Martyn's random musings

(Restored: Original date: January 9, 2022)

If you've been following my previous blog posts, you have now a dual-boot pinenote with debian, but you have a rather black-looking e-ink screen and only a terminal entry. You probably want a GUI, wifi, the touchscreen working and pen configured so you can interact with the device.

So let's start. First, wifi.

create a file with your wifi configuration (change “home” to the ssid of your wifi and “SuperSecretPassword” to the wifi password) :

cat > /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=wheel
network={
        ssid="home"
        scan_ssid=1
        key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
        psk="SuperSecretPassword"
}

(Press Control+D on a blank line to finish creating the file) Then run wpa_supplicant in the background :

wpa_supplicant -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf -B

After about a minute, you'll have an IP on wlan0 :

ip a show wlan0
2: wlan0: <BROADCAST,MULTICAST,UP,LOWER_UP> mtu 1500 qdisc pfifo_fast state UP group default qlen 1000
     link/ether 00:00:00:00:00:00 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
     inet 192.168.5.156/24 brd 192.168.5.255 scope global noprefixroute wlan0 
         valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever
     inet6 dead::beef:1010:1010:0001/64 scope link       
          valid_lft forever preferred_lft forever

So we can use apt to install xwindows and a DE. For now, we'll use xfce as it's lightweight :

apt install -y xfce4 onboard xserver-xorg-input-evdev network-manager-gnome

That's a lot of packages. Eventually though, you'll be returned to the prompt.

Note: I included network-manager-gnome in the package list above as wicd no longer seems to be in debian and xfce's own network management tool is abandoned. You can decide not to include it but to get network you'd have to use wpa_supplicant manually. You can remove it from the list if you prefer to manage wifi a different way.

Now you have some more config files to create :

First, the xorg config for rotating the pen and enabling touch input :

cat > /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/pinenote.conf
Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "evdev touchscreen"
        MatchProduct "tt21000"
        MatchIsTouchscreen "on"
        #MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event5"
        Driver        "evdev"
EndSection

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier    "RotateTouch"
        MatchProduct    "w9013"
        Option    "TransformationMatrix" "-1 0 1 0 -1 1 0 0 1"
EndSection

Control-D again for the prompt on a blank line.

And to enable the greeter to switch to the onscreen keyboard (note TWO chevrons!):

echo "keyboard=onboard" >> /etc/lightdm/lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf

Now's also as good a time as any to create a normal user (you don't have to call it fred!) and enable them to sudo:

adduser fred

Put in the password twice, enter for the other details then when the prompt returns:

apt install -y sudo
addgroup fred sudo

Now, I'm not usually a fan of saying this, but the easiest thing to do here is reboot, as dbus, lightdm and all sorts of other things need to talk to each other and it would be fiddly to get them to do so. So issue reboot, Spam your Interrupt and use the last u-boot commands from the previous article. You should be greeted by the lightdm greeter.

To bring up the onscreen keyboard so you can log in, you can press F3 on the keyboard. I kid you not, that's the default. You can also enable it by clicking the “person in a bubble” icon in the top right though.

There you have it, a “minimal” XFCE desktop with working touch and pen.

I want to give a shout out here to everyone who has been involved with getting Linux on the pinenote up to this stage.

MASSIVE props to smauel who has been doing the kernel work that gets the panel and sound working! Thanks to everyone in the pine64 irc/discord/matrix pinenote channel for support too. Without them, I'd probably still be fighting stuff. Special thanks to irrenhaus, vveapon and pgwipeout there for their patience with me. Also a quick thanks to DorianRudolph who's docs form some very important basis for my own. And of course, pine64 themselves, this is such a cool device!