Last Updated on April 4, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
- We tried three different 3. th party adapters with the PinePhone to use it with keyboard, mouse and monitor.
- Unfortunately, none of them worked.
- Other users reported in the Pine64 forum, that they tested 12 adapters with the PinePhone Pro, and most of them worked:
https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=18059
- But where is the problem with our 3 adapter we tested?
- To control the Pinephone with keyboard mouse and HDMI monitor is great.
- We then have a little Linux PC, which we can use as a desktop PC.
- But there was a lot of discussion about this PinePhone adapter.
- Is it eventually tricky with the PinePhone, and if you want to be sure, use the one PinePhone developer Martijn Braam as developed?
- But should we order another expensive PinePhone component from the US, with high shipping costs and import taxes?
At this point, we started testing our Raspberry 4, which we never used.
- And what a miracle, OS installation goes quickly, we tested Ubuntu Mate, and use now Raspberry Pi OS.
- Keyboard and mouse and HDMI monitor worked at the first attempt.
- We also paired a Bluetooth keybard and mouse to it.
- First we where shocked as we found an installation which command lines to pair keyboard an mouse to a Raspberri Pi.
- Is Raspberri PI OS so basic?
- But then we found another method for paring, and then it was as easy as on a desktop PC.
This german instruction was helpful for personally:
- We paired the Raspberri Pi over WIFI and Ethernet to a router.
- First, it did not work, we had to check whether the router as recognized the Raspberri Pi, but then the ip adress was listed.
- we do not how we managed it, but suddenly, the ip adress was there.
- we paired the Raspberry Pi over WIFI and Ethernet to the router
- the Raspberri Pi was listed under the devices which was connected over cable.
- It takes a view steps to get the connection working.
- We had before other options running as for instance to control a PC over the web from another PC
- it was an application we could start with a single click.
- This instruction has a bit more steps.
- Maybe we get used to it
- it took about 15 minutes to get the connection working between Raspberry Pi and PC.
- Maybe we get it to work faster.
- The connection works on the path described here.
- It is a bit slow, for instance to use LibreOffice
- But it is possible to start LibreOffice with this setup from our desktop on the Raspberry Pi and write in LibreOffice on the Raspberry Pi.
- The the Raspberri Pi, in our example we used the Raspberri Pi 4, has usb connectors, and a HDMI connector to plug in keyboard and mouse and HDMI monitor.
- The Pinephone does not have these connectors without an adapter.
- We described above the problems we had with PinePhone adapters.
- We can now control our Raspberry Pi 4 from our desktop PC via VNC.
- We confirm that the instruction shown above worked for us personally.
- There is also an instruction how to contol the PinePhone over VNC in PostmarkedOS
- The instruction how to use the PinePhone with VNC is only a view commands and should also work similar to this instruction which is shown here to remotely control the Raspberry Pi 4.
- In this instruction, we discussed how to connect a Rasperry Pi4 over VNC to as PC for remote desktop.
- At the following link you can see, how to start a VNC server on a PinePhone with PostmarketOS installed on it, which can be connected to a VNC viewer, as we have shown it in the example of the Raspberri Pi4:
- The example in the Pine64 documentation shows only how to run a VNC server on the PinePhone. The second part, which is not shown there, is shown here in this post, how to connect the VNC server to a VNC viewer running on a desktop PC.