PinePhone/Pro Customizations

I originally made a quick little note on some hackish tasks because I wanted to get it down in a note and closer to some sort of progress on it. Since then I’ve tried (and failed) to modify the Danctnix ARCH Linux ARM builder for Pine64.

The initial problem was that the size of the file system to be created was stored in a profile that I had not created. I was looking for shell scripts that made use of the variable, (something like size_ui_${ui} but later when I found and created this, it created an image that I couldn’t boot.

But, it’s not so bad because my package list contained far more than what I actually wanted to have installed on the device, so the new list is much more concise (no KDE nonsense hiding out).

Anyway, here’s the progress I’ve made so far on the PinePhone Pro, starting from barebones image, in no particular order:

• ported my bspwm/sxhkd/conky configs
• incorporated lisgd from suckless
• lisgd bindings for switching desks, killing apps, opening the virtual
• power button custom scripts for putting display/touchscreen to sleep
• incorporated sxvkb from suckless
• started making new keyboard layouts
• created scripts for sending sms
• created scripts for making calls
• (scripts for calls sounds crazy, but I don’t like any dialers I’ve seen so far and the scripts take care of switching the audio device…)
• hardware keyboard map customizations (the layers were missing, so I added a custom set of bindings and more convenient mappings for some of the harder to reach combinations)
• dunst config settings
• gomuks for matrix
• finch for sms & signal
• built signald, but might have to abandon it, it’s quite limited and somewhat unstable
• profanity for XMPP
• qutebrowser for web, but it’s a power hungry jerk
• haven’t picked a mastodon client yet, been playing with tootstream, tut, and something I can’t recall
• MMS works, but I’m manually carving them out after mmsd-tng dumps files the incoming blobs on the filesystem, so I need to create something for that
• sending mms isn’t bad, but could be nicer
• email via mutt
• built protonmail bridge for cli
• password management in pass because it works with protonmail bridge
• built megapixels from source to get camera working
• tt++ for playing Muds

Pandoc wasn’t available through the repo, but is available as a binary from pandoc.org.

Anyway, I’ve been making steady progress against customizing the PinePhone, but it’s not easily reproducible yet. I need to revisit the Pine64 aarch64 build stuff and get that to produce an image with a sane set of base packages and then add my customizations as strictly installed to the user home directory because there’s nothing I’ve done that wouldn’t work on other distributions, it’s just handy to have a good base. Especially since I’d like to swap it for something that doesn’t use SystemD.

I’ve more or less been tackling things as they occur to me with no real plan. This is probably terrible long term, but I haven’t used it enough to know what things are missing that I would also want to have.

Remaining problem areas:

• bluetooth audio is choppy (could be hardware, could be software, need to try other audio sources…)
• need an alarm app or to create a script for this
• receiving mms isn’t hooked or handled automatically (I can snoop dbus for this, but maybe there’s a real way?)
• I’m loving the ease of making custom keyboards, I need to make them easier to get to and maybe make one just for tt++
• need to start telling it to use sleep instead of just turning off the screen
• need to start polling for power information because the battery device lacks an alarm
• need to look into vlc not seeing UPnP/DLNA sources (probably dual homing issue)
• need to make scripts for hosting files/media (web & dlna) for easy transfer and use of media
• need a better way to copy and paste when using the screen

quick little note

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#pinephone

#todo

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initial pine64 ui todo

updated: 2022-12-07 23:05:48 -0500

generated: 2023-06-03