💾 Archived View for 1436.ninja › Phlog › gmi › 20190118b.post.gmi captured on 2022-03-01 at 15:35:29. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2020-09-24)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
The
is a
that comes mounted in a socket on a board with a 4.3 inch 480×272 pixel resistive touchscreen, a crap-tastic keyboard (but usable), and 4gb of flash. It was designed and sold by Next Thing Co., which is now out of business. When they went down, their web properties went down too. That included their Debian repo and their flash images.
When you get a new PocketChip, it comes flashed with the PocketHome interface. This is a six icon menu that includes Pico8 games, and the terminal. If you're like me, you just want your Linux handheld. I am not a fan of PocketHome.
There was a flashable image for an XFCE Debian desktop interface for the PocketChip. However, if you follow links online for it, the site is down.
There is a collection of all the flash images on
. Download these for posterity. The one you want is stable GUI. Instructions for flashing are still available
. After flashing the GUI image you will need to edit /etc/apt/sources.list as instructed on
. Note that the
listed earlier also contains a .tar.bz2 version of the entire repo if you want to self host. Follow the instructions in
to install PocketDesk. This will correct your touchscreen after flashing the GUI image, and also reinstall the PocketChip stock software such as Pico8.
Important! that video will tell you to git clone the
git repo and blindly run the PocketDESK.sh script. You need to modify that shell script and remove the line that adds a defunct repo to your /etc/apt/sources.list it will then succeed and you will be left with a decent little WiFi terminal that can run xorg apps (the vertical screen res makes things like firefox suck ass, but chocolate doom runs nicely).