I am now using the Devterm R-01 for, what, 11 months or so as my more or
less primary computer, which has lead to the "discovery" of some problems:
- The screen real estate with its widescreen format and small size isn't
ideal for a traditional desktop
- It is somewhat slow
- The trackball is still a crime against humanity
What i also noticed:
- The screen real estate is absolutely OK for shell based work
- The keyboard, while relatively small. is still rather pleasant to
type on
- The battery run time is really good, normally i get a full workday
with note taking, mails and so on out of it... even the extended nethack
round after work doesn't drain it completely.
- In the console, running in framebuffer mode, the display is rather
pleasant on the eyes
So, some time ago i stopped using X and settled for a entirely console
based workflow (as any sane person would do in 2024... right?).
Little improvements
As the R01 is a somewhat experimental system, using a RISC-V chip and was
put to market rather hastily by Clockwork Pi it has some... pecularities
in its supplied OS image. Thankfully, there is also a quiet active
community around it so there are tips on improvements to be found on
the forum. In the forum i discovered the work auf the user katmai, who
has created a nice toolbox of improvements that makes the life with the
R01 way better, he even made his collectian available on github [1].
With this toolset the R01 boots now up in seconds, has a nice console
font, checkable batery status from the console and many more niceties.
Software that i settled on
Email - mutt
File manager - nnn
Newsreader - slrn
RSS - newsboat
Calender - calcurse
PDF reader - green
Image viewer - fim
Browser - elinks
Media - mpv (works reasonable with low res videos)
Gopher - gopher
And then there is also the plethora of various UNIX tools like troff,
awk etc. that i use for some tasks, some installed games and such things
like dictd that are just nice little helpers.
Using only the erminal has taught me one thing: To really appreciate
the modularity end empowerment of the user a Unix (-ish) OS gives you,
you HAVE to dive into the terminal. Having (normally quiet good) manuals
for every command right there and the ability to glue programs together
to form your own solutions is a really fascinating experience.
While viewing images or videos on the Devterm was never a big problem
(besides the lack of computational oomph), viewing PDF's required a bit
of searching and experimentation. While there are some console based
PDF viewers out there, the only one i managed to successfully compile
and get to run was the since about 14 years unmaintained green[2]
pdf viewer. After getting it to run i faced the little problem that
the framebuffer of the R01 seemingly rotates everything 90 degrees
anticlockwise. With mpv or fim this is no problem (you simply rotate
the image back), but green doesn't have this buildin function. So i
put together a little script utilizing pdftk to rotate the pdf before
handing it to green:
%<------------------------------
#!/bin/sh
if [ -e $1 ]; then
pdftk $1 cat 1-endeast output /tmp/$1.pdf sudo SDL_NOMOUSE=1 green
/tmp/$1.pdf rm /tmp/$1.pdf
else
echo "$1 existiert nicht"
fi %<-------------------------------
I often need to scan documents that i receive in paper form to pdf, so,
after wrangling around with sane and img2pdf i decided to hack together
a little script that streamlines the process to something as comfortable
as using a GUI document scanner:
%<-------------------------------
#!/bin/sh
if [ -n $1 ]; then
SCANFILE=$1
else
SCANFILE=/home/ralf/scan/scan_`date '+%s'`.pdf
fi
if [ ! -d "/tmp/scan" ]; then
mkdir /tmp/scan
fi
while true; do
echo "scanne..." scanimage --format=jpeg --output-file
/tmp/scan/`date '+%s'`.jpg --progress
echo "Eine weitere Seite scannen (j/n)?" read answer
if [ "$answer" = "n" ]; then
break
fi
done
img2pdf /tmp/scan/*.jpg -o $SCANFILE.pdf && cowsay "Erledigt! Die PDF
Datei liegt unter $SCANFILE"
rm /tmp/scan/*.jpg
%<------------------------------
For writing documents, reports and so on i settled on groff. Yeah,
it has a bit of a leaning curve to it but all in all it statisfies my
needs for creating documents. Luckily, today most of the documents i
exhange with others are in PDF format which can easily created with the
groff toolchain.
The only downside i get with this setup is, that the modern web is
nearly impossible to use, at least the JS heavy sites are oout of the
question. But... is this really a downside? I could now dive into a
rant about the modern web, tracking and so on, but i think we all know
the drill.
To conclude this text let me say that i don't advocate to replicate
this setup. It works for me with my particular messy brain and counters
very well my tendency to procrastinate away on time sucking websites
(now i am procratinating by studying manpages and tinkering with shell
scripts...). All in all it is a nice experiment that i am now using for
a while and perhaps will use at least for a while in the future. Perhaps
in a month, two months or a year i will be back on a more normal system,
who knows?
