In case it’s of any use to others – I spent ages looking round in forums and reddit pages over the past few months trying to find this solution.
The Pinebook Pro is a great little laptop I got a few years ago based around a Rockchip single board ARM CPU. I’d recently got it out of the cupboard and revived it to use as an everyday machine for browsing/programming, but with the latest Manjaro updates I found that the usb-c port wasn’t working after updating to the latest kernel (there’s various forum posts about the latest releases not including the neccessary libraries/support for the Rockchip board).
I did see some posts on Megi’s custom kernel, but from what I could see it’s focussed around the Pinephone rather than the Pinebook Pro. The last custom kernel I could see was for 6.15 (https://xff.cz/kernels/) – the install I have is running 6.7.9.
Revisiting this over Xmas/New Year, I found this post though on the pinebook forums which led me to getting it working!
The discussions on this forum post (https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=19066&pid=125927#pid125927) showed someone with the same problem, which led me to a custom kernel build made by “mjrh” here:
https://github.com/mjrh/archlinuxarm-pbp/releases
Downloading and trying this using:
sudo pacman -U linux-6.7.9-1-aarch64.pkg.tar.xz
threw up a couple of warnings but a reboot worked and now the usb-c dock has my bluetooth keyboard/mouse, network connection and hdmi monitor all working!
Some notes:
- The release notes (https://github.com/mjrh/archlinuxarm-pbp/releases) say that usb-c charging isn’t working but so far it seems to be.
- Haven’t tried to see if sound works yet.
- Haven’t tried to see if webcam/usb-mic work yet.