postmarketOS/Alpine edge image for the Pinebook Pro

[Surehand53]

Hi.


I am using postmarketos with sway since today. All in all it works really well, although there are also a few niggles
I write down here how all worked and how I have installed it and which problems I still have. I have used the PBP and Manjaro to install a sd card with postmarketos / sway.

Installation

As mentioned by Martin, PostmarketOS for PBP is now merged to the standard postmarketos installer.


The install tool for PostmarketOS is pmbootstrap and is build with Python. So you need to have Pythin and pip installed, then you can install the tool with these instructions.

The install guide for postmarketos is here.

In a nutshell you have these commands:

Code:

pmbootstrap pull
pmbootstrap init

Here choose pine64 as manufacturer and pinebookpro as model, most of the other questions can stay default, for the user interface choose sway.

As postmarketos gets installed on a sd card, now is the time to pop one in.

the command lsblk gets you the name of the sd card. Basically not the one that has "/" on one line, the other one. The size is also a good hint.
In my case on Manjaro the name of the sd card was mmcblk1. With that the command to install on the sd card is:

Code:

pmbootstrap install --sdcard

After the installation, reboot.


The Mod key is the Pine key <pine>.


Terminal

<Pine> + Enter does not work to start a terminal.
Alacritty is set up as default terminal and  not installed 

After installing alacritty this error comes up on startup:

Code:

Alacritty encountered an unrecoverable error:

There was an error initializing the shaders: Failed compiling shader at /home/buildozer/aports/community/alacritty/src/alacritty-0.4.2/alacritty/../res/text.v.glsl: 0:14(10): error: GLSL 3.30 is not supported. Supported versions are: 1.10, 1.20, and 1.00 ES

Work around: use Ctrl+Alt+F2 to get to a tty terminal, install dmenu (see bellow) and then use urxvt as terminal

Wifi
To turn on Wifi use nmtui

Dmenu

Dmenu is the default to start applications, however it not installed out of the box.

Add dmenu with

Code:

sudo apk add dmenu

and then start applications with <Pine>+d

Graphics

In the forum it is mentioned to install mesa-git-dri-panfrost and mesa-git-dri-kmsro, however I cannot find these packages. When I search for e.g. panfrost I get mesa-git-dri-gallium as search result, not sure why.

From the error message the missing panfrost driver could also be the reason why alacritty crashes (although also in other environments it crashes a lot)

Applications

Currently Firefox (75) and VTE get an error when installing because of a version mismatch for libicuuc.so. That also means that almost all terminals cannot be installed as most are based on VTE amd as alacritty crashes the alternative is urvxt.

work around, although grudgingly: chromium

As terminal I recommend Termite

Code:

sudo apk add termite

On the bright side, Micro my by a long distance preferred terminal editor is available for install, so quickly:

Code:

sudo apt add micro

The version installed is unfortunately an a bit older release candidate with the nervy habit to ask for recovery when started with a file twice, that works, but still, hopefully the latest version will be available soon.

Mouse settings
For a new install you need to copy the defaule settings to |/.config/sway from /etc/sway/config

In the config file is a section called Input configuration with an example.

use swaymsg -t get_inputs to get all input files.

On the Pinebook Pro the touchpad should be called "9610:30:HAILUCK_CO.,LTD_USB_KEYBOARD_Touchpad"

Code:

input "9610:30:HAILUCK_CO.,LTD_USB_KEYBOARD_Touchpad" {

      dwt enabled

      tap enabled

      natural_scroll enabled
[color=#000000][font=monospace, Courier]  }[/font][/color]

Sway works already quite well and with a bit of fine tuning it will be great. I hope the version conflict for Firefox will be resolved soon.