[HN Gopher] January Update: Happy New Gear - PINE64
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       January Update: Happy New Gear - PINE64
        
       Author : RealStickman_
       Score  : 54 points
       Date   : 2021-01-15 18:42 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.pine64.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.pine64.org)
        
       | justusthane wrote:
       | Excited to see they've made progress on sourcing LCDs for the
       | Pinebook Pros! Looking forward to ordering one as soon as they
       | have them back in stock.
        
       | anderspitman wrote:
       | Been working on getting a dev environment up and running for
       | making GUI apps for my PinePhone. Compiling on the phone itself
       | is simply too slow.
       | 
       | I've poured a few hours into fiddling with QEMU aarch64. I've got
       | the compilation going. Still seems too slow, might need to go
       | through the pain of getting cross-compiling working. I also
       | haven't been able to get a display working yet.
       | 
       | Can anyone recommend a good tutorial for either/both:
       | 
       | 1. Setting up QEMU/aarch64 with a working display device? Ideally
       | needs to work on a reasonably old distro so that the executables
       | will dynamically link on a range of distros.
       | 
       | 2. Cross-compiling for PinePhone or Raspberry pi, which should be
       | close enough to figure out the rest.
        
         | jolmg wrote:
         | Another option might be compiling on an RPi4 (haven't checked
         | if it's the same ARM arch) or other "powerful" ARM machine.
         | 
         | You could also _not_ compile by using a language that doesn 't
         | require it.
        
           | BuildTheRobots wrote:
           | Pretty sure the pine is arm64 rather than armHF. I know I've
           | installed Pi (hf) packages onto my Pine, but I'm not sure you
           | can actually compile natively on a Pi without it cross
           | compiling -and at that point a desktop is almost certainly
           | faster.
           | 
           | Nearly everyone else on HN is likely to have more
           | understanding than me though, so listen to them as/when they
           | set me straight :)
           | 
           | I have to say though, when it comes to network IO, my
           | original kickstarter pine64 blows the raspberry pi's out of
           | the water (though this might just be due to the network card
           | not being strung off the USB bus).
        
           | anderspitman wrote:
           | You know what I actually hadn't considered how much more
           | powerful my RPi4 is than the PinePhone. I'll give this a
           | shot, thanks.
           | 
           | Can you recommend a GUI library in a scripting language that
           | doesn't require linking against a behemoth like QT or GTK?
           | For reference I'm currently playing with fyne which is a
           | golang library which pretty much just needs X11 and GL
           | libraries, which is about the best you can do on Linux AFAIK.
           | 
           | Don't really care what the language is. It's probably going
           | to shell out to a static golang binary anyway.
        
             | ptx wrote:
             | For Python there is Kivy[1] which works on both Android and
             | desktop Linux (as well as other platforms), so it ought to
             | work on PinePhone, I would assume.
             | 
             | [1] https://kivy.org/
        
         | deivid wrote:
         | on debian you could just install gcc-10-aarch64-linux-gnu and
         | have a working cross compiler?
        
       | jolmg wrote:
       | I wonder how much the price of PineTime would have risen if they
       | had made it able to run Linux. Kind of feel that whatever
       | software is developed for it wouldn't have much of a future
       | because it wouldn't be portable and interoperable with other
       | software.
       | 
       | For example, for a smartwatch I ultimately want to run a
       | timekeeping app that connects to an emacs daemon (for working
       | with org-mode buffers) through a VPN to a personal server, taking
       | into account the watch eventually evolving to one that supports a
       | cellular modem.
       | 
       | Doing something worth doing, from scratch, seems too much. I
       | wonder what their vision is. What are they hoping PineTime
       | eventually evolves to? Are they expecting it to never stop being
       | a companion to a phone?
        
         | varispeed wrote:
         | Ultimately until all the loopholes are not fixed the companies
         | will have to behave like Apple to survive (walled gardens,
         | anti-repair agenda, data collection, Orwell's speak - e.g.
         | touting being privacy oriented and at the same time collecting
         | massive amount of data they don't need for other reasons than
         | to manipulate consumers and so on).
        
         | jsight wrote:
         | I suspect the intention is to never stop being a phone
         | companion. Having the phone there allows the watch to be very
         | low power, which helps greatly with battery life.
         | 
         | It also means that goals such as yours are possible with the
         | mere addition of a companion app on the phone.
         | 
         | If you want more than that, you'd probably want to consider
         | something like an Android Wear device, with the accompanying
         | tradeoffs.
        
       | Mediterraneo10 wrote:
       | It seems an odd choice to begin a newsletter to one's
       | international customer base with "Let us all hope that the
       | difficulties brought about by the COVID-19 virus are now waning
       | and that more aspects of our lives will return to normal soon,"
       | when officials in several EU countries have recently said that
       | restrictions are likely to last until very late 2021, because
       | even in a best-case scenario not enough people will be vaccinated
       | until then.
       | 
       | But one can understand Pine64's impatience for the crisis to
       | pass: COVID has seriously slowed down international shipping, and
       | the forums have been full of people complaining that their order
       | (if they chose regular post and not DHL) has taken weeks or
       | months to reach them. Buyers have been blaming Pine64 for
       | shipping issues that they have no control over.
        
         | worik wrote:
         | This international customer is in Aotearoa.
         | 
         | I know the crises has not passed, it could flare up again, and
         | flare up here. But not all the world is doing badly. Some of us
         | are in good shape.
        
           | Mediterraneo10 wrote:
           | I know New Zealanders and Australians often like to brag that
           | life is normal for them thanks to their country's bold
           | measures, but that is not the case: you still cannot travel
           | internationally, nor can you receive international guests or
           | do business with international tourists. You, too, have to
           | wait for things to go back to normal.
        
             | worik wrote:
             | I hate international travel.
             | 
             | International "guests" have been a mixed blessing. We used
             | to get >1,000,000 tourists a year. The opportunity cost of
             | tying up that many resources for a small country of
             | 5,000,000 is huge.
             | 
             | Mixed, yes. Part of the world we are, but I for one will
             | not be unhappy if international travel becomes much harder.
             | 
             | And please let's not go back to normal!! We are headed to
             | catastrophe, we must change...
        
         | jsight wrote:
         | I don't see the issue, tbh. Hopeing that the issues are waning
         | and more aspects of our lives will return to normal is not
         | inconsistent with an expectation that some restrictions will
         | continue throughout the year.
         | 
         | That those restrictions will soon trend downward instead of
         | upward is a great hope for a lot of people this year, all
         | throughout the world.
        
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       (page generated 2021-01-15 23:01 UTC)