My Debian journey on the Pinebook Pro

[schwarzwieweiss]

With that being said, there are a number of things which don't work ootb on the PBP in Debian/Devuan that have been tweaked in the various distros. However, I am not sure which of these require patches. For instance:

- changing screen brightness using hotkeys
- battery gauge

Regarding screen brightness and the hotkeys: there's three parts to this

1. An interface to actually change screen brightness, in this case available at /sys/class/backlight/edp-backlight/brightness
   
2. The hotkeys being recognized as XF86MonBrightnessUp and XF86MonBrightnessDown (EDIT: defined in /lib/udev/hwdb.d/60-keyboard.hwdb which is part of udev (search for Pinebook Pro in this file))
   
3. Some software that will run when you press the hotkeys: brightnessctl, available in Debian
   

So all that remains should be to configure whatever window manager or desktop environment you are using to actually execute brightnessctl when you press the hotkeys, e.g. I have the following lines in my .config/sway/config:

Code:

bindsym XF86MonBrightnessUp exec --no-startup-id brightnessctl --class backlight set 10%+
bindsym XF86MonBrightnessDown exec --no-startup-id brightnessctl --class backlight set 10%-

EDIT for clarification: I'm not saying that brightnessctl is the only way to get this to work nicely. Your desktop environment might include its own tooling and you might just need to enable or configure that. I'm just saying: all the parts required are included in Debian bullseye but you might still need to glue them together.

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With that being said, there are a number of things which don't work ootb on the PBP in Debian/Devuan that have been tweaked in the various distros. However, I am not sure which of these require patches. For instance:

- changing screen brightness using hotkeys
- battery gauge

Regarding battery gauge: battery information is available at /sys/class/power_supply/cw2015-battery/. For some reason this information is not in the standard path /sys/class/power_supply/BATn/, so you need some way to tell whatever tool you want to use where to find the battery information.