Welcome to the Citrix Community. Citrix User Group Community (CUGC)Join this new online community of technology professionals dedicated to helping members and their businesses excel through education, knowledge- sharing, networking and influence. Version history and archived downloads page for Plex Media Server. Plex bridges the gap between your Mac and your home theater, doing so with a visually appealing. · Continuation from How to Help with the Aw, Snap! / He's Dead Jim! Error. If you're running into this issue, please try all the steps below and provide the. Pine. 64: The Un- Review | Hackaday. Even before the announcement and introduction of the Raspberry Pi 3, word of a few very powerful single board ARM Linux computers was flowing out of China. The hardware was there – powerful 6. ARM chips were available, all that was needed was a few engineers to put these chips on a board, a few marketing people, and a contract manufacturer. One of the first of these 6. Pine. 64. Introduced to the world through a Kickstarter that netted $1. Million USD from 3. Pine. 64 is already extremely popular. The boards are beginning to land on the doorsteps and mailboxes of backers, and the initial impressions are showing up in the official forums and Kickstarter campaign comments. I pledged $1. 5 USD to the Pine. Kickstarter, and received a board with 5. MB of RAM, 4. K HDMI, 1. Ethernet and a 1. GHz ARM Cortex A5. CPU in return. This post is not a review, as I can’t fully document the Pine. My initial impression? This is bad. This is pretty bad. Shenzhen and Guangzhou, the ‘Silicon Delta’Hardware. This un- review covers the least expensive Pine. GHz Allwinner A6. MB of RAM, Ethernet, HDMI, and two USB ports. This is the reward for pledging $1. Pine. 64 Kickstarter campaign. According to the Kickstarter campaign, this board should have shipped in February. It arrived on April 1. That’s surprisingly fast for a Kickstarter campaign, and not at all a knock at the Pine team. Right now, the Pine. The lowest tier, the one being reviewed here, is $1. USD with worldwide shipping. The Pine. 64+ includes 1. GB of RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, and connectors for a camera, LCD, and a touch panel. This version costs $1. USD, plus $7 shipping to the US, $1. The top- tier Pine. GB includes 2. GB of RAM, priced at $2. US, $1. 2 for the rest of the world. Although this is a little esoteric for a hardware un- review, I would like to mention the mechanical layout of the Pine. It’s huge. It’s just a hair larger than 3″ x 5″, more exactly 1. This is significantly larger than the current crop of Raspberry Pis and the Odroid C2. There’s a lot of space on the Pine. Power, Ethernet, and HDMI are all on one side of the board, USB and the 3. SD card is along the side. There’s a DSI header to connect a touch sensitive LCD, but the connector for the touch panel is on the other side of the board. Concerning the specific Pine shipped to me, I would have to rate the assembly as somewhat lackluster. The board itself is bent in the middle, with a visible gap between the board and spacer of the pin headers. It’s difficult to photograph, but you can see it plain as day. If I were grading Pine’s QA, this would be a solid D – the board works, but I’m surprised that it does. A very slight bend in the middle of the Pine. This would never pass QA from any manufacturer. The hardware is pretty much what you would expect from a 6. ARM board. The quad- core ARM A5. Allwinner CPU is effectively the same CPU that is found in the Raspberry Pi 3. The GPU, however, is entirely different. The So. C unfortunately features a Mali 4. MP2 graphics processor, a GPU that isn’t well supported and lags behind the efforts to open source the Broadcom Video. Core IV found in the Raspberry Pi. To be fair, GPU support on single board Linux computers is almost always terrible; the Mali 4. As far as software is concerned. Pine. 64 wiki, including Ubuntu, Arch, and Android images. Getting Started. Allwinner’s Phoenix. Card utility. If you buy a printer, you’re not getting a CD full of software. If you buy a laptop, all the recovery software will only be available either through a download or on a recovery partition. No one ships software anymore and Pine. You get your SD card images directly from the Pine. Ubuntu, Arch, and Android Lollipop distros available. There’s one problem here – Pine. Google Drive and Torrents to distribute their software images to everyone. The Ubuntu image is 7 Gigabytes, and as I’m writing this paragraph, it’s downloading at about two megabits per second. You can do the math for that. At least they offer a few torrents for SD card images. I suspect those torrents will be faster once Pine. With the image in hand, you would expect writing an image to a micro. SD card to be exactly the same as a Raspberry Pi or any other single board computer – use Win. Disk. Imager or dd and write the image to a card. This is not true for all distributions. According to the Pine wiki and forums, the recommended software to burn an image to an SD card is Phoenix. Card, a piece of software developed by Allwinner that writes disk images to SD cards. It may start up with a Chinese UI, and according to community member [Michael Larson] fails one in every fifteen times at writing an image to an SD card. With a somewhat reliable way to write a software image to the SD card, you would think booting the Pine. Not so. At the time of this writing (and with multiple attempts), several of the distribution images simply don’t work. The Android distro did not boot on my machine, the Arch distribution did not work. The Ubuntu image worked, but this was an effort by community member [Michael Larson]: Yes, a Pirates of the Caribbean desktop will be most people’s first experience with the Pine. The Ubuntu experience was tremendously slow on the Pine. I suffered several reboots. As of this writing, I have tested all of the software distributions on the Pine. Only the Ubuntu distribution works poorly, and right now I consider the Pine. This will hopefully change in the near future, and I will gladly write a new review when I can boot the Pine. Peripherals and Expansion. One of the biggest draws of a Linux single board computer is a plethora of pins and GPIOs and peripherals. The Pine. 64 has plenty of pins, including a 4. Raspberry Pi’s expansion port. This is awesome – there are hundreds of ‘hats’ available for the Pi, and although many of them are built around the Pi’s particular So. C, having the artificial Pi standard available on the Pine is great. There are other ports and headers, including a 3. Euler Bus. What’s a Euler Bus? This is the most information you will find on the Euler Bus, linking to (again) Google docs. There’s an IR receiver in there, headphone out, UARTs, SPIs, and even I2. C. Not bad. Conclusion. I have one of the first thousand Pine. Every ARM/Linux single board computer is built on the efforts of the community around the board, and the Pine. The efforts of Linux hackers like [Michael Larson] have turned the Pine. However, Pine, or the people behind Pine, have not held up their end of the bargain. It’s relatively easy to pick up a few thousand ARM chips, hire an EE for a month or two to produce a single board computer, and find a contract manufacturer in China. The hard part is getting the software working, getting the documentation together, and fostering a community that isn’t stumbling in the dark trying to get this board to work. This is where the Pine. The forums are a mess right now, and the comments on the Kickstarter campaign aren’t much better. The software support and documentation is so sparse, I literally can not get into a Linux terminal. With a day sunk into setting up the Pine, I only have a picture of a Pirates of the Caribbean desktop that came on a distribution produced by someone completely unrelated to the Pine team. This isn’t just me, either; a few of the Hackaday Overlord devs gave the Pine a shot, too. The results were inconclusive. This is not a review of the Pine. LEDs, and maybe try to get a Dreamcast emulator working. I am unable to do this. In turn, this turned into a review of the people behind the Pine. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has shown that you can rely on the community and user forums for a great deal of support, but you need to bring a bit more to the table than a board whipped up by a contract manufacturer. I do not have a working OS on the Pine. Pine team has not managed to meet my minimum expectations.
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