TUTORIAL - complete DEBIAN INSTALL with 4G working

[geminifrench]

geminifrench - this guide is AMAZING! You've helped breathe new life into my Gemini PDA. I remember when installing Linux was painful. and this was a comparative breeze. And. so glad to have an OS that is still getting security updates.

Thank you for sharing this!

Merci :-)

[DaveL]

I am new to the Gemini PDA and only bought it because it can run Linux. I don't really know Android at all so I thought this tutorial would be great for me. I have not followed all the steps yet so bear that in mind. I am stuck on one thing - the real time / hardware clock. With only Debian, whenever I shutdown I lose the system time - jumps back to 2016. However if I dual-boot and set the date/time in Android then shutdown and then boot into Linux the date/time is current. So, clearly I think, the date and time can be maintained through shutdown but Linux is not setting the RTC. I tried hwclock but it says "Inappropriate ioctl for device" so I assume Mediatek do not use rtc0. Can anyone point me in the right direction, please?

[Mooie]

Just wanted to say a big thank you to geminifrench for taking the time and trouble to post this.  I've been wanting to buy a Gemini for a while simply to run Linux, but I'd pretty much given up on the idea until I came across this.  Now, owning a Gemini is possibility again.

I've a couple of questions:

* As the Gemini has a non-standard processor, will DEBIAN updates be readily available? Or will it depend on whether the community make a compilable version for the Gemini available?

* Will I be able to install apps like TaskWarrior, easily?  Is there an installer app within DEBIAN?  I'm currently using Brew on a Mac and installing other software is a breeze.

Apologies, for the basic questions, I'm new to Linux and only just getting to grips with the basics!

[DaveL]

Replying to my own question just above, it must just be the version of hwclock that does not work. I wrote a very simple program to call ioctl with RTC_RD_TIME and RTC_SET_TIME and both worked fine so the RTC can be set from the system clock  before shutdown and then is maintained.

[Eric BF]

* As the Gemini has a non-standard processor, will DEBIAN updates be readily available? Or will it depend on whether the community make a compilable version for the Gemini available?

It's not a non-standard processor. The ARM processor in the Gemini is one of the standard processors supported by Debian, known as arm64.

* Will I be able to install apps like TaskWarrior, easily?  Is there an installer app within DEBIAN?  I'm currently using Brew on a Mac and installing other software is a breeze.

One of the key strengths of Debian is its whole package manager eco-system: apt, dpkg, ... and, yes, taskwarrior is one of the packages available.
Having said this, one of the problems with Debian on the Gemini, as it's not really supported, is that it is not possible (or at least not easy) to upgrade to recent versions of some of the packages due to the Gemini specific packages being stuck at an old version of Debian. So if having recent versions of some software is critical then the Gemini may not be for you. In my case, all the software that I want for portable computing is stable and does what I need. I don't need to be at the bleeding edge for what I do with my Gemini.

[jakfish]

@DaveL--would you mind posting that time-keeping script? It sounds very effective and I'd like to give it a whirl.

Thanks,
Jake

[panv]

Any luck with updating to Debian 10 ?

Also, is there a way to use i3wm instead of lxqt ? sddm seems not to recognise i3, but if I switch to lightdm, i can login to i3 session...

Sorry, two subjects in one message...

[Eric BF]

Also, is there a way to use i3wm instead of lxqt ? sddm seems not to recognise i3, but if I switch to lightdm, i can login to i3 session...

The login screen does allow the choice of different window managers or desktop environments. It looks in /usr/share/xsessions for those choices. You can create your own in that directory for i3. For instance, I have this on my desktop computer in a file called i3.desktop in that directory:

Code: [Select]

[Desktop Entry]
Name=i3
Comment=improved dynamic tiling window manager
Exec=i3
TryExec=i3
Type=Application
X-LightDM-DesktopName=i3
DesktopNames=i3
Keywords=tiling;wm;windowmanager;window;manager;


[panv]

Works without any problem...

:-)

Just have to tweak couple of things...

[geminifrench]

Any luck with updating to Debian 10 ?

take a look here :
https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?topic=36527.0
and
https://github.com/gemian/gemian/wiki/DebianBuster.

i had tried, but not finished.

[tysiong]

Thank very much for the sharing. Great guide to revive my gemini with only linux.

YS Tan