Slackware

I had wanted to do this for a while, was using the default manjaro and its painfully obvious the slowdown caused by kde and sysyemd services. Tried it at first after getting my nvme adapter and failed. Later found out i needed a supported nvme a2000 by kingston 250Gb. Finally arrived this week and redid the download. After 2 reboots it worked.

Following the docs its got xcfe and the font it recommended. I got no sound at the time but will hopefully fix that once i do a few searches. But one thing that has improved is the speed thanks to the nvme and the ram usage.

Update 08/16/2023: wiki on pb pro for slackware says sounds ongoing on getting it working. I'll be trying somethings out (/lib/modprobe.d has some commenented sound options(need to read on these options) but in the meantime my bluetooth speaker is covering the sound portion of the use.

Update end of August- i decided to update the system and made the mistake of rebooting before adding the updated kernel to the bootloader. Needless to say im in a section where I am gonna be looking to see if i can use uboot shell to temporarily boot the system and then i can run a script to finalize the new kernel. I believe it was 6.0.44. I could just reinstall but figure id take the learning route of knowing more about u boot. Wish me luck.

Update Dec 13, 2023

Sorry for not getting back to you sooner

Previously i was on 6.0.44, so i found out due to my impatients(i hit a key to "hurry along the boot process") turns out hitting a key disrupts the booting process. It worked fully once I waited for a bit longer. Today i decided to test it again and updated slackware with slackpkg. Including the kernel(now on 6.1.67-armv8). Same as before the process worked. ) Still an issue is getting sound from the internel speakers. Ill be trying the mic when i get a chance, till then I'll be using my bluetooth speakers to make up for it.

Update May 27, 2024 Kernel: 6.6.31-armv8 Slackware 15 aarch64 - current

I have been taking some free time to search online for the audio to turn on. There is a way to do it. Apparently the problem with audio is even if you turn it on, its not persistant across power cylcling ( turning on and off the laptop). Also pinebook pro on slackware is not fond of reboots(restarts), especially with kernel updates.

To turn on audio. (Please keep audio volume low)

• On your terminal of choice, as your regular user(no su/root needed) type alsamixer, then hit enter on the keyboard.
• from there hit F6 and select rockchip, es8316
• the view will automatically be in playback. Use the right arrow to move to Left Headphone Mixer Left DAC and hit the M key of your keyboard. Do this same action to Right Headphone Mixer Right DAC.
• Now slowly bring the volume(if you want to use alsamixer, hit F6 and select (default) to go back to overall volume control to adjust.
• IMPORTANT do not go past 50 %, the audio starts to distort and just sounds overall bad. Also the performance can get affected where the laptop freezes or an application can crash. Ive experienced browser crash(firefox) and wm session freeze( either screen doesnt move or mouse moves but screen is black). Also to note, your battery will take a hit with using internal audio, at this point im switching to fluxbox to see if running low resource wm can slow down the battery usuage.

That is pretty much it for audio on Pb pro. I still have to see what i can try to do until the problem is fixed overall. As a simple bandaid fix, I will be testing if scripting something to start at boot will at least allow me to keep overall levels and selection when the windows manager is started.