January Update: Happy New Gear | Hacker News Reader

January Update: Happy New Gear

pine64.org

72 pointsRealStickman_24 comments

> Some of you will surely be excited to learn that the Quartz64 model-A will also feature a dedicated e-ink panel interface capable of supporting a capacitive pen. We will have a 10” e-ink display available in the Pine Store at the time the Quartz64 boards launch

That sounds great, i long wanted to build an e-ink computer

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?

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.

I suppose the market for smartwatches isn't so well defined. Personally, I don't see much value in smartwatches if they can't be standalone. The prime benefit for me is that they're more portable than phones. I'd like to eventually leave my phone at home. If I have to carry it, then that means the smartwatch is just more baggage to lug around with almost no benefit since nearly all functions are available in the phone, too.

> If you want more than that, you'd probably want to consider something like an Android Wear device, with the accompanying tradeoffs.

Yeah, I got a Gear S3, but same as my Android phone, I hope to eventually replace it with something more open.

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).

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.

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.

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, a golang library that 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.

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/

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).

RP4 (and I think 3) is aarch64 so it shouldn't be a problem, right? Pretty sure I already tried aarch64 executables on both Pi4 and Pine.

on debian you could just install gcc-10-aarch64-linux-gnu and have a working cross compiler?

Is it easy to get all the correct aarch64 headers for OpenGL and X11? That's where I ran into issues on Arch and started looking for alternatives. Most articles seem to think cross-compiling isn't worth the effort.

Isn't that handled by multiarch support?

Not sure. Multiarch looks like a debian thing and I haven't used a debian system in many years. That might be a good way to go for a build VM anyway though.

I've used nix to cross compile, and I recommend it if you can bother to learn it. It's straightforward if you want to deploy using nix/NixOS, but you can also adapt it to create portable deployables. E.g. I cross-compile a mips kernel, initramfs, and small userspace to run on a system without nix.

If you think your app will be ABI compatible, it may be enough to cross-compile it with nix in an ordinary way and remove the RUNPATH and dynamic linker it sets in the elf file.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Serving international travellers and taking their money in exchange is much easier than bootstrapping new economic activities for the 10% of the population who work in that sector.

What economic opportunities do you foresee for them?

Heaps.

We are very short of horticultural labour. With the use of modern machinery horticultural workers are getting very productive. It is hard to increase tourism workers productivity with technology....

We are very short of infrastructure workers, ditto.

Even for unskilled jobs we have to import workers. There is a lot of work available, and no need for the low skill low productivity tourism jobs. It was wrecking our economy and the opportunity of the tourism collapse will be a boon across the board.

The sad part is all the small operators that have built up on the margins. These businesses will collapse too, taking people's life savings and hard work. That is sad.

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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