The idea is to use this low power box for email and blogging. This does not require much bandwidth. If that works, then I’ll look at more challenging things.
So…you get your Pine 64, and then the fun starts. You really need a monitor that will handle hdmi if you want any graphics… and then you need to consider what to do with the limited number of USB ports (two). My solution is the happy hacking keyboard. You can get mechanical versions (the membrane version I used to have died after ten years and a thesis), and they contain a USB hub. Which helps.
Then get a microUSB card, download Remix OS (if you like chromeOS: I don’t), debian or ubuntu. The Arch version is broken. Extract the compressed file directly into the microUSB card. It will delete everything there.
Wire the pine64 into your network (wifi does work, but wired is preferred) and boot.
In Debian you end up with 720p, which is ugly. This has been fixed in this link.
The coding is:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install sunxi-disp-tool cat <So far have browsing working, wordpress working, and email up.
Firefox is broken (no great loss) and Chrome does not exist, neither do Chrome based browsers such as Opera or Brave.
And yes, I can blog.
I’m waiting for the Pinebook. I hope it’s a success.