Pinebook Pro + Distrobox + QEMU is fantastic

Lately I’ve thinking about frugal computing and this encouraged me to dust off my Pinebook Pro. This is the first time I’ve used it since I started using Distrobox and I am once again in love with the Pinebook Pro.

Pinebook retirement

About a year ago I threw in the towel with the Pinebook Pro. First, it stopped connecting to external monitors. Next, the USB-A port on the left side stopped working. Finally, it stopped recognizing any network devices attached, which essentially rendered it useless. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with laptop and constantly frustrated with the lack of consistency. There’s always something wrong with the most basic of features.

However, I have a hard time getting rid of it because I can see the potential. Being arm64 based, it was tough in the beginning with software availability. But, now that more prominent platforms have made hardware around arm64, it is rarer and rarer to find unavailable software based on architecture. Because it is arm64 it sips power and can easily run all day of heavy use from its own battery plus a standard phone battery bank. I drive a lot for work and I can charge it from a 12v adapter so its always full. The screen is nice, the keyboard is functional, and we don’t talk about the trackpad.

I finally had to step away because it not only failed to connect to wifi (which is already not the fastest) but it failed to recognize there was any networking equipment installed. That was enough for me. I put it on a shelf and moved on.

Unretirement, new OS, and Distrobox

After I wrote that post about frugal computing, I started thinking about the Pinebook Pro. My needs for a “around the house” laptop have changed significantly this winter. I stopped using Nextcloud and switch to services like nfs and WebDAV via dufs which have greatly improved my ability to access my files over the network instead of syncing to every device.

The last distro I used on it was Manjaro and it was fine. The touchpad was a little better and I liked having access to the AUR. I had originally switched because it was the only distro that would boot with an NvME installed. Yet, the more I thought about it, the more I realized the networking issue might be OS related. So, this time I installed Armbian (again) and networking has been working perfectly ever since.

In addition to upgrading my network shares, I’ve spent a lot of time getting better at and finding more tools for exclusively using the command line. The Pinebook Pro isn’t the fastest device and using GUI applications less makes it a more enjoyable experience. Now that I’m more comfortable with CLI and TUI tools, using the Pinebook Pro has been more fun and I find myself reaching for it more often over using my phone with DeX and my lapdock.

One of the tools I’ve fallen in love with this winter is Distrobox. Using it makes it easy to find and install software without worrying about dependencies or packaging. To my surprise, Distrobox works great on Armbian and this Pinebook Pro. Right away I was able to setup containers for both Ubuntu and Fedora. Now, anything that is packaged specifically for those distributions are immediately avaialble to this laptop. The odd one out is Arch, believe it or not.

For whatever reason there is not a container for aarch64 in Distrobox for Arch. I tried some podman workarounds, but I couldn’t get anything to work. Reading the Distrobox documentation, I found a section for using alternative architectures that references using aarch64 on x86_64. This can easily be done the opposite direction using an x86_64 on the Pinebook Pro using qemu with minimal impact on the system. So now I have x86_64 Arch Linux installed via Distrobox and exported apps from the AUR to Armbian on the Pinebook Pro!

At the moment I’m using exclusively CLI applications and I don’t notice any performance impact. I’m not using GUI applications or running a full desktop, which would tax this system significantly. But, its working fantastic for what I need. At a minimum you need to have these packages installed:

qemu-system
qemu-user-static
binfmt-support

After that, Distrobox handles the rest. Combine emulating x86_64 with scrcpy to mirror my phone, and x2go to stream applications from my destkop, this Pinebook Pro is a fantastic couch machine.

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