A grand repository of Gemini how-tos is needed

[depscribe]

It appears that we're at the point where a lot of Geminium are or will soon be in the wild. It would be useful if there were some sort of organized repository of information on how to do the various things some, perhaps many, of us hope to do to and with our new devices. While there's a tips-and-tricks thread here, something a little more organized and elaborate is in order.

For instance, here are things I hope to do, in more or less the order I want to do them:

-- de-Googlize. Before I ever put the device on even wifi, I want to disable and if possible remove Gapps and related spyware. I do not want my device associated with a Google account, ever. There are various sites about this or things close to it involving other devices and versions of Android, but nothing step-by-step for the Gemini.

-- Investigate the various available ROMs, both from Planet and elsewhere. Planet offers a rooted ROM and at least two ROMs that include a developmental version of Debian Linux. There is also a Lineage OS version, though it seems that at present telephony is limited to the stock ROM. (I backed Gemini because a 4G device that runs Linux would be ideal for my work. Android as it is shipped is antithetical to privacy, and by Blackberry BB10 device has gotten very long in the tooth.)

-- Set things up in a sensible way. As discussed elsewhere on this forum, there are advantages to moving things that are frequently written away from the built-in storage and onto a microSD card -- to me, in Linux, /home and /var (or at least /var/log) are prime candidates to put on the card and symlink to the built-in storage.

-- Make storage accessible to both the Android or AOSP and the Linux sides. This might not be useful to everyone, but it is to me, because then I could do work on the Linux side and reboot into *droid to transmit it over 4G, until Linux telephony is sorted out.

-- Figure out what the connectivity pack -- hub, hdmi cable, etc. -- does and doesn't allow us to do. My plan was to set up monitor, keyboard, hub, charger, and trackball at the newspaper office, so that when I'm on deadline I could just plug in the Gemini at each end and do some work. It seems as if that's not possible, or maybe it is and language differences have made it seem not so.

-- More generally figure out and employ the things necessary to ensure privacy, from DNS request encryption to mail encryption to use of Tor on the Gemini.

These are just a few of the items of particular interest to me, while others will have different interests. At this point, there's no one place where we can easily find the answers. Establishing such a place is something that I think might be useful. Might the wiki that Varti set up be a place for this?

We don't seem to have a user manual, and Mike Halsey, great work though he does, is a Windows guy.

[Varti]

I think it is about time I post an update on the wiki's status.

The wiki is already available at this URL:

https://www.oesf.org/wiki/

It can be accessed from the OESF Wiki link on the toolbar at the top of the forum. I know, all the links there are barely visible, my plan is to replace them with an array of bigger and more readable buttons.

I have set the Wiki as read-only and with the registrations disabled, since I wanted first to make sure that the following two points are covered:

1) a strong and effective anti-spam filter to be used in the registration page
2) a well structured layout which would be easy to be read on mobile devices must be chosen

About point 1), we had many problems in the past with spambots on our previous Zaurus-devoted Wiki. We ended up having more than 6000 registered spambots; unfortunately, due to how MediaWiki is structured, it's not possible to remove any of these accounts, so this time I'd like to avoid this to happen again. This should be anyway now covered: I have setup ConfirmEdit to use a QuestyCaptcha with a list of questions based on basic knowledge about the Gemini, plus Bad Behavior which should block all the registration attempts from IPs known to be used by spambots.

Regarding point 2), I have been searching for a good layout which would make the text easily readable on our Geminis and on other mobile devices. I have been unable to find any good front-page template or wiki page generator; the only layout I have found so far that I like is the Pivot skin, though it seems that it only provides a generic layout template and no templates for e.g. a frontpage or an index of the wiki's contents.

OESF covers a handful of portable devices: the Gemini, the Sharp Zaurus and the GPD devices, though for the latter there has never been a lot of activity here. I'd anyway like to cover all these systems, although the main focus will anyway be on the Gemini, of course.

If you agree, we can start now with a basic Wiki and publish articles on it right away, we can think about improving the layout at a later stage. In the next post I'll make my own proposal about the wiki's structure, feel free to make any comment about it, I'll update the post with all your contributions.

Once we'll agree on a final structure, I'll open the registration to anyone who'd like to contribute. I'd also like to ask if anyone would like to become a moderator: a mod will have the rights to move/delete pages and to suspend users, if required.

BTW, Mike has kindly offered me to include all the contents of his upcoming manual that might be useful for the Wiki.

And lastly, thanks to greguu for the new Wiki logo!

Varti

[Varti]

A draft version of the layout of the Gemini's section:

- Gemini models (just one for now of course, listing its hardware specs), including
- all the available keyboard layouts

- available add-ons and compatible accessories

- known hardware issues and workarounds

- supported OSes: Android, Debian, Sailfish OS, Lineage OS. For each of these OSes:
- known software issues and workarounds
- general tips, including fixing security issues and removing Google-related software

- list of external resources (official Planet pages, chat rooms, fan pages)


Varti

[Isaac]

Could we setup the wiki to sync accounts with the forum and only allow making wiki pages after a certain number of posts on the forum? I know... quite a lot of PHP (to say the least) and could help with this perhaps. Integrating the two would be awesome and encourage use of the wiki, for instance linking to wiki pages automatically by page name or pinning wiki pages to forum sections. Lots of ideas.

[speculatrix]

Mike Halsey is writing a Gemini manual
https://geminiplanet.com/gemini-manual-crowdsourcing/

[Dom (shymega)]

Hi all.

I just wanted to bring attention to a wiki I've been curating with the community. It's a Git-based wiki (it might, in the future, be merged with Planet's wiki, and worked on by both Planet & the community, who knows), and hosted on GitHub.

Contributors make changes by making PRs to this repository - https://github.com/shymega/planet-devices-wiki-prs - there is no other way to make contributions, except by emailing over new pages to myself, and when the PR is approved, I set up a CI script to automatically update the wiki here - https://github.com/shymega/planet-devices/wiki - with commit history.

I appreciate the wiki isn't very 'new user' friendly, but it's the best way I could come up with for a collaborative system.

I'm also working on a web UI for reporting Planet bugs, that uses the GitHub tracker, and PostgreSQL as a backend. The idea behind that (iTrackz) is so people without GitHub can report bugs, and Planet can see a dashboard of bugs per-device, etc. It's an Actix Web application. Rust.

Thoughts on that, and the wiki, are welcome.

[speculatrix]

BTW, rather than make /var/log be a symlink, it's better to use "mount" with the "bind" option, so that a different file system is mounted over the top.

that way if there's a problem with boot, there's  a failsafe as the /var/log directory will still work. Add a startup to do the mount-bind and then restart the syslog process and/or systemd journald so as to drop the file handles on the normal /var/log and use the new file system.

so something like

Code: [Select]

mount -o bind /storage/external-sd-card/var/log /var/log
systemctl restart syslogd
systemctl restart journald
just my 2c