Month: September 2018

Fedora 29 Beta on GPD Pocket 2

~ Matt Smith ~ Leave a comment

#fedora #gpd #pocket2 #linux

Of course, immediately after I get Fedora 28 running on my new Pocket 2, what happens ?  Fedora 29 Beta is released!  So, here are my notes on getting Fedora 29 Beta running on the GPD Pocket 2.

Installing Fedora 29 Beta

  1. Obtain the x86_64 Live ISO and write it to a USB drive
  2. Boot from the USB drive using F12 to access the boot menu
  3. The desktop will begin rotated sideways (just like with Fedora 28), but we can fix this.  Bring up Display Settings and do the following:
    • Select “Orientation” = “Portrait Left”, noting this gives an error
    • Select “Resolution” = 864×1152 (the lowest resolution)
    • Select original resolution of 1200×1920 again. This clears the error and activates the “Apply” button.
    • Click Apply and display should be properly oriented.
  4. Perform the Fedora installation like normal
  5. Reboot
  6. The screen orientation will be sideways again.
  7. Run through initial setup (sideways) to create user account
  8. Once logged in as your new user, use the steps above in item 3 to correct the screen orientation
  9. If you find the font and other UI elements to be too small on this 7″ screen,. then you’ll want to enable fractional scaling. Enter the following at the terminal: 
    gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"
  10. Log out, log in, and enter the Display Settings again. You should now see an option for “Scale”. I find 150% to be the smallest comfortable on this small screen.
  11. If you want bigger, edit “~/.config/monitors.xml” and set the scale to 2 
    <scale>2</scale>
  12. The font can also be scaled up by installing gnome-tweaks, running “Tweaks” and changing “Fonts->Scaling Factor”
  13. Open a terminal, and copy the monitor configuration so that the GDM login screen also has proper orientation and scaling: 
    sudo cp ~/.config/monitors.xml /var/lib/gdm/.config/
  14. We can correct the orientation of the text console during boot by modifying a kernel parameter in Grub.
    • Edit /etc/default/grub to modify the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX variable, appending “fbcon=rotate:1” to the end
    • grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg
  15. Reboot

What’s left ?

  • The plymouth screens during boot are still sideways, including the LUKS password prompt.  There appears to be upstream patches to correct this.

Fedora 28 on the GPD Pocket 2

~ Matt Smith ~ 1 Comment

Update 2019-09-29 10:00 ET: Post initially stated “F7” to enter BIOS.  Corrected to state “DEL” is used to enter BIOS.

Yesterday my GPD Pocket 2 arrived.  So what’s the first thing I had to do with it?  Well, install Fedora 28, of course!  So far, it runs great (I’m typing this blog post on it right now!), but there were a few bugs to work through.

img_20180924_214702This 7″ UMPC comes with Windows 10 by default, but that was pretty easy to fix.  I grabbed the standard x86_64 Fedora Workstation ISO from https://fedoraproject.org , and wrote it to a USB drive.  When booting the device, F12 (Fn+’=’) will show you a boot menu, and you can boot off the USB. (DEL will get you into the BIOS settings).

Once booting, you will immediately notice everything is sideways – the text boot, the GDM login, and the desktop.  Unless you are comfortable working sideways, we’ll need a temporary fix for the install, and a better fix once installed.

img_20180924_212549

Using the Live Desktop, open a terminal (yes, we are still sideways) and enter the following to bind a hotkey to the “Rotate Screen” Wayland action:

$> gsettings set org.gnome.mutter.keybindings rotate-monitor "['XF86RotateWindows', '<Control>F8']"

Now you can press CTL-F8 (don’t forget to include Fn) to cycle through screen angles until things look right (I had to press 7 times).

Now, go ahead and install Fedora, everything should be normal – until your first boot, when everything is sideways again.

Unfortunately, the “Orientation” option in the Display Settings doesn’t appear to work.  Or at least it didn’t until I tried a very low resolution, and then toggled back to the higher resolution.  To simplify this for anyone reading this blog, just create a file named ~/.config/monitors.xml, and add the following content:

<monitors version="2">
<configuration>
<logicalmonitor>
<x>0</x>
<y>0</y>
<scale>1</scale>
<primary>yes</primary>
<transform>
<rotation>right</rotation>
<flipped>no</flipped>
</transform>
<monitor>
<monitorspec>
<connector>eDP-1</connector>
<vendor>unknown</vendor>
<product>unknown</product>
<serial>unknown</serial>
</monitorspec>
<mode>
<width>1200</width>
<height>1920</height>
<rate>60.022136688232422</rate>
</mode>
</monitor>
</logicalmonitor>
</configuration>
</monitors>

Log out, log in, and your desktop should now be the proper orientation.  If you want to correct the GDM login too (hey, maybe you like it sideways!), simple copy the monitors.xml file into /var/lib/gdm/.config/ and restart GDM (or just reboot).

You will probably also want to use the Gnome Tweak Tool to change the font “scaling factor”, under the “Fonts” section.

Screenshot from 2018-09-25 11-41-42

I have not yet figured out how to properly orient the textual boot console – and this includes the Plymouth LUKS login.  If anyone has any ideas on that, please leave a comment below.

But aside from that one remaining annoyance, so far this looks like it’ll be a great little Fedora device!