Using the uConsole as a daily driver (part time)

uConsole
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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!

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

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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.

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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.