Bookworm 6.6.y for the uConsole and DevTerm

I had the DevTerm and an A04 and that thing ran hot too.

I found an answer to the input/rotation problem using wayland and VNC. Took a lot of digging, and sifting through plenty of unhelpful suggestions. Itā€™s apparently not a bug in wayfire/wayland, but a poorly documented decision with broken defaults (and no indication itā€™s a problem, except for lots of people posting on the internet with the issue) that has been that way for a while and will probably never be fixed. Good times.

Anyhow, the answer was here:

referring to the documentation at:

The takeaway is that the config file needs to be updated to add a specific section and entry.

For the Devterm (and presumably uConsole), the config file is at:
~/.config/wayfire.ini

And the new lines to include are (specifically for our devices):

[input-device:wlr_virtual_pointer_v1]
output = DSI-1

I donā€™t think it matters where you put them. I put those lines after the last [input-device ā€¦] section in my file.

The section name identifies that weā€™re talking about the virtual pointer which will get used in VNC (and probably other remote utilities?) And the output entry links it to our physical display, so it does the proper rotation translation based on the settings of the display. Without this config entry, it apparently takes bogus defaults and completely ignores the rotation.

This might be a good thing to add to the image at some point, @Rex. It would only affect people using VNC (and probably other stuff that uses the virtual pointer), but itā€™s such an obscure fix that it would save time and frustration, even if itā€™s only for a few folks. :wink:


Bonus info:

Along the way, it educated me in wayland stuff a bit, since I was unfamiliar with it. Thereā€™s a utility called wlr-randr which is the wayland equivalent of xrandr. Just running it with no params will show the name of your display and various properties.

But you can also change the resolution, orientation, and scale with it. It wonā€™t hurt your physical display to change these values, but it will affect how the screen is shown and can be cut off, etc. When remoting in with VNC, you can use it to get a larger display than the usual 1280x480.

This gives extra height and sets it to a more standard display mode (on the device itself, the top half of the screen wonā€™t show).

wlr-randr --output DSI-1 --custom-mode 720x1280

or go full HD with

wlr-randr --output DSI-1 --custom-mode 1080x1920

I didnā€™t find --scale to be very useful, but it applies the scale to both width and height equally. If you want to zoom in you can go with something like

wlr-randr --output DSI-1 --custom-mode 1080x1920 --scale 1.5
or zoom out with something like
wlr-randr --output DSI-1 --custom-mode 1080x1920 --scale .75

In any case, putting those missing lines in the config file did the trick, and would probably be helpful for others.

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Iā€™ll add that and it will be in the next build.

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Iā€™ve installed ClockworkPi-CM4-Bookworm-Lite-6.6.41.img.xz and noticed two issues with it on my uconsole:

  • wifi become ~5x less sensitive (like it is using another antenna connector?)
  • upower shows 4x more power consumption (3.5W against 0.7W on stock Raspbian) ā€” it could be a upower issue of course.

Has anyone try powertop to tune power consumption?
What discharging rate should I expect to be normal?

UPDATE: yeahā€¦ It looks like upower on the stock Raspbian shows some irrelevant data. It shows ā€œenergy-fullā€ as 8 Wh, but it should be more like 25 Wh.

How do you have the external antenna connected? The stock distro only utilizes the PCB antenna on the CM4. This Bookworm image enables the u.fl port on the CM4 for the external antenna and if you have the stock antenna stuck to the metal case youā€™ll have interference problems.

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I have found that ibus does not want to work rationally on Wayfire. You will need to boot into X11 to get Chinese to work.

Hi, how to map ABXY keys for the proper usage e.g. in TIC-80 games?

UPDATE: found this method - trying it now

UPDATE2: it works with TIC80

If this was already mentioned on this thread, I apologize for the repeat. I noticed a lot of whine noise on the latest CM4 Bookworm image for Devterm with full battery and charger still connected and I vaguely remembered a fix for the stock image years agoā€¦

It was this from @yatli:

Thereā€™s a bunch of other stuff in the same repo that might be useful, but I suspect most of the other issues are taken care of by the image itself (like the printer, fan, seems to work already, etc.) Also, I think most of the other things are for A04 and A06, but the battery/charging whine fix seems to work on CM4 as well, unless Iā€™m imagining things. :slight_smile:

Anyhow, itā€™s a quick and easy build, and install, and itā€™s just another service to start up to run behind the scenes and tone down the whine. Not sure if it should be included in the Bookworm build, but thought it might be useful to share here in case anyone else was frustrated with the noise.

(Based on other posts to the forum, the whine noise isnā€™t an indication thatā€™s something is wrong and going to break. But even if itā€™s not causing damage that doesnā€™t make it any less annoying.)

Wow! Okayā€¦ Thatā€™s something new. Thank you.

That was one part of the problem. I was using the PCB antenna and the external antenna was stuck to the metal case.

Now I enabled ant2 on both configurations. External antenna is connected to the u.fl port on the CM4.

The SIGNAL displayed by nmcli dev wifi list shows something like 15 dB lower values in Bookworm for the same hardware configuration. I had to connect a better external antenna to have something to measure at all. But it could be just a measurement issue. Download speed values are mostly equal.

That could also have something to do with the binary blobs for the Wi-Fi that ship with the old image and kernel, compared to the newer blobs that got pulled down when I built the new bookworm kernel and image.

What would take to port this to the CM4S? PotatoManiaā€™s Arch Image work great, but Iā€™m trying to get a debian distribution. I was hopping that this image would work since it can use the external Wifi, but it works the same as the official one: without wireless and sound.

Iā€™m willing to work to get it done, and I did some (naive) things such as trying to port Archā€™s wireless drivers and overlays, but Iā€™m inexperienced with doing this kind of stuff, so if I someone can point me towards the right direction it would be great.

you can add the overlays from the arch kernel to the one from my github and recompile the kernel. then set the necessary overlays.

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I finally built my uConsole and confirmed that this was needed on it as well as the DevTerm. Without the wayfire.ini change, the mouse directions were rotated, but with the change it works as it should.

thanksā€¦Iā€™ll look into that, wish you a good day, sir!

My bookworm image did some updates yesterday, and now it does not connect to any wifi.

It gives me this prompt for a passwerd, and even when I enter the correct password, it keeps brining this prompt.

Update, this doesnā€™t happen on other systems, that haveā€™t been updated.

My daily driver image is fully updated and I just updated a fresh flashed sd and iā€™m not having any issues. Did you install any extra WiFi stuff?

I had macchanger installed. I removed it just now, and It seems to have fixed the problem.
At least I was able to connect.
Would be a shame to lose the ability to randomize mac addresses. Macchanger still works on images that werenā€™t updated.

All the updates come from Raspberry Pi except the kernel and software just for the uConsole.
If Raspberry Pi changes how something works it will get updated in this image. That includes if they break a workflow.

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I get that. I will be testing another solution later.
Thanks for your increadible work on the images! They are fantastic!

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Thank you, I appreciate it!