Ebrius Disputatio

I was a Debian Linux Man, for many a decade or two. That's why I thought running Mobian Linux on my Phone would be ideal. It was not. There seems to be much disarray in the community Mobian and I departed ways. The community Manjaro, based on, if not identical to the ManjaroArm developers, are a stable lot and I find their distribution to be quite well. However, Manjaro reminds me so much of Arch Linux, that I had to find out if there was an Arch Linux port for the Pine Phone. There was, and happily, stil is. I've been hanging around this group, they all seem to be interconnected with the Pine64 community of projects. Many of the same names can be found in all the other Pine Phone development exchanges, but before I continue, I've found myself drawn to, and using the Arch Linux port or OS for the Pine Phone. The community seems friendly and helpful enough. More so than any others and they're very competent and humble to boot. I was welcomed warmly at first, but lately, I've sensed a bit of cooling. I can't imagine what it is, except that I am who I am and my politics are well known, since I use the moniker of agentcasey all over the internet, and it's no secret that I hate socialist and communist and would gladly see the back of them forever. That's all I can come up with.

Nevertheless, the Arch Linux mobile community is still one of my favorite haunts for learning more. I mostly, like to learn where the kernel repositories are so that, in my experiments and use, I have the modules and functions built in to the kernel for my specifications. I have that now. In searching more I now have ways of compiling almost, perfect kernels, identical, in every way to the distribution's, with only my slight modifications.

One of my pet peeves, with the ARM developers, is that they seem to be oblivious of the usage of gpm the console mouse daemon that allows for the use of one's mouse in the virtual terminals, the world with out xorg or X Window or whatever it's called today. GPM allows for copy and pasting withing the terminal space and obviously is an asset in the absence of X. I don't know why so many Linux kernels built for ARM boards are lacking the function. It's a simple enough measure to enable legacy mouse and that's that. Anyway, I'm usually forced to recompile kernels for this purpose and it isn't always easy when I don't have the specific repository, from whence a particular kernel is sprung. I'm sure it's my own ineptitude, but whenever I get a kernel with the similar numbers and compile my modules, even when I have success, I encounter error messages about unknown symbols and such. Long story short I no longer have those instances, with my Pine Phones or my Raspberry Pi's running Arm. Now, I run the latest stable kernels and if I choose, the latest Release Candidate, RC, kernels. Sweet.

I hear a lot of chatter, which means I really read a lot of, for lack of a better word, chatter, mostly minutia, from myriad users about why they're not using their Pine Phone as their daily driver. My phone works just fine, I always find new ways to improve it and I realize that this particular phone is still a work in progress and that the user's manual, is still being written. My keyboard works, There's talk about not attaching devices to the USB-C port of the phone but I discount these observations. You see, once the phone is attached to the keyboard there becomes two USB-C ports. One on the phone and another on the keyboard. I still need to hook my phone up to the hub so that I can use the Ethernet connection so I connect the ensemble as usual, through the original port of the phone. It doesn't work if it's plugged into the keyboard anyway. Now at first there are error messages about the charger or something or other, but I find that once I disconnect the hub cable and reattach it and hit the keys on the keyboard a couple of times everything gets normal. Perfectly normal for a development device. My battery stays charge up for as long as the connection lasts. I'm fine, and so is my hardware. For the life of me, I still don't know what all the fuss is about.

Anyhow, thanks for reading, I'll be copying and formatting this very same post for my Gemini and Gopher servers. Thanks again and I'll endeavor to create more content and hopefully some interesting ones. Adieu.