My Gemini arrived Monday. After charging and getting my strongest reading glasses I set about Tuesday to flash the device with a rooted Android and with Linux. It worked in due course -- a permissions issue with the machine I was flashing from -- and I was getting things set up, with the Planet Computers' Gemini chat on Matrix alongside. (You've seen the teevee shows where the tower talked the non-pilot into safely landing the plane? It was like that -- those poor guys can't have gotten a lick of work done for a few days this week, because they were hand-holding me.) I had things well along when Adam Boardman, genius, mentioned that he had produced some scatter files that alter the ratio of space for Android and space for Linux. Having less than no interest in Googledroid, I downloaded (onto my desktop machine) the one which gives maximum space to Linux and minimum space to Android. (If there were one that gave all space to Linux and none to Android, I would have chosen it.) Those various scatter files are located here:
https://github.com/gemian/gemini-keyboard-apps/wiki/FlashingAnyway, this meant reflashing, which was fine. The Android side is untouched since then but for my having given it a long and complicated password, and I plan not to revisit it until I can wipe it off the machine forever.
Cos, another of the genius hackers who are doing more work on this than you can imagine, pointed out that a lot of configuration and so on could be done by SSHing into the machine over USB.
(To do this, you connect your Gemini to your Linux machine via USB cable, open a terminal, and type
ssh gemini@10.15.19.82 at the prompt. Whereupon you'll be asked for the password, which is "gemini" and you're in.)
I was then able to
sudo apt-get update and
sudo apt-get upgrade and then commence doing the things on Adam's wiki:
https://github.com/gemian/gemini-keyboard-apps/wiki/DebianTPA braver man than I am would have typed them into a terminal on Gemini itself; I copied and pasted 'em from the browser on my desktop into my SSHed terminal. Later, I learned that I could have done pretty much all of it after the upgrade by simply running Cos's script, which is available here:
https://coshacks.blogspot.it/2018/04/gemini...kers-guide.htmlThough there was a certain zen in doing it all by hand. That did, though, wear off over time.
Some observations after a few days' use:
-- Unless your fingers are much, much smaller than those found on any human ever recorded (even a baby human), using the screen to navigate will be hit-and-miss, literally. This is exacerbated by the mouse pointer, which follows your finger around but usually doesn't catch up (this will be come less of an issue with accelerated video drivers, but I do not know their status). Fortunately, much navigation can be done with the keyboard and those handy arrow keys. One of the first things I did, after poking at the lower left corner to get the menu, up-arrow to "Preferences" then right-arrow to "LXQt" settings, then right-arrow again to "LXQt Configuration Center," where I was able to make the fonts big enough to be useful. Then I did the same with "Preferences>KDE System Settings" (there's KDE Plasma mixed in with it, I think providing the KWin window manager). This made things an easier target for my fat finger. Scroll bars were and remain just about impossible, and dragging content occasionally moves the page up but more often selects test. So keyboard navigation is essential, arrowing down to scroll.
-- My next step (sorted by category, not in the order in which they occurred) required connecting a mouse to the left USB port. right clicking on the desktop let me be rid of the wallpaper. More important, right clicking on the kicker/launcher/taskbar panel let me adjust the sizes of things, most important the icons. The default is 22x22px; I made it 48X48, which seems just about right (and I increased the size of the panel to 60).
-- I needed to create a new user -- me -- so I did, and failed miserably. VERY IMPORTANT: when you create a new user, you
must then open a terminal and type
sudo nano /etc/group before you try to log in as the new user. Every group that has "Gemini" as a member, add a comma and the name of the new user. (While you're there, go to the bottom and make sure your new user was added as a group.) If you don't, you will login and face a black screen with a mouse pointer and nothing else. The only way out is to sit on the ESC ket for a very long time, forcing a reboot. Once you have rebooted, you can fix things from copying kwinrc from the /.configure directory in the /home/Gemini directory into the same spot in /home/[newuser].config (and after that,
sudo chown [newuser] /home/[newuser/.config/kwin). I had to do all this and it was a real pain. I would never have figured it out without help.
Now I was able to log in to my own account and play. Two immediate observations: Everything is
tiny -- remember, the horizontal resolution is greater than that of the iPad Mini with Retina display, and the screen is less than half the size. I quickly became accustomed to applications that opened to the size of a large postage stamp. In the upper left corner of each is an icon, a fairly easy target by Gemini-Linux standards, which renders a decent-sized menu that includes Maximize, Minimize, and Close. This menu is your friend. You will want to maximize everything. It might be that you can open two applications side-by-side, but I very much doubt anyone will do anything useful in such an arrangement unless they have superhuman eyesight to accompany their supertiny fingers. But maximized applications are generally useful. (I haven't tried photo editing in the GIMP yet and don't much look forward to it.)
The complaints that the keyboard needs to be lit is exacerbated by the brightness of the screen. The screen is very bright and best I can tell the little adaptive lighting sensor on the Gemini's bezel isn't hooked up in Linux yet. (In the LXQt control center there's a brightness setting. I cut it to half, but I don't think that that's hooked up yet, either.) The problem is a very bright screen right next to a very dark keyboard, and our eyes adjust to the screen, making the keyboard almost invisible. I recommend dark themes for anything that allows them.
The keyboard is plenty nice, as good as that on any modern portable computer, but the mapping can confuse at first. Characters you expect to be one place are in another, or else require a modifier key (usually Fn). So it does take some getting used to.
I'm a little amazed that I was able to set up wifi uneventfully. To move the Connman applet (and any other app) up so that you can get to the OK button, you hold Alt and drag the window with your finger. On some applications, maximizing them allows you to navigate around with the arrow and tab keys, moving what's on the screen as you go.
Biggest embarrassment of the whole process: The hour or two in which I and a bunch of developers with better things to do tried to figure out why after reflashing I could no longer connect to the Internet. Reason was that I had fulsomely assumed that I was getting Internet over the USB cable, which I wasn't. I'd apparently set up wifi in the version I'd just flashed over. Annoying when I waste my own time, but very sad when I waste other people's time, too. When everything is fixed and working, it will be several hours later than it should have been, because of me.
Biggest immediate upcoming project: I installed a 128gb microSD card in my Gemini and, using the nice GParted app (
sudo apt-get install gparted) I was able to format it ext4, one big partition. Problem is, I cannot figure out how to get it to automount at boot, necessary if I'm to have it as my /home directory, which I'd hoped to do to reduce write wear on the internal storage. But it turns out that Debian Stretch and therefore the Linux on Gemini use the execrable systemd, which is said to have advantages but ease in configuring a disk to mount automatically ain't among 'em. And an error could require a reflash -- and repetition of the last four days, which was fun but not that much fun.
Hope this has been at least of interest.
