Using the uConsole as a daily driver (part time)

uConsole
1

Hi folks,

TLDR: What’s your OS set up as a mini laptop?

I mostly got the uConsole for its looks, I mean look at it… I was spending too much time on my iPad mini (games/ Reddit / other news) so I ripped the cord, sold it and got the uConsole CM5 Lite 16GB. I figured I might as well learn something interesting.

Long term, if I stick to it, I’ll experiment with Hacker Gadgets stuff, etc, but in the meantime, I am a bit struggling to get my unit to the state of a “mini laptop that I can use on a whim”.

I’ve tried all Rex’s distros, all worked, but I need to get to some usable baseline in terms of UI. Proper (not squished) resolution, nice proportional fonts scaled with the overall scale/resolution, little QoL things like that.

I “know computers”, been at since late 80’s, currently on a Mac, comfortable with the CLI/brew/apt, but very not familiar with Wayland, X11, etc. I just want a nice screen to actually start hacking on the device itself. E.g. I installed Trixie (full), then installed KDE Plasma, and now my login screen is rotated left. I’ve consulted with the latest Codex, Opus, Haiku, but it’s all just a bunch of “xrendr this”, “systemctl that”, a bit cumbersome.

So far, I got the fast Sandisk SD, installed an external antenna, tried a couple of distros, and that’s that.

Thanks!

2

Maybe @Astrox can help. He’s using the uConsole as his daily driver, too.

1 Like
3

I’ve been really enjoying running DMS/niri on top of Rex’s Trixie image. https://danklinux.com/ . I’m running it on a stock cm4 w/nvme board. The boot time is slightly slower but once it’s up I haven’t hit any performance issues

It’s a DE with infinite scrolling windows arranged horizontally with deep configurability and robust keybinds. It really cuts down on the amount of mouse movement that you need to do. I’ve been finding the UI to be decent and multiple different font categories that can be sized separately.

There’s been a few funny things with the battery monitor and power menu but no deal breakers and I’m sure I can work it out but haven’t gotten to it yet.

Edited to add: I got around the rotation issue for the log in screen by editing the config file for the greeter to autolog in to my preferred DE.

2 Likes
4

I use River, a Wayland compositor, with the river-bsp-layout window manager. My terminal emulator, foot, uses the configuration line font=Mx437 DOS/V re. ANK24:style=Regular:size=18, Unscii:size=12 to set a large font from a Japanese DOS, falling back to Unscii (which only looks good at certain sizes) for Unicode rendering. In Firefox some pages are zoomed in to cope with the small screen size, and some pages are zoomed out to cope with the small screen resolution. I am fortunate enough to not need more scaling than that. I used to use Unscii at size 12 for everything but have had a harder time seeing it over the years so I moved up.

xrandr(1) is indeed the correct tool to use for rotation in X11 (and on Wayland I use wlr-randr(1)) but many popular desktop environments don’t expose a /bin/init or AUTOEXEC.BAT equivalent and make it difficult to run a shell command on startup. I don’t know how to help with Plasma. River’s configuration file is an executable file, so I have the command line wlr-randr --output DSI-1 --transform 270 # ClockworkPi uConsole workaround in there towards the end and it works fine for me, at least until I swap framebuffers which requires me to run it again.

5

Hello, I had the same issue with the login being rotated left. To fix it I believe I had to edit /usr/share/sddm/scripts/Xsetup, and then add xrandr --output DSI-2 –rotate right at the end. I don’t remember exactly which file or folder or whatever but I hope this helps.

6

I’m facing problems I don’t want to solve on my main laptop. I forced myself to use the uConsole as daily driver and it’s amazing.
For long typing sessions I use an external keyboard. I also bring with me an HDMI cable to connect to an external monitor when available.

As OS I’m running NixOS (btw) with Sway. Which is the reason I forced myself with the uConsole: to learn the OS and then unify the configs with my main.
Sway (but every tilting window manager) I think is quite good because you’ll almost never use the mouse, which gives a poor experience compared to the keyboard.
Also if you like using the keyboard vim keybindings in firefox works great (in particular the f shortcut to click links without mouse, try it :slight_smile: ).
If you’ll stick with using the mini trackball consider the mod with the trackpad.

Regarding the mods, the nvme upgrade from HG makes the difference.

As for some use cases:

Gaming
If you change to 4k kernel you can run a lot of emulators.. PPSSPP runs fine.
For “heavy” games Moonlight/sunshine works quite good if you have something to stream from.

Making stuff
Prusa slicer, Freecad, Kicad, inkscape..

Studying, notes
Logseq for notes, calcurse for calendar, and Octave or jupiterlab as pimped calculator.

Navigation
you can run waydroid and android apps like Osmand

2 Likes
7

I’m using a devterm, not a uConsole. But it’s become my daily driver for like 90% of what I use a computer for.

I use Rex’s image, as I’m a long time debian user. I started with the light image so I could set everything up the way I wanted. For the UI, I set up greetd with tuigreet to manage the login, and I also use sway. I went with a tiling compositor because I figured the small screen size means one, maybe two windows on a desktop. To support this I also configure sway to maximise screen real estate:

  • No border or window titles (default_border none in the config file)
  • waybar for the status bar, configured to be hidden all the time unless cmd is pressed
  • Default orientation horizontal, which is useful on the very wide devterm screen but less useful on uConsole I guess
  • sway will take care of the display orientation for you. For the devterm I set up the output like output DSI-1 mode 480x1280@60Hz transform 90, but uConsole will have a different size and maybe? transform 270.

Some other useful stuff for sway:

  • fuzzel to launch applications. I like this because it learns which ones you use frequently and puts them at the top of the menu.
  • bemoji as a character picker to insert things like emoji. :high_voltage:
  • kanshi for dynamic display configuration. Plug in an external display and kanshi will automatically activate it and turn off the built in display. Unplug and it switches back.
  • I use Iosevka fonts. The fixed width is lovely, compact and very readable at small sizes. I also use the quasi-proportional variants for proportional fonts in emacs, but haven’t experimented much using them system-wide.

I’m a heavy emacs user, and auto start an emacs client at login. After that I’ve got firefox, libreoffice, krita, and have been experimenting with stellarium and kstars to drive my telescope.

1 Like
8

what do you use for the $mod key on sway?

I use
bindsym --to-code $mod+i exec flatpak run it.mijorus.smile

as it allows to visually search

oh, that nice, ty.

9

I’m not sure this will be useful feedback but frankly the device was not feasible as an every day one for me until I got Vileer’s NVME board. Finally, with a 16GB CM5, SSD, and USB 3, the responsiveness and speed is enough to meet my expectations. Off an SD and with only USB 2 transfer, some nights I hated the thing.

1 Like
10

Alt

having both left and right makes combos easier letting you to always have two hands for typing. If you have used emacs before you sould be fine anyway XD