{"id":4633,"date":"2023-12-13T18:22:20","date_gmt":"2023-12-13T18:22:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/castle-engine.io\/wp\/?p=4633"},"modified":"2023-12-13T00:21:51","modified_gmt":"2023-12-13T00:21:51","slug":"castle-game-engine-on-pinetab2-linux-tablet-from-pine64","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/castle-engine.io\/wp\/2023\/12\/13\/castle-game-engine-on-pinetab2-linux-tablet-from-pine64\/","title":{"rendered":"Castle Game Engine on PineTab2, Linux tablet from PINE64"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n \"Castle<\/a><\/td><\/tr>
\n \"Castle<\/a><\/td><\/tr>
\n \"Castle<\/a><\/td><\/tr>
\n \"Castle<\/a><\/td><\/tr>
\n \"Castle<\/a><\/td><\/tr><\/table>\n

Last week, I got my PineTab2 tablet<\/a>, made by the PINE64<\/a> community. In a way, it’s an early Christmas gift I bought for myself \ud83d\ude42 It’s a tablet running Linux on 64-bit Arm. My hope was to have something that can be a tablet (light device, can do tasks for which touchscreen input is comfortable enough, like read things and watch movies) but also can be a laptop (do e.g. coding, as it features a fully-functional Linux and a keyboard with touchpad). It took some tinkering, but I have to say my hope was fulfilled and I love it \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

It’s still a low-end device<\/i>, by which I mean that it’s not very fast and when I have a choice — working on a regular modern PC \/ laptop is just faster. But it’s also not terribly slow. It is much more powerful than e.g. a Raspberry Pi 4 (e.g. examples\/platformer<\/a> runs on PineTab2 with ~30 FPS, which is playable; on Raspberry Pi 4, I could run it, but it wasn’t really playable). The device is fast enough to even use KDE Plasma by default<\/a> (Though I’m a GNOME guy, I’m bound to install there familiar GNOME 3 or XFCE at some point; but for now I enjoy KDE, it’s an interesting change for me).<\/p>\n

You can install there FPC<\/a>, Lazarus<\/a>, VS Code<\/a>, and finally our Castle Game Engine<\/a> and have fun making games. The default OS on PineTab2 is DanctNIX, which is Arch Linux ARM<\/i>, and in practice it features most of software you would find on a regular Arch Linux<\/i>, both from official packages and AUR.<\/p>\n

Technically, it is just Linux on a 64-bit Arm CPU<\/i> (known also as Aarch64<\/i>).<\/p>\n

You can guess where this is leading: The official Linux\/Aarch64 downloads of Castle Game Engine<\/a> “just work” on PineTab2. Enjoy!<\/p>\n

There are no special instructions, just download, unzip and run bin\/castle-editor<\/code> inside, as on other platforms. Remember to also install FPC (Free Pascal Compiler<\/em>), see below<\/p>\n

FPC on PineTab2<\/h3>\n

While you can install FPC from the packages (sudo pacman -S fpc<\/code>), you may experience linking problems with FPC 3.2.2. They result in errors with messages like undefined reference to<\/code>__libc_csu_init’`.<\/p>\n

When that happens, my advise is to install FPC 3.2.3 (from the fixes_3_2<\/code> FPC branch). I am testing now on FPC 3.2.3 + Lazarus IDE from recent main<\/code> branch. I used my install_fpc_lazarus<\/a> script for easy setup.<\/p>\n

Castle Game Engine in AUR<\/h3>\n

About CGE package in AUR<\/a>: While it should work in the future, first the FPC built into DanctNIX has to be upgraded (see above — FPC 3.2.2 will have problems at linking). Then we should update the castle-engine-git<\/code> package to just add aarch64<\/code> architecture and it will rock, allowing you to install CGE on it by just yay -S castle-engine-git<\/code>.<\/p>\n

Editor binaries: GTK2 or Qt5<\/h3>\n

The CGE editor on Lonux comes with 2 binaries since some time: castle-editor<\/code> (GTK 2) and castle-editor-qt5<\/code> (Qt5). To run the latter, you have to install qt5pas<\/code> (sudo pacman -S qt5pas<\/code>) but it does have occasional crashes, looks like some LCL Qt5 widgetset problems. I advise using castle-editor<\/code> for now.<\/p>\n

PinePhone, PineBook Pro<\/h3>\n

In theory, this support should extend as well to other PINE64 products using Arm64, like Pinebook Pro<\/a> and PinePhone<\/a>. They all “just run Linux on Arm64”<\/i> so in principle should work.<\/p>\n

I’m pretty confident that it will work on Pinebook Pro<\/i> without any issues. I would assume it would be just an upgraded experience compared to PineTab2 in terms of performance, but without touchscreen.<\/p>\n

I’m super-curious about PinePhone<\/i> \ud83d\ude42 If anyone has PinePhone<\/i>, and wants to test can we install FPC and CGE there, let me know<\/a>. I can help if you want, e.g. we can meet online and test it together.<\/p>\n

Before you buy PineTab2<\/h3>\n

In case this post encourages you to actually buy PineTab2 tablet<\/a>, please take into consideration:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \n

    I am enthusiastic about this tablet, and I’m also a Linux fanboy \ud83d\ude42 I actually enjoyed testing 3 different OSes on this (DanctNIX, Ubuntu Touch<\/a>, Rhino Linux<\/a>) to see what works best. I enjoyed testing browsers to see what has best support for the touch screen, performance, and can play DRM content<\/a>. I enjoyed playing with WiFi (while the laptop has a WiFi card, DanctNIX<\/em> doesn’t feature a working WiFi driver, and the simplest recommendation is to use a WiFi dongle; Ubuntu Touch<\/em> has a working WiFi driver, but comes with different issues around touchpad).<\/p>\n

  2. \n

    Make your own decision if you will enjoy above tinkering too \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

  3. \n

    See PineTab2 wiki<\/a> and reviews like Pine64 PineTab 2 unboxing and review by Ivon Huang<\/a>, After 3 months of daily-driving tPineTab 2, ARM Linux tablet, I love but also hate it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

  4. \n

    If you want a fast and fully-functional tablet that “just works” then a modern Android tablet or iPad may suit you better. (Though PineTab2 supports Waydroid<\/a> so you can<\/i> run Android tabs, but with performance hit.) <\/p>\n

    And if you want a fully-functional laptop that “just works”, than a regular laptop may be better \ud83d\ude42 PineTab2 wasn’t even supposed to be a laptop (for this, see Pinebook Pro<\/a>). I just decided to test can it fulfill the role of a laptop, for some work, for me.\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Last week, I got my PineTab2 tablet, made by the PINE64 community. In a way, it’s an early Christmas gift I bought for myself \ud83d\ude42 It’s a tablet running Linux on 64-bit Arm. My hope was to have something that can be a tablet (light device, can do tasks for which touchscreen input is comfortable … <\/p>\n

    Continue reading \u27a4 “Castle Game Engine on PineTab2, Linux tablet from PINE64”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4637,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"publish_to_discourse":"1","publish_post_category":"9","wpdc_auto_publish_overridden":"","wpdc_topic_tags":"","wpdc_pin_topic":"","wpdc_pin_until":"","discourse_post_id":"3978","discourse_permalink":"https:\/\/forum.castle-engine.io\/t\/castle-game-engine-on-pinetab2-linux-tablet-from-pine64\/1026","wpdc_publishing_response":"success","wpdc_publishing_error":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/castle-engine.io\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/12\/Screenshot_20231212_235435.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9IgYW-1cJ","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/castle-engine.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/castle-engine.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/castle-engine.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/castle-engine.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/castle-engine.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4633"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/castle-engine.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4651,"href":"https:\/\/castle-engine.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4633\/revisions\/4651"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/castle-engine.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/castle-engine.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/castle-engine.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/castle-engine.io\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}