
that's just maybe no maybe i'm not used
to gnome do you right click to move
things
but there you go hey performance is all
right of that
okay click we've got firefox what else
have we got let's check out the apps
performance looks like graphic
performance you gotta
admit that's pretty sleek for
gnome on a pine book pro
holy cow gotta get used to the mouse
though
i'm gonna want to tweak that and right
out of the box here i am
and thinking you know there are some
things that i would want to tweak for
sure
i don't have wi-fi so i can't bring up
the internet to show you
the internet just now but obviously
we've got firefox
hey play with this this is just a really
quick demonstration to see
hey can we compile debian linux
upstream on a pine book pro and does it
perform
this is performing really well
yeah i know
look at that so we've got libreoffice
writer
libreoffice suite already pre-installed
out the box
and you can bring up synaptic package
manager
i presume is included yes synaptic
package manager is a place oh
it's not installed i can so it actually
took me to
the installer to install it that works
for me
so hey with synaptic package manager i
can install things but it looks like
it's got its own
crazy package installer too i
admit not a gnome baby i'm a mate baby
so i'm old school so those of you who
know gnome
are like that's this and that and yeah
so but hey it works out the box
very cool so why do i want to do that
because i want control
over my environment over my pine book
pro i want to be able to control it
am i going to run gnome on it myself no
am i going to run mate yeah that's my
choice
but it goes to show how if 39
of our community who responded said i
want
gnome that's not my choice but it goes
to show that hey you can customize this
make it the way you want your pine book
pro to be
and it gives you that opportunity to
really play around and make it your own
and then you can copy it dd it to the sd
card or onto the you know
make a backup and then you've got your
own distro that you can flash on to it
reinstall if you need to if you break
something and all that kind of stuff so
that is a fun project don't forget i set
up that
quick link for you at cat5 dot tv
slash pbp deb and that will take you
right to daniel thompson's repository
the information there
about the script that he's created big
shout out and kudos to daniel for
submitting that to the community
that is a big thumbs up from category 5.
you