So, I’ve continued to work on making the pinebook a comfortable usable device. It’s been a bit of battle – my mail server has some quirks to the way it’s set up which meant that it took me quite a while to get it working. I’m still having issues with another mail server I use, where I’m not sure if it’s me or the server. My lovely friend, who’s the Admin, has sent me some stuff, and I’ve sent her some stuff, so hopefully I can get it worked out.
I ended up doing my first build-from-source in quite a while today, so I could have Sylpheed, which is (apparently) a nice lightweight mail client. Certainly it seems pretty good. Can’t work out how to force it to allow certificate.
It’s fascinating (and at times a little frustrating) using the pinebook, because some stuff clearly taxes the hell out of the processor. I rarely log onto Facebook, but wanted to to grab something today and wow does that suck.
Still, it’s demonstrated some things for me – like the fact that my Linux server is set up right, it’s my Macbook that’s being a dick about connecting to it. I don’t know why – but the SMB share will only connect as a guest, not as a user. It fails to authenticate if you try and log in as an actual user. I’ve not yet had a good look as to why though – but since the Pinebook just happily connects (when I give it the username and password) then I”m going to point my finger at the Macbook.
And yeah, otherwise it’s a handy laptop that I can drag around and not worry too much about. And while Linux on ARM has proven to still be a bit of a pain in the arse (e.g. Telegram, which I’d like to run, is only available compiled for x86 Linux). It’s superlight and the battery life isn’t bad either.
It’s also finally nudged me into upgrading logitech media server on the media server, which, after the last upgrade had developed an irritating bug where when you added tracks to the playlist, or even just pressed play, it tended to make the squeezebox crash after a few seconds. Loading the web interface also seemed to take an age, too. I’d not got around to nosing at that problem, but it turns out that there was an update to the update which seems to have fixed it.
So yay.
