Make p0cket usable

p0cket (Private) is a PinePhone Pro I'm giving Linux a shot on.

To do

  • Get it booting Arch:
  • Find a good mail client:
    • Geary is pretty great.
  • Find a good terminal:
    • Gnome Terminal is a bit bulky.
      • There must also be something wrong with its desktop file as it's not visible in the app drawer.
    • KGX's context menu doesn't work, making copy/paste hard.
    • Alacritty has no UI for copy/paste and the keyboard shortcuts can't be inputted with Squeekboard.
  • Fix p.r.comp.util.firefox (Private)'s janky menus, sidebars and extension popovers
  • Get Gnome Web (Epiphany) extension support working
    • Can import Bitwarden from the Firefox XPI, but can't enter text into inptu fields with the on-screen keyboard.
  • Fix Squeekboard's unopenable settings
  • Figure out password auto-fill
  • [>] Get Android apps working:

Shells

What I did

For Tow:

I prepared an SD card, using macOS I had to drop oflag=direct:

curl -LO https://github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/releases/download/release-2021.10-005/pine64-pinephonePro-2021.10-005.tar.xz
tar -xf pine64-pinephonePro-2021.10-005.tar.xz
sudo dd if=pine64-pinephonePro-2021.10-005/spi.installer.img of=/dev/disk2 bs=1M oflag=sync status=progress

I then booted the phone from this SD card by holding the RE button in the back down as I powered it on, and chose Install Tow-Boot to SPI.

For Arch:

curl -LO https://github.com/dreemurrs-embedded/Pine64-Arch/releases/download/20220729/archlinux-pinephone-pro-phosh-20220729.img.xz
xz --decompress archlinux-pinephone-pro-phosh-20220729.img.xz
sudo dd if=archlinux-pinephone-pro-phosh-20220729.img of=/dev/disk2 bs=1M oflag=sync status=progress

To boot from this, I held down the volume down button until the phone vibrated a second time and the LED light changed to a blue colour.

I then installed Paru:

sudo pacman -S --needed base-devel git
git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/paru.git
cd paru
makepkg -si

Children
  1. Retrospective from 3 days of maining