Timeshift, vivaldi, kernel mgr and btrfs on Pinebook

Hi, I got my pinebook pro today and all is well, i updated it to testing w/o a hitch. Thankyou.

I thought I’d make a post about this all together as it may help others if they think like me ?!?.

Anyway, I’ve been on Arch for a while so I got used to having 2 kernels, timeshift and btrfs to make sure updates couldn’t break things.

So, following this logic, on my PBP I would convert the partition to btrfs, install timeshift and auto-snap, grub-btrfs and an extra kernel (not -lts coz it was always updated at the same time as current but -zen because it was days later).

Is my thinking here wrong?

  1. Partition is ext4, i see btrfs is possible in KDE PM, is this a good idea on solid state?
  2. Can timeshift be used on arm? Who would do it? Is it likely?
  3. Will kernel manager be available or are you waiting for uboot to support kernel rollback as Luke mentioned in a post on the pine64 forum.
  4. Aaaand, does anyone know if Vivaldi will be made available?

I’ll answer these as best as I can.

I know some people are running with btrfs, but it’s not something we support out-of-the-box.

I have never tried, but it would likely compile just fine.

Using multiple kernels would require display in uboot for rk3399 and then a setup where we can generate the extlinux.conf file, when you install and uninstall kernels.
Right now, all the kernels use the same file names and some kernels (like the zen kernel) might not even support the PBP as a platform.

There’s an arm64 build of Vivaldi in the AUR. Try it and see if it works.

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Thanks, I forgot pamac needed aur enabled. Vivaldi-arm64 is fine.

Luke mentioned kernel rollback so I guess we wait and see what they do.

you can always use yay:

sudo pacman -S yay base-devel
yay -S vivaldi-arm64
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Ok I created a bootable micro SD with Manjaro-Pine64 image and created an ext4 partition on the free space (24.51GB).
I am using fsarchiver with -A switch to clone it while active, this should be all I need for recovery, being as Manjaro updates are curated and the PBP system doesn’t vary between users.
I guess the only thing left is the security of saving a working kernel during updates, and as already said this is a future feature of uboot.

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