PineNote Development/Apps
This page lists applications and tweaks for the PineNote.
Development
Here are some resources you may find helpful in learning to develop on embedded Linux devices:
- Great YouTube series introducing you to the kernel and lower-level components of Linux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiZ05pnHZqM
- https://embetronicx.com/
- https://bootlin.com/training/
- https://www.nand2tetris.org
Emulator recommendation for developing and testing PineNote apps: https://github.com/michaelshiel/picom-epaper
The PineNote is a specialized device, mainly due to the eink display having unique display and refresh characteristics. Finding and configuring apps that work well sometimes requires a lot of tweaking and a lot exploring, especially for applications containing fast screen updates and animations, as well as depend on a lot of colors.
Here is a video showing the performance of a few applications.
Desktop Environments
Sway
- WinkShell "Collected applications, configurations and scripts for using a wlroots-based compositor with an EPD (aka e-ink display). Currently supports Sway only."
Getting touch + pen working on sway
If you notice that touching the screen works, but when you use the pen the mouse coordinates are inverted, don't worry! We can fix it! Set rockchip_ebc.panel_reflection=0 on boot (see this page for more info). Add the following line to your sway config:
# This line rotates the mouse input by 180 degrees. See https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/1.11.3/absolute_axes.html input "type:table_tool" calibration_matrix -1 0 1 0 -1 1
Gnome
Gnome on wayland runs nicely on the PineNote. However, a slightly patched version of mutter is required at the moment.
- See this repository for .deb packages and patch/compile files: Patched Debian Mutter for Bookworm
- The ready-to-use Debian image provides a pre-configured GNOME environment], with specific GNOME configurations found here
- A GNOME extension is being developed that provides access to some of the ebc-specific driver options.
- PNEink is a GNOME Theme for use with the PineNote
GTK3
High contrast style for eink-devices can be found here.
GTK4
High contrast style for eink-devices can be found here.
Application support on the PineNote
System-Control
A rust-based dbus service is being developed to enable easy, system-wide control over some of the PineNote-specific settings by users and programs (e.g., triggering global screen refreshes, changing waveforms, enabling/disabling dithering). Requires this kernel.
Notetaking
Xournal++
Works well. The development version and unrelease 1.2 version offers repainting-related optimisations and supports PDF highlighting as well as links. To remove artefacts from the eraser set the eraser cursor's visibility to Never via Preferences -> Stylus -> Eraser Visibility.
Xournal++ uses anti-aliasing and interpolation, which do not work well for the A1 waveform. Mitigations include using either dithering or black-and-white mode in the ebc driver. https://gitlab.com/hrdl/pinenote-shared/-/blob/main/patches/xournalpp/0001-Disable-anti-aliasing-and-use-NEAREST-interpolation-.patch is an outdated patch that used to work well without changing the bw mode.
Pre-compiled Debian packages with some of the PineNote-related modifications and support for triggering global refreshes after scrolling using the dbus service (see above) can be found here
Obsidian
Works well, EInk-Theme can be found here.
Web Browsing
Firefox
Pretty good experience! Enabling GPU acceleration is helpful.
GPU Acceleration in Firefox
See 0ccam's notes here.
Cloud
syncthing
High contrast theme can be found here.