Messages

1

Cosmo Communicator - Linux / Re-install Android when Linux comes out?

« on: November 27, 2019, 02:55:16 pm »

Hi all,
When Planet comes out with the Debian, Sailfish, Kali, etc. versions, is there any word about what will happen to our Android setups?
I fear that we'll need to re-flash the whole device and all the setup that we've done to get our Android working as we want will be undone.  Although perhaps we will be able to make a full back-up and restore of everything we've done?

The problem is in large encrypted userdata partition of Android which can not be resized. So basically you can keep Android firmware, but all the setup and data will be erased still.

2

Gemini PDA - Linux / FlashToolLinux: Failed to find USB port [SOLVED]

« on: May 11, 2019, 04:20:01 pm »

So it takes the scatter file i.e. 'Gemini_WIFI_A20GB_L36GB_Multi_Boot.txt' as well?

Correct. Scatter file is like partition table basically.

3

Gemini PDA - Linux / FlashToolLinux: Failed to find USB port [SOLVED]

« on: May 10, 2019, 04:03:47 am »

@TheKit yeah more times than I'd like to confess. And building FlashTool from source didn't work. Does vanilla MediaTek's SP FlashTool allows to do a multi boot with the provided 'modules'?

Yes, the tool's job is just to flash images. What Planet did was to remove potentially dangerous options like Format All and Download.

4

Gemini PDA - Linux / FlashToolLinux: Failed to find USB port [SOLVED]

« on: May 09, 2019, 06:16:08 pm »

Hi I try to reinstall a double boot on my Gemini Wifi only.
On up-to-date Arch64 with the appropriate udev rules (checked out and worked fine when I installed the firmwares last year) I run FlashToolLinux, plug the gemini and reboot it:

Did you try it multiple times? Honestly I had more luck with vanilla MediaTek's SP FlashTool on Linux than with Planet's one, but you have to be careful about nvram partition with that one.

5

Gemini PDA - Linux / No audio under Kali 2019.1

« on: April 23, 2019, 11:39:37 am »

(I restored them afterwards by searching through the file and adding the deleted dependency from my backup.) Then I installed the gemian version of I think libpulse0 along with pulseaudio and pulseaudio-module-droid.

Now if I put my ear right up to the speakers when the PDA was shutting down I could hear static coming from the speakers. No luck with audio working sadly. Pulseaudio didn't show any sinks or sources.

So finally I decided to uninstall the gemian pulse audio and reinstall Kali pulseaudio. While also restoring all of the libpulse0 dependencies back to their orignal state. After I launched an application that supported sound and like magic audio was working. I don't even know if the right sounds were being played but it was definitely playing sounds.

Gemian PulseAudio version is modified to include https://github.com/mer-hybris/pulseaudio-modules-droid, which uses Android HAL for audio device configuration/sound playing (which in turns talks to ALSA). I suppose Kali maintainers didn't package it or it got outdated. It didn't work with PulseAudio 12 in buster before, but upstream update in pulseaudio-modules-droid fixed this.

6

Gemini PDA - Linux / unable to boot debian after crash

« on: March 09, 2019, 11:31:49 am »

ssh'd in via wifi and /var/log/Xorg.0.log says it's 'Failed to load module hwcomposer' and then a message to say it can't open a display.

I haven't knowingly tweaked the X setup but have installed Qt5 which may have some EGL dependencies?

[My gemini has run out of juice at present and I have no way to get more verbose output across but will add in when possible]

I'm interested in full Xorg.0.log when you're able to. Also please post the output of test_egl_configs command from libhybris-tests package.

7

Gemini PDA - Linux / Wayland desktop environment for Gemini PDA?

« on: February 19, 2019, 02:01:43 pm »

As this is out of scope of Debian TP3, I suppose it is better to discuss this in a separate topic. It seems the best way to move forward with Gemini graphical stack (and to get good performance both for 2D/3D apps) is to switch to one of Wayland compositors.

However, compared to Xorg, there is no "standard" Wayland compositor implementation. Both KDE and GNOME provide their own ones, plus there are Wayland compositors not tied to particular WM, such as sway or Wayfire. As we don't have standard Linux DRM graphics stack, each of those would require adaptation to run on Gemini. Therefore it is interesting to know opinions over which one would make sense to get running on Gemini given the device form-factor and overall usability of that compositor/desktop environment if you have been using it on another device.

The possible options I know so far:

• KWin/Plasma Desktop/possibly Plasma Mobile - already has hwcomposer backend implemented, runs on Gemini as Wayland compositor with some hacks. I tried using Plasma with Wayland instead of X11 on desktop PC, and while there are improvements with every release, some things still work not as expected.
• Mutter/GNOME - needs hwcomposer backend implemented to run on Gemini. Can't say much, as I am KDE user personally.
• wlroots-based compositors, such as sway and Wayfire. I ported basic hwcomposer backend for wlroots before, so it is possible to run those at least. There is also Phosh developed by Purism for their Librem 5, but it seems to be still at early stages.
• Mir - has been recently repurposed as Wayland compositor, has hwcomposer support from Ubuntu Touch. There have been efforts to make MATE work with it, and Unity8 can be potentially used as well, but needs lot of fixes to be usable as desktop-style environment (as opposed to mobile in UBPorts).

8

Gemini PDA - Linux / HDMI output with linux

« on: February 11, 2019, 03:28:19 pm »

I think, currently this is not possible. Probably some changes to hwcomposer are required to get this to work. Maybe NotKit can enlighten us if this is true.

Yeah, that's problematic as current xf86-video-hwcomposer driver is built around assuming single screen. I had been able to get test_hwcomposer from libhybris to render on two screens (see https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/nMd8R6Krxh/ + https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/J9SQWNMVBB/ to enable HDMI on Gemini PDA in particular), but that is not integrated in driver. If anyone wants to help, I can explain on IRC what could be done.

9

Gemini PDA - Linux / Final call for TP3

« on: February 04, 2019, 07:33:45 pm »

Have you ever tried KDE Plasma compared to LXQT? It is about 3 or 4 times more useful. All of those settings can easily be adjusted with a GUI, for instance.

The Gemini is more than capable of running it, except the keyboard doesn't work correctly.

It can be workarounded for now by disabling conflicting key shortcuts in System Settings.

10

Gemini PDA - Linux / Final call for TP3

« on: January 30, 2019, 03:21:26 pm »

With switching to Wayland we would loose X11 and many applications with it. This would be nearly the same as switching to Sailfish. So I would vote against it.

Desktop Wayland compositors have XWayland support, which is basically running Xorg server on top of Wayland and it works pretty good. It is just Sailfish choose not to support legacy apps for obvious reasons.

Any chance to get cameras and GPS?

For cameras, either libcamera_compat_layer from Ubuntu Touch or gst-droid from Sailfish can be used as middleware, but then we need respective camera app ported. For GPS, are there actually any "desktop" apps capable of utilizing it?

Maybe it is worth to wait until the Android update. There might be a chance for a 4.x kernel with it. Well, or does anybody know the upcoming Oreo update sticks with the 3.18 kernel?

Anyways, the kernel should be upgraded (if not already happened, I am using a custom one) to current git. The latest fix, disabling the keyboard on lid close works quite well. Before, when recognizing the Gemini in the pocket getting hot, already a quarter of battery juice has been lost...

It sticks with 3.18 as MediaTek did not port mt6797 support onto 4.x.

11

Gemini PDA - Linux / Final call for TP3

« on: January 30, 2019, 02:33:06 pm »

That would be a good idea if possible

I've done a lot of work with gl + mali on android, it's borderline impossible to upload textures without heavy stalling using the standard GLES userspace api (even with pixel buffers etc), as glamor is doing (or was when I last checked). It must be possible at some level though for android itself and apps using things like hardwarebuffer/graphicbuffer to be unaffected

Would be nice to have some comparisons/measurements beforehand though. I think when you last used glamor it was a bit slower than current due to glFinish hack from Rockchip.

The ultimate solution is switching to Wayland, as then the compositor renders with GLES and it is fast even with texture uploads for shmem windows, but that's outside of TP3 scope. The problem with Wayland though is that there is no standard server implementation like Xorg, each compositor is an implementation of its own.

12

Gemini PDA - Linux / Final call for TP3

« on: January 30, 2019, 02:04:58 pm »

How do you disable Glamor? I would like to try. Thanks.

I believe I rebuilt xf86-video-hwcomposer without --enable-glamor-hybris, cant remember if there was more to it than that

It can be disabled by setting         Option          "AccelMethod" "None" in the device section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf, for example:

Section "Device"
        Identifier      "MediaTek HWC"
        Driver          "hwcomposer"
        Option          "AccelMethod" "None"
EndSection

If you update to latest libhybris and xf86-video-hwcomposer from Gemian repos, chromium will still work, but with color channels flipped. Might be interesting to compare performance though. If it is really much better without glamor, we could look into dri3 support without glamor, which would allow EGL applications to still work, although a bit slower due to buffer copy involved.

13

Gemini PDA - Linux / ExaGear: Wine on gemini?

« on: January 10, 2019, 01:13:02 pm »

Does anybody succeeded to run EPOC Emulator inside Wine + Exagear Desktop ARM v8 on Debian 9.x @ Gemini ?

Tried for the fun of it, and yes, it works. May need some solution for scaling though.

14

Gemini PDA - Linux / Up to date packages on Debian

« on: January 06, 2019, 04:39:56 pm »

Other Methods that i have looked at but haven't got around to trying/using
BedRock Linux To make a hybrid of debian and other linux distros like void linux
Changing the Debian version --- Broke on me when I tried:(

We are probably going to migrate to Debian Buster sooner or later, but in the meanwhile, I tried Bedrock Linux approach and can confirm it works on Gemini, same way as in this Reddit post.

init selection menu would not display as we lack framebuffer console, so it makes sense to set timeout to 0 in [init] section of /bedrock/etc/bedrock.conf.

15

Gemini PDA - Linux / KDE Plasma

« on: December 20, 2018, 04:28:40 pm »

Kind of sad that this thread has almost 200 views but no progress to report.

KDE, GNOME, and XFCE are so much better tham LxQT. Am I the only one who misses them?

Let me quote the posts about the issue from another topic:

Could it be that the version of i3 supplied via Debian stretch is simply too old?

I'd suggest that as unlikely, the whole linuxy key grabbing stuff is all based upon grabbing named keys as whole keys. Cite for example original LXQT and current KDE's/Gnome key grabbers eat 'r' keys as 'Print' on the UK keyboard, so you just have to disable the short-cut's or fix the code.

How does the standard window manager use them?

Had be fixed with some changes to make it work with keys that do both letters and 'named functions', from commit messages:
https://github.com/gemian/lxqt-globalkeys/c...4b3c775ed18631f
and:
https://github.com/gemian/lxqt-globalkeys/c...d9b26447a1baa34

But its a while ago that I made those changes not certain that there aren't other tweaks in the other commits that might also be important.

For KDE, that code needs to be adapted for kglobalaccel, probably with an issue raised upstream to discuss this. Will Atl is correct about amount of people working on Linux for Gemini being very small, so contributions welcome .

I have started building packages against Ubuntu bionic base, so KDE Neon could be used later, but the issue with key grabber needs to be handled anyway.