Episode: 4402
Title: HPR4402: pinetab2
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4402/hpr4402.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-26 00:17:03

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This is Hacker Public Radio episode 4402 for Tuesday the 17th of June 2025.
Today's show is entitled Pine Tab 2.
It is the 30th show of Brian in Ohio and is about 20 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is how I'm using the Pine Tab 2.
Hello Hacker Public Radio Brian in Ohio here.
I'm out from under my rock and I'm doing a show that piggybacks on the work that Swift
intended and HPR 4346 about the Pine Tab 2.
And so I've also have a Pine Tab 2 and I want to give you my impressions on the device.
Let's start off by talking a little bit about my tablet use.
I had a Samsung tablet that I've been using for a while with running Linear Joe S. It doesn't
really matter what type it is.
I will say this, putting Linear Joe S on a Samsung tablet is not a trivial endeavor.
In fact I had two identical devices and I could only get one of them to actually install
Linear Joe S. So it's not easy.
It's actually really a, it's a windows only environment that you're working in.
You can't do it under Linux.
It's not a great experience.
But anyway, I did get Linear Joe S on a Samsung tablet and I was using it for what I use
tablet for was for reading PDFs and ePubs.
I could use EMAX under termux.
Although they do have an Android EMAX version, a GTK version I think it is, but it's no
good.
It's just, the keyboard doesn't work the way I would want it and it just wasn't very
fun.
So I always reverted back to using termux in it and EMAX, EMAX in a terminal emulator which
is okay.
It's not the best way to run EMAX.
I would do some fourth development on microcontrollers, although accessing the devices via the serial
port is a challenge.
It requires installing apps that are, you can't get anywhere but from one of these places
that seems dodgy but it's probably just fine.
But it's like the serial Bluetooth terminal and it's not seamless and it doesn't, it's
not tightly integrated with EMAX which is where I would edit the text files and it would
upload to the microcontroller.
Just wasn't, not a seamless, it was okay but it wasn't great.
And I try to use the tablet as a, my travel computer to lighten my load on the road.
Things that I don't use the tablet for, I don't really consume video, media content, YouTube,
videos, anything like that, or audio consumption, I do, I use my phone for that.
I watch YouTube videos on my phone and I wish people who did computer stuff on YouTube
would use a bigger font so that you can see what's going on there.
And I listen to podcasts on my phone.
So I don't use a tablet for that stuff.
Anyway, I finally had had enough with the serial port access which is, it's a shame that
they lock everything down so much in Android.
But anyway, that's another story.
And so I bought a used Pine Tab 2 on eBay.
Pine Tab 2 is a tablet based on the Rock Chip RK 3566.
They're coming up 4GB and 8GB models, the one I got is an 8GB model.
If you don't know anything about Pine 64, it's a company that out of Hong Kong I think
they produce hardware.
And then they basically leave the community out there to develop the software for it.
And that's kind of where the Pine Tab 2 is right now.
The unofficial, official factory software is an arch Linux based distribution and here's
my impressions.
I don't know what the deal is but it seems like I'm just guessing that these guys are young
guys doing the development.
They love their rolling releases and they love glitzy desktops.
And this device needs less than that.
It needs minimal desktop and something that's more stable and get the stuff working.
So unfortunately right now the best installable OS out there is Archbase which means you're stuck
with System D and they like to promote Wayland for everything and they love to change
stuff constantly.
So I just, in fact just had an Archbase update break my EMAX installation so I had to re-install
EMAX anyway.
I don't love Arch Linux but that's where we're at with this device.
So what I did to make this device functional for me, the first thing I did was I installed
X11.
It's a better mature system.
It has all the tools you need to be able to rotate screenings, change font sizes, do
all that stuff.
Wayland might have all that but the documentation, I couldn't find it.
When you ever start looking to do anything like rotate screens you end up on an X11 site.
So I just, I installed X11 and I'm happy with that.
The other thing is that I could be wrong about this but there doesn't seem to be a great
deal of virtual keyboards out there for Wayland.
So you end up with, you end up with sort of like a Wayland KDE Plasma desktop with a
virtual keyboard when you're in tablet mode that doesn't have things like the Alt key.
Why would you have a virtual keyboard and not give you the Alt key?
It's like, all you're going to do is text messaging, I guess.
Anyway, whereas with X you can find virtual keyboards that are just like, they're like
full keyboards and they're configurable and not only that, there is some like DWM and
the suckless guys.
They do have a keyboard that's out there but it's suckless which is not, suckless is
no good because they've decided that everything needs to be recompiled constantly and who
wants to do that?
That's why I use fourth and microcontroller so I don't have to recompile everything.
So I want, I wanted a desktop that was lightweight, it uses lightweight in the sense of low system
resources needed and I wanted to be able to do configuration via config files, text
files and I don't want to have to recompile everything if I change something.
So I installed Flexbox.
Flexbox is a tiling window manager and it's very customizable in fact it forces you to
customize it because out of the box it doesn't really do anything but it's really easy
to customize it.
The documentation is great and it's easy to try stuff and it just takes, you don't even
restart Flexbox, you do a change to a config file, you reload the config file and try it
and if it works it works, it doesn't work, then you try something else.
So anyway that's what I use as my window manager was Flexbox.
I did try TWM, TWN Tango Whiskey Mike which is the X11, it's the window manager that
comes with X11 but it's a little bit hard to deal with and the config files for that
are not as friendly I don't think.
And then I thought about doing something like XFCE but really I didn't need all that
much of a desktop.
I just needed a window manager and I would install the apps and I would take care of
all the functionality of the tablet via building functions and EMAX actually.
So of course I installed EMAX, I installed EMAX Lucid which is a non GTK version, GTK
version seemed to crash more and left kind of X hanging so but the EMAX Lucid version
works just fine and I installed EMAX, if you're not an EMAX user you should be because
EMAX is a Lisbon environment that allows you to do programming but it's a Lisbon environment
that's focused on text editing and EMAX has all the mechanisms that you need to be able
to build functions to interact with X and it's easy to test and try those functions.
Just an interactive on the scratch buffer you just write some code, try it out, if it
works then you can just add it to your init file.
Also EMAX has EPUB modes, it has PDF modes, it has terminal emulator, it has org mode.
What else would a person need?
It's the one and only program you would need.
I will tell you I did try using EMAX as the window manager, there is a project out there
EXWM and it works fine if you stay in laptop mode but the minute you try to rotate the
screen you can do it but you end up there's no input, I haven't figured out how to generate
a buffer that has the virtual keyboard in it that would talk to the other buffer.
Probably a way to do it but at this point I'll just use a flux box as the window manager
and EMAX is my primary application that I use on the device.
So the virtual keyboard that I ended up installing was XVKBD, it seems like a very mature project,
pretty easy to install, some of the things don't work exactly as documented but I ended
up just installing and using it as a keyboard without a keypad and with the function keys
and it gives me everything I need in tablet mode I can use EMAX without any problem and
it's a very nice virtual keyboard system.
Although EMAX does have a PDF rendering engine, I installed XPDF, it does handle it better
than EMAX does and so I tried Ocular but again kind of system resource intensive, there
is functionality that I really didn't need and XPDF works nice and it's got a nice
little config file, you can bind keys to do different things which is nice in tablet
mode, you can one press and get page movement and stuff like that pretty easily.
So that's the main programs that I installed and of course you have all of the programs
that are installed with the quote unquote factory arch installed that's there so there are
all kinds of programs that you have access to without having to run the full KDE Plasma
desktop.
So currently where it's at, it functions okay, the in laptop mode everything works well
nice, the keyboard case that the device comes with is fairly nice, it's a little bit, if
I'm like sitting on my couch and trying to use it, sometimes I have to figure out like
put a book on my lap or something, it's a little bit, it's not as nice as a laptop but
that's fine, it works out okay.
As far as in tablet mode, so what I've done is to all the rotations that I need are
done via commands that I've built in EMAX, EMAX will just commands and they are triggered
via, you know, calling them via MetaX and then whatever, I've called these small functions
or bind them to keys, the function keys which are mostly a lot of them are unused in EMAX
and but what I didn't do and I don't really like anyway is I didn't, I'm not using
an accelerometer to rotate the tablet automatically, I don't do that on my phone either, I manually
rotate my screen mostly because it's frustrating when you're like sitting on the couch and you're
slightly at an angle and the thing decides, oh you must need landscape mode, oh no, so
I just, I rotate my screen manually mostly anyway and so that's what I've done with this
device, I've got three tablet modes, one mode rotates the screen, reduces the size in
portrait mode, reduces the size of the EMAX or whatever is there and then pops up the
virtual keyboard. In another mode, I rotate the screen but it puts whatever you're working
on in full screen mode and it expects having an external keyboard attached, I use that
actually quite a bit for one program in particular one mode, ledger mode for doing finances
in a command line CLI accounting stuff and works out nice, having a nice keyboard and the
screen up and you're looking at files vertically, it just works nice for me. I also have another
mode where rotates the screen puts the screen in full screen portrait mode but uses the keyboard,
the keyboard case that comes with the pine tab too as input device, so you'd tap the
spacebar or the arrow bars to move in, I use it just for reading and so it kind of ends up
being like a book with physical buttons and sometimes that works nice, it depends on
what you're doing. The device still crashes randomly sometimes, I'm still trying to figure
that out, at first I thought it was an EMAX thing but then I had other applications with
crash but it only happens occasionally so it's hard to really figure out what's going
on there, it forces me to save stuff more often and the device does have good battery life,
the Wi-Fi works, I guess maybe that wasn't working earlier on but works fine now, Bluetooth
doesn't work to strange but I don't understand how they don't have, how they can access these
devices, like these manufacturers make devices with Bluetooth but there's nobody knows how
the stack works, I don't get it but that's, I'm not there to develop stuff there, it's just
weird but what's nice is that now I have easy access to the serial ports with standard tools,
I can use AVR-Dude, I can use my, I can talk to the fourth interpreter on the microcontroller,
any EMAX just using the regular serial terminal modes and the permissions just takes writing
a UDEV rule and you have access as a normal user, it's just stuff that Android unfortunately
lacks and I get it, they're selling devices to people who have known nothing but it would
be nice to be able to have an Android device that for somebody who does know something and
is willing to accept the responsibility of using the device fully, it'd be nice to be
able to do all those things but that's life and that's why I'm here reason this pint
tab too, for the future what I'd like to do, I'd love to install Slackware on this device,
much more stable OS, no rolling releases, just give me stuff that works and you can use
whatever desktop environment and they don't have system D which is I think overkill for
a device like this, it just drives me crazy, system D is great if you're like spinning
up virtual servers at a million of them and you want to paralyze it, paralyze everything
but for this device I don't need that, I'd rather have a CISB in it and simple script files
that I can read and even write my own just by looking at a couple of examples. I'd like
to maybe spiffy up the desktop a little bit more, just make it a little bit more attractive
but it's not hugely important. I'm still working on functionality, things like the brightness
control, eventually I'll figure out how to get the audio working but I don't really
listen to anything on this device so it's not a huge, it's not a huge, hugely important to
me. So anyway that's my impressions of the pint tab too, a nice device, not perfect
and it's, but I like it, I like the fact that I have better control of what it does and
it does what I need it to do. It's probably not for everybody if, you know, just not and
so that's fine, that's why they're out, that's why, that's what's good about things like
pint, pint 64 and about free and open source things that, you know, allows you the customisation
and allows you to control, allows you to learn stuff which is fun. So anyway, I'll stop
there. I will, I will also in the show notes post one of the E-Lis tablet commands just
to see if somebody's interested, you can see what it looks like. I'm not an E-Lis expert
but it's just like anything, just keep playing away with it, learning a little bit, doing
some research, read some manuals and you can figure it out. If you take the time and read
you can figure it out, but I can't figure out why people would want to use a rolling release
and KDE plasma on a device like this, but that's what the main developer wants, that's
fine. It's nice that I can get away from it so mostly. So with that, I'll sign off here,
I'd like to remind everybody that ideological purity never survives contact with the enemy.
Bye-bye.
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