In September of this year, I visited Kenya to attend the State of the Map conference. I spent six nights in the capital Nairobi, two nights in Mombasa, and one night on a train. I was very happy with the visa process being smooth and quick. Furthermore, I stayed at the Nairobi Transit Hotel with other attendees, with Ibtehal from Bangladesh as my roommate. One of the memorable moments was the time I spent at a local coffee shop nearby. We used to go there at midnight, despite the grating in the shops suggesting such adventures were unsafe. Fortunately, nothing bad happened, and we were rewarded with a fun time with the locals.
The coffee shop Ibtehal and me used to visit during the midnight
Grating at a chemist shop in Mombasa, Kenya
The country lies on the equator, which might give the impression of extremely hot temperatures. However, Nairobi was on the cooler side (10 25 degrees Celsius), and I found myself needing a hoodie, which I bought the next day. It also served as a nice souvenir, as it had an outline of the African map printed on it.
I also bought a Safaricom SIM card for 100 shillings and recharged it with 1000 shillings for 8 GB internet with 5G speeds and 400 minutes talk time.
A visit to Nairobi s Historic Cricket Ground
On this trip, I got a unique souvenir that can t be purchased from the market a cricket jersey worn in an ODI match by a player. The story goes as follows: I was roaming around the market with my friend Benson from Nairobi to buy a Kenyan cricket jersey for myself, but we couldn t find any. So, Benson had the idea of visiting the Nairobi Gymkhana Club, which used to be Kenya s main cricket ground. It has hosted some historic matches, including the 2003 World Cup match in which Kenya beat the mighty Sri Lankans and the record for the fastest ODI century by Shahid Afridi in just 37 balls in 1996.
Although entry to the club was exclusively for members, I was warmly welcomed by the staff. Upon reaching the cricket ground, I met some Indian players who played in Kenyan leagues, as well as Lucas Oluoch and Dominic Wesonga, who have represented Kenya in ODIs. When I expressed interest in getting a jersey, Dominic agreed to send me pictures of his jersey. I liked his jersey and collected it from him. I gave him 2000 shillings, an amount suggested by those Indian players.
Me with players at the Nairobi Gymkhana Club
Cricket pitch at the Nairobi Gymkhana Club
A view of the cricket ground inside the Nairobi Gymkhana Club
Scoreboard at the Nairobi Gymkhana cricket ground
Giraffe Center in Nairobi
Kenya is known for its safaris and has no shortage of national parks. In fact, Nairobi is the only capital in the world with a national park. I decided not to visit one, as most of them were expensive and offered multi-day tours, and I didn t want to spend that much time in the wildlife.
Instead, I went to the Giraffe Center in Nairobi with Pragya and Rabina. The ticket cost 1500 Kenyan shillings (1000 Indian rupees). In Kenya, matatus - shared vans, usually decorated with portraits of famous people and play rap songs - are the most popular means of public transport. Reaching the Giraffe Center from our hotel required taking five matatus, which cost a total of 150 shillings, and a 2 km walk. The journey back was 90 shillings, suggesting that we didn t find the most efficient route to get there. At the Giraffe Center, we fed giraffes and took photos.
A matatu with a Notorious BIG portrait.
Inside the Giraffe Center
Train ride from Nairobi to Mombasa
I took a train from Nairobi to Mombasa. The train is known as the SGR Train, where SGR refers to Standard Gauge Railway. The journey was around 500 km. M-Pesa was the only way to make payment for pre-booking the train ticket, and I didn t have an M-Pesa account. Pragya s friend Mary helped facilitate the payment. I booked a second-class ticket, which cost 1500 shillings (1000 Indian rupees).
The train was scheduled to depart from Nairobi at 08:00 hours in the morning and arrive in Mombasa at 14:00 hours. The security check at the station required scanning our bags and having them sniffed by sniffer dogs. I also fell victim to a scam by a security official who offered to help me get my ticket printed, only to later ask me to get him some coffee, which I politely declined.
Before boarding the train, I was treated to some stunning views at the Nairobi Terminus station. It was a seating train, but I wished it were a sleeper train, as I was sleep-deprived. The train was neat and clean, with good toilets. The train reached Mombasa on time at around 14:00 hours.
SGR train at Nairobi Terminus.
Interior of the SGR train
Arrival in Mombasa
Mombasa Terminus station.
Mombasa was a bit hotter than Nairobi, with temperatures reaching around 30 degrees Celsius. However, that s not too hot for me, as I am used to higher temperatures in India. I had booked a hostel in the Old Town and was searching for a hitchhike from the Mombasa Terminus station. After trying for more than half an hour, I took a matatu that dropped me 3 km from my hostel for 200 shillings (140 Indian rupees). I tried to hitchhike again but couldn t find a ride.
I think I know why I couldn t get a ride in both the cases. In the first case, the Mombasa Terminus was in an isolated place, so most of the vehicles were taxis or matatus while any noncommercial cars were there to pick up friends and family. If the station were in the middle of the city, there would be many more car/truck drivers passing by, thus increasing my possibilities of getting a ride. In the second case, my hostel was at the end of the city, and nobody was going towards that side. In fact, many drivers told me they would love to give me a ride, but they were going in some other direction.
Finally, I took a tuktuk for 70 shillings to reach my hostel, Tulia Backpackers. It was 11 USD (1400 shillings) for one night. The balcony gave a nice view of the Indian Ocean. The rooms had fans, but there was no air conditioning. Each bed also had mosquito nets. The place was walking distance of the famous Fort Jesus. Mombasa has had more Islamic influence compared to Nairobi and also has many Hindu temples.
The balcony at Tulia Backpackers Hostel had a nice view of the ocean.
A room inside the hostel with fans and mosquito nets on the beds
Visiting White Sandy Beaches and Getting a Hitchhike
Visiting Nyali beach marked my first time ever at a white sand beach. It was like 10 km from the hostel. The next day, I visited Diani Beach, which was 30 km from the hostel. Going to Diani Beach required crossing a river, for which there s a free ferry service every few minutes, followed by taking a matatu to Ukunda and then a tuk-tuk. The journey gave me a glimpse of the beautiful countryside of Kenya.
Nyali beach is a white sand beach
This is the ferry service for crossing the river.
During my return from Diani Beach to the hostel, I was successful in hitchhiking. However, it was only a 4 km ride and not sufficient to reach Ukunda, so I tried to get another ride. When a truck stopped for me, I asked for a ride to Ukunda. Later, I learned that they were going in the same direction as me, so I got off within walking distance from my hostel. The ride was around 30 km. I also learned the difference between a truck ride and a matatu or car ride. For instance, matatus and cars are much faster and cooler due to air conditioning, while trucks tend to be warmer because they lack it. Further, the truck was stopped at many checkpoints by the police for inspections as it carried goods, which is not the case with matatus. Anyways, it was a nice experience, and I am grateful for the ride. I had a nice conversation with the truck drivers about Indian movies and my experiences in Kenya.
Diani beach is a popular beach in Kenya. It is a white sand beach.
Selfie with truck drivers who gave me the free ride
Back to Nairobi
I took the SGR train from Mombasa back to Nairobi. This time I took the night train, which departs at 22:00 hours, reaching Nairobi at around 04:00 in the morning. I could not sleep comfortably since the train only had seater seats.
I had booked the Zarita Hotel in Nairobi and had already confirmed if they allowed early morning check-in. Usually, hotels have a fixed checkout time, say 11:00 in the morning, and you are not allowed to stay beyond that regardless of the time you checked in. But this hotel checked me in for 24 hours. Here, I paid in US dollars, and the cost was 12 USD.
Almost Got Stuck in Kenya
Two days before my scheduled flight from Nairobi back to India, I heard the news that the airports in Kenya were closed due to the strikes. Rabina and Pragya had their flight back to Nepal canceled that day, which left them stuck in Nairobi for two additional days. I called Sahil in India and found out during the conversation that the strike was called off in the evening. It was a big relief for me, and I was fortunate to be able to fly back to India without any changes to my plans.
Newspapers at a stand in Kenya covering news on the airport closure
Experience with locals
I had no problems communicating with Kenyans, as everyone I met knew English to an extent that could easily surpass that of big cities in India. Additionally, I learned a few words from Kenya s most popular local language, Swahili, such as Asante, meaning thank you, Jambo for hello, and Karibu for welcome. Knowing a few words in the local language went a long way.
I am not sure what s up with haggling in Kenya. It wasn t easy to bring the price of souvenirs down. I bought a fridge magnet for 200 shillings, which was the quoted price. On the other hand, it was much easier to bargain with taxis/tuktuks/motorbikes.
I stayed at three hotels/hostels in Kenya. None of them had air conditioners. Two of the places were in Nairobi, and they didn t even have fans in the rooms, while the one in Mombasa had only fans. All of them had good Wi-Fi, except Tulia where the internet overall was a bit shaky.
My experience with the hotel staff was great. For instance, we requested that the Nairobi Transit Hotel cancel the included breakfast in order to reduce the room costs, but later realized that it was not a good idea. The hotel allowed us to revert and even offered one of our missing breakfasts during dinner.
The staff at Tulia Backpackers in Mombasa facilitated the ticket payment for my train from Mombasa to Nairobi. One of the staff members also gave me a lift to the place where I could catch a matatu to Nyali Beach. They even added an extra tea bag to my tea when I requested it to be stronger.
Food
At the Nairobi Transit Hotel, a Spanish omelet with tea was served for breakfast. I noticed that Spanish omelette appeared on the menus of many restaurants, suggesting that it is popular in Kenya. This was my first time having this dish. The milk tea in Kenya, referred to by locals as white tea, is lighter than Indian tea (they don t put a lot of tea leaves).
Spanish Omelette served in breakfast at Nairobi Transit Hotel
I also sampled ugali with eggs. In Mombasa, I visited an Indian restaurant called New Chetna and had a buffet thali there twice.
Ugali with eggs.
Tips for Exchanging Money
In Kenya, I exchanged my money at forex shops a couple of times. I received good exchange rates for bills larger than 50 USD. For instance, 1 USD on xe.com was 129 shillings, and I got 128.3 shillings per USD (a total of 12,830 shillings) for two 50 USD notes at an exchange in Nairobi, while 127 shillings, which was the highest rate at the banks. On the other hand, for smaller bills such as a one US dollar note, I would have got 125 shillings. A passport was the only document required for the exchange, and they also provided a receipt.
A good piece of advice for travelers is to keep 50 USD or larger bills for exchanging into the local currency while saving the smaller US dollar bills for accommodation, as many hotels and hostels accept payment in US dollars (in addition to Kenyan shillings).
Missed Malindi and Lamu
There were more places on my to-visit list in Kenya. But I simply didn t have time to cover them, as I don t like rushing through places, especially in a foreign country where there is a chance of me underestimating the amount of time it takes during transit. I would have liked to visit at least one of Kilifi, Watamu or Malindi beaches. Further, Lamu seemed like a unique place to visit as it has no cars or motorized transport; the only options for transport are boats and donkeys.
That s it for now. Meet you in the next one :)
For an embarassingly long time, my shell has unnecessarily tried to
initialize a console font in every kind of interactive terminal.
This leaves the following error message in my terminal:
Couldn't get a file descriptor referring to the console.
It even shows up twice when running tmux!
Clearly I ve done something horrible to my configuration,
and now I ve got to clean it up.
How does Shell Initialization Work?
The precise files a shell reads at start-up is somewhat complex, and defined
by this excellent chart 1:
For the purposes of what I m trying to fix, there are two paths that matter.
Interactive login shell startup
Interactive non-login shell startup
As you can see from the above, trying to distinguish these two paths in bash
is an absolute mess.
zsh, in contrast, is much cleaner and allows for a clear distinction
between these two cases, with login shell configuration files as a superset of
configuration files used by non-login shells.
How did we get here?
I keep my configuration files in a config
repository.
Some time ago I got quite frustrated at this whole shell initialization thing,
and just linked everything together in one profile file:
Move to ZSH
I ve wanted to move to zsh for a while, and took this opportunity to do so.
So my new configuration files are .zprofile and .zshrc instead of .mkshrc
and .profile
(though I m going to retain those symlinks to allow my old configurations to
continue working).
mksh is a nice simple shell,
but using zsh here allows for more consistency
between my home and $WORK environments, and will allow a lot more powerful
extensions.
Updating my Prompt
ZSH prompts use a totally different configuration via variable expansion.
However, it also uses the PROMPT variable, so I set that to the needed
values for zsh.
There s an excellent ZSH prompt generator at
https://zsh-prompt-generator.site
that I used to get these variables, though I m sure they re in the zsh
documentation somewhere as well.
I wanted a simple prompt with user (%n), host (%m), and path (%d).
I also wanted a % at the end to distinguish this from other shells.
PROMPT="%n@%m%d%% "
Fixing mksh prompts
This worked but surprisingly mksh also looks at PROMPT,
leaving my mksh prompt as the literal prompt string without expansion.
Fixing this requires setting up a proper shrc and linking it to
.mkshrc and .zshrc.
I chose to move my existing aliases script to this file,
as it also broke in non-login shells when moved to profile.
Within this new shrc file we can check what shell we re running via $0:
I chose to add plain zsh here in case I run it manually for whatever reason.
I also added -zsh to support tmux as that s what it presents as $0.
This also means you ll need to be careful to quote $0 or you ll get fun shell
errors.
There s probably a better way to do this, but I couldn t find something that
was compatible with POSIX shell, which is what most of this has to be written
in to be compatible with mksh and zsh2.
We can then setup different prompts for each:
if [ "$0" = "/bin/zsh" ] [ "$0" = "zsh" ] [ "$0" = "-zsh" ]
then
PROMPT="%n@%m%d%% "
else
# Borrowed from
# http://www.unixmantra.com/2013/05/setting-custom-prompt-in-ksh.html
PS1='$(id -un)@$(hostname -s)$PWD$ '
fi
Setting Console Font in a Better Way
I ve been setting console font via setfont in my .profile for a while.
I m not sure where I picked this up, but it s not the right way.
I even tried to only run this in a console with -t but that only
checks that output is a terminal, not specifically a console.
if [ -t 1 ]
then
setfont /usr/share/consolefonts/Lat15-Terminus20x10.psf.gz
fi
This also only runs once the console is logged into,
instead of initializing it on boot.
The correct way to set this up, on Debian-based systems,
is reconfiguring console-setup like so:
dpkg-reconfigure console-setup
From there you get a menu of encoding, character set, font, and then font size
to configure for your consoles.
VIM mode
To enable VIM mode for ZSH, you simply need to set:
bindkeys -v
This allows you to edit your shell commands with basic VIM keybinds.
Getting back Ctrl + Left Arrow and Ctrl + Right Arrow
Moving around one word at a time with Ctrl and the arrow keys is broken by
vim mode unfortunately, so we ll need to re-enable it:
Better History Search
But of course we re now using zsh so we can do better than just the same
configuration as we had before.
There s an excellent substring history search plugin that we can just
source without a plugin manager3
source $HOME/config/zsh-history-substring-search.zsh
# Keys are weird, should be ^[[ but it's not
bindkey '^[[A' history-substring-search-up
bindkey '^[OA' history-substring-search-up
bindkey '^[[B' history-substring-search-down
bindkey '^[OB' history-substring-search-down
For some reason my system uses ^[OA and ^[OB as up and down keys.
It seems ^[[A and ^[[B are the defaults, so I ve left them in,
but I m confused as to what differences would lead to this.
If you know, please let me know
and I ll add a footnote to this article explaining it.
Back to history search.
For this to work, we also need to setup history logging:
Why did it show up twice for tmux?
Because tmux creates a login shell.
Adding:
echo PROFILE
to profile and:
echo SHRC
to shrc confirms this with:
PROFILE
SHRC
SHRC
For now, profile sources shrc so that running twice is expected.
But after this exploration and diagram,
it s clear we don t need that for zsh.
Removing this will break remote bash shells (see above diagram),
but I can live without those on my development laptop.
Removing that line results in the expected output for a new terminal:
SHRC
And the full output for a new tmux session or console:
PROFILE
SHRC
So finally we re back to a normal state!
This post is a bit unfocused but I hope it helps someone else repair or enhance
their shell environment.
If you liked this4, or know of any other ways to manage this I could use,
let me know at fixmyshell@tookmund.com.
This chart comes from the excellent Shell Startup Scripts article by Peter Ward. I ve generated the SVG from the graphviz source linked in the article.
Technically it has be compatible with Korn shell, but a quick google seems to suggest that that s actually a subset of POSIX shell.
I use oh-my-zsh at $WORK but for now I m going to simplify my personal configuration. If I end up using a lot of plugins I ll reconsider this.
Or if you ve found any typos or other issues that I should fix.
The Framework is a 13.5" laptop body with swappable parts, which
makes it somewhat future-proof and certainly easily repairable,
scoring an "exceedingly rare" 10/10 score from ifixit.com.
There are two generations of the laptop's main board (both compatible
with the same body): the Intel 11th and 12th gen chipsets.
I have received my Framework, 12th generation "DIY", device in late
September 2022 and will update this page as I go along in the process
of ordering, burning-in, setting up and using the device over the
years.
Overall, the Framework is a good laptop. I like the keyboard, the
touch pad, the expansion cards. Clearly there's been some good work
done on industrial design, and it's the most repairable laptop I've
had in years. Time will tell, but it looks sturdy enough to survive me
many years as well.
This is also one of the most powerful devices I ever lay my hands
on. I have managed, remotely, more powerful servers, but this is the
fastest computer I have ever owned, and it fits in this tiny case. It
is an amazing machine.
On the downside, there's a bit of proprietary firmware required (WiFi,
Bluetooth, some graphics) and the Framework ships with a proprietary
BIOS, with currently no Coreboot support. Expect to need the
latest kernel, firmware, and hacking around a bunch of things to get
resolution and keybindings working right.
Like others, I have first found significant power management issues,
but many issues can actually be solved with some configuration. Some
of the expansion ports (HDMI, DP, MicroSD, and SSD) use power when
idle, so don't expect week-long suspend, or "full day" battery while
those are plugged in.
Finally, the expansion ports are nice, but there's only four of
them. If you plan to have a two-monitor setup, you're likely going to
need a dock.
Read on for the detailed review. For context, I'm moving from the
Purism Librem 13v4 because it
basically exploded on me. I
had, in the meantime, reverted back to an old ThinkPad X220, so I
sometimes compare the Framework with that venerable laptop as well.
This blog post has been maturing for months now. It started in
September 2022 and I declared it completed in March 2023. It's the
longest single article on this entire website, currently clocking at
about 13,000 words. It will take an average reader a full hour to go
through this thing, so I don't expect anyone to actually do
that. This introduction should be good enough for most people, read
the first section if you intend to actually buy a Framework. Jump
around the table of contents as you see fit for after you did buy the
laptop, as it might include some crucial hints on how to make it work
best for you, especially on (Debian) Linux.
Advice for buyers
Those are things I wish I would have known before buying:
consider buying 4 USB-C expansion cards, or at least a mix of 4
USB-A or USB-C cards, as they use less power than other cards and
you do want to fill those expansion slots otherwise they snag
around and feel insecure
you will likely need a dock or at least a USB hub if you want a
two-monitor setup, otherwise you'll run out of ports
you have to do some serious tuning to get proper (10h+ idle, 10
days suspend) power savings
in particular, beware that the HDMI, DisplayPort and
particularly the SSD and MicroSD cards take a significant amount
power, even when sleeping, up to 2-6W for the latter two
beware that the MicroSD card is what it says: Micro, normal SD
cards won't fit, and while there might be full sized one
eventually, it's currently only at the prototyping stage
Current status
I have the framework! It's setup with a fresh new Debian bookworm
installation. I've ran through a large number of tests and burn in.
I have decided to use the Framework as my daily driver, and had to buy
a USB-C dock to get my two monitors
connected, which was own adventure.
Update: Framework just (2023-03-23) just announced a whole bunch of
new stuff:
The recording is available in this video and it's not your
typical keynote. It starts ~25 minutes late, audio is crap, lightning
and camera are crap, clapping seems to be from whatever staff they
managed to get together in a room, decor is bizarre, colors are
shit. It's amazing.
Specifications
Those are the specifications of the 12th gen, in general terms. Your
build will of course vary according to your needs.
CPU: i5-1240P, i7-1260P, or i7-1280P (Up to 4.4-4.8 GHz, 4+8
cores), Iris Xe graphics
4 x USB-C user-selectable expansion ports, including
USB-C
USB-A
HDMI
DP
Ethernet
MicroSD
250-1000GB SSD
3.5mm combo headphone jack
Kill switches for microphone and camera
Battery: 55Wh
Camera: 1080p 60fps
Biometrics: Fingerprint Reader
Backlit keyboard
Power Adapter: 60W USB-C (or bring your own)
ships with a screwdriver/spludger
1 year warranty
base price: 1000$CAD, but doesn't give you much, typical builds
around 1500-2000$CAD
Actual build
This is the actual build I ordered. Amounts in CAD. (1CAD =
~0.75EUR/USD.)
Base configuration
CPU: Intel Core i5-1240P (AKA Alder Lake P 8 4.4GHz
P-threads, 8 3.2GHz E-threads, 16 total, 28-64W), 1079$
Memory: 16GB (1 x 16GB) DDR4-3200, 104$
Customization
Keyboard: US English, included
Expansion Cards
2 USB-C $24
3 USB-A $36
2 HDMI $50
1 DP $50
1 MicroSD $25
1 Storage 1TB $199
Sub-total: 384$
Accessories
Power Adapter - US/Canada $64.00
Total
Before tax: 1606$
After tax and duties: 1847$
Free shipping
Quick evaluation
This is basically the TL;DR: here, just focusing on broad pros/cons of
the laptop.
Pros
easily repairable (complete with QR codes pointing to repair
guides!), the 11th gen received a 10/10 score from
ifixit.com, which they call "exceedingly rare", the 12th gen
has a similar hardware design and would probably rate similarly
replaceable motherboard!!! can be reused as a NUC-like device, with a
3d-printed case, 12th gen board can be bought standalone and
retrofitted into an 11th gen case
not a passing fad: they made a first laptop with the 11th gen Intel
chipset in 2021, and a second motherboard with the 12th Intel
chipset in 2022
four modular USB-C ports which can fit HDMI, USB-C (pass-through,
can provide power on both sides), USB-A, DisplayPort, MicroSD,
external storage (250GB, 1TB), active modding community
nice power led indicating power level (charging, charged, etc) when
plugged
they used to have some difficulty keeping up with the orders: first
two batches shipped, third batch sold out, fourth batch should have
shipped in October 2021. they generally seem to keep up with
shipping. update (august 2022): they rolled out a second line of
laptops (12th gen), first batch shipped, second batch shipped
late, September 2022 batch was generally on time, see this
spreadsheet for a crowdsourced effort to track those
supply chain issues seem to be under control as of early 2023. I
got the Ethernet expansion card shipped within a week.
compared to my previous laptop (Purism Librem
13v4), it feels strangely
bulkier and heavier; it's actually lighter than the purism (1.3kg
vs 1.4kg) and thinner (15.85mm vs 18mm) but the design of the
Purism laptop (tapered edges) makes it feel thinner
no space for a 2.5" drive
rather bright LED around power button, but can be dimmed in the
BIOS (not low enough to my taste) I got used to it
fan quiet when idle, but can be noisy when running, for example if
you max a CPU for a while
battery described as "mediocre" by Ars Technica (above), confirmed
poor in my tests (see below)
no RJ-45 port, and attempts at designing ones are failing
because the modular plugs are too thin to fit (according to Linux
After Dark), so unlikely to have one in the future
Update: they cracked that nut and ship an 2.5 gbps Ethernet
expansion card with a realtek chipset, without any
firmware blob
a bit pricey for the performance, especially when compared to the
competition (e.g. Dell XPS, Apple M1)
12th gen Intel has glitchy graphics, seems like Intel hasn't fully
landed proper Linux support for that chipset yet
Initial hardware setup
A breeze.
Accessing the board
The internals are accessed through five TorX screws, but there's a nice
screwdriver/spudger that works well enough. The screws actually hold in
place so you can't even lose them.
The first setup is a bit counter-intuitive coming from the Librem
laptop, as I expected the back cover to lift and give me access to the
internals. But instead the screws is release the keyboard and touch
pad assembly, so you actually need to flip the laptop back upright and
lift the assembly off to get access to the internals. Kind of
scary.
I also actually unplugged a connector in lifting the assembly because
I lifted it towards the monitor, while you actually need to lift it
to the right. Thankfully, the connector didn't break, it just
snapped off and I could plug it back in, no harm done.
Once there, everything is well indicated, with QR codes all over the
place supposedly leading to online instructions.
Bad QR codes
Unfortunately, the QR codes I tested (in the expansion card slot, the
memory slot and CPU slots) did not actually work so I wonder how
useful those actually are.
After all, they need to point to something and that means a URL, a
running website that will answer those requests forever. I bet those
will break sooner than later and in fact, as far as I can tell, they
just don't work at all. I prefer the approach taken by the MNT reform
here which designed (with the 100 rabbits folks) an actual paper
handbook (PDF).
The first QR code that's immediately visible from the back of the
laptop, in an expansion cord slot, is a 404. It seems to be some
serial number URL, but I can't actually tell because, well, the page
is a 404.
I was expecting that bar code to lead me to an introduction page,
something like "how to setup your Framework laptop". Support actually
confirmed that it should point a quickstart guide. But in a
bizarre twist, they somehow sent me the URL with the plus (+) signs
escaped, like this:
(They have also "let the team know about this for feedback and help
resolve the problem with the link" which is a support code word for
"ha-ha! nope! not my problem right now!" Trust me, I know, my own
code word is "can you please make a ticket?")
Seating disks and memory
The "DIY" kit doesn't actually have that much of a setup. If you
bought RAM, it's shipped outside the laptop in a little plastic case,
so you just seat it in as usual.
Then you insert your NVMe drive, and, if that's your fancy, you also
install your own mPCI WiFi card. If you ordered one (which was my
case), it's pre-installed.
Closing the laptop is also kind of amazing, because the keyboard
assembly snaps into place with magnets. I have actually used the
laptop with the keyboard unscrewed as I was putting the drives in and
out, and it actually works fine (and will probably void your warranty,
so don't do that). (But you can.) (But don't, really.)
Hardware review
Keyboard and touch pad
The keyboard feels nice, for a laptop. I'm used to mechanical keyboard
and I'm rather violent with those poor things. Yet the key travel is
nice and it's clickety enough that I don't feel too disoriented.
At first, I felt the keyboard as being more laggy than my normal
workstation setup, but it turned out this was a graphics driver
issues. After enabling a composition manager, everything feels snappy.
The touch pad feels good. The double-finger scroll works well enough,
and I don't have to wonder too much where the middle button is, it
just works.
Taps don't work, out of the box: that needs to be enabled in Xorg,
with something like this:
But be aware that once you enable that tapping, you'll need to deal
with palm detection... So I have not actually enabled this in the end.
Power button
The power button is a little dangerous. It's quite easy to hit, as
it's right next to one expansion card where you are likely to plug in
a cable power. And because the expansion cards are kind of hard to
remove, you might squeeze the laptop (and the power key) when trying
to remove the expansion card next to the power button.
So obviously, don't do that. But that's not very helpful.
An alternative is to make the power button do something else. With
systemd-managed systems, it's actually quite easy. Add a
HandlePowerKey stanza to (say)
/etc/systemd/logind.conf.d/power-suspends.conf:
And the power button will suspend! Long-press to power off doesn't
actually work as the laptop immediately suspends...
Note that there's probably half a dozen other ways of doing this,
see this, this, or that.
Special keybindings
There is a series of "hidden" (as in: not labeled on the key)
keybindings related to the fn keybinding that I actually
find quite useful.
Key
Equivalent
Effect
Command
p
Pause
lock screen
xset s activate
b
Break
?
?
k
ScrLk
switch keyboard layout
N/A
It looks like those are defined in the microcontroller so it
would be possible to add some. For example, the SysRq key
is almost bound to fns in there.
Note that most other shortcuts like this are clearly documented
(volume, brightness, etc). One key that's less obvious is
F12 that only has the Framework logo on it. That actually
calls the keysym XF86AudioMedia which, interestingly, does
absolutely nothing here. By default, on Windows, it opens your
browser to the Framework website and, on Linux, your "default
media player".
The keyboard backlight can be cycled with fn-space. The
dimmer version is dim enough, and the keybinding is easy to find in
the dark.
A skinny elephant would be performed with altPrtScr (above F11) KEY, so for
example altfnF11b
should do a hard reset. This comment suggests you need to hold
the fnonly if "function lock" is on, but that's
actually the opposite of my experience.
Out of the box, some of the fn keys don't work. Mute,
volume up/down, brightness, monitor changes, and the airplane mode key
all do basically nothing. They don't send proper keysyms to Xorg at
all.
This is a known problem and it's related to the fact that the
laptop has light sensors to adjust the brightness
automatically. Somehow some of those keys (e.g. the brightness
controls) are supposed to show up as a different input device, but
don't seem to work correctly. It seems like the solution is for the
Framework team to write a driver specifically for this, but so far no
progress since July 2022.
In the meantime, the fancy functionality can be supposedly disabled with:
echo 'blacklist hid_sensor_hub' sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/framework-als-blacklist.conf
Kill switches
The Framework has two "kill switches": one for the camera and the
other for the microphone. The camera one actually disconnects the USB
device when turned off, and the mic one seems to cut the circuit. It
doesn't show up as muted, it just stops feeding the sound.
Both kill switches are around the main camera, on top of the monitor,
and quite discreet. Then turn "red" when enabled (i.e. "red" means
"turned off").
Monitor
The monitor looks pretty good to my untrained eyes. I have yet to do
photography work on it, but some photos I looked at look sharp and the
colors are bright and lively. The blacks are dark and the screen is
bright.
I have yet to use it in full sunlight.
The dimmed light is very dim, which I like.
Screen backlight
I bind brightness keys to xbacklight in i3, but out of the box I get
this error:
sep 29 22:09:14 angela i3[5661]: No outputs have backlight property
It just requires this blob in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/backlight.conf:
This way I can control the actual backlight power with the brightness
keys, and they do significantly reduce power usage.
Multiple monitor support
I have been able to hook up my two old monitors to the HDMI and
DisplayPort expansion cards on the laptop. The lid closes without
suspending the machine, and everything works great.
I actually run out of ports, even with a 4-port USB-A hub, which gives
me a total of 7 ports:
power (USB-C)
monitor 1 (DisplayPort)
monitor 2 (HDMI)
USB-A hub, which adds:
keyboard (USB-A)
mouse (USB-A)
Yubikey
external sound card
Now the latter, I might be able to get rid of if I switch to a
combo-jack headset, which I do have (and still need to test).
But still, this is a problem. I'll probably need a powered USB-C dock
and better monitors, possibly with some Thunderbolt chaining, to
save yet more ports.
But that means more money into this setup, argh. And figuring out my
monitor situation is the kind of thing I'm not that big
of a fan of. And neither is shopping for USB-C (or is it Thunderbolt?)
hubs.
My normal autorandr setup doesn't work: I have tried saving a
profile and it doesn't get autodetected, so I also first need to do:
autorandr -l framework-external-dual-lg-acer
The magic:
autorandr -l horizontal
... also works well.
The worst problem with those monitors right now is that they have a
radically smaller resolution than the main screen on the laptop, which
means I need to reset the font scaling to normal every time I switch
back and forth between those monitors and the laptop, which means I
actually need to do this:
Expansion ports
I ordered a total of 10 expansion ports.
I did manage to initialize the 1TB drive as an encrypted storage,
mostly to keep photos as this is something that takes a massive amount
of space (500GB and counting) and that I (unfortunately) don't work on
very often (but still carry around).
The expansion ports are fancy and nice, but not actually that
convenient. They're a bit hard to take out: you really need to crimp
your fingernails on there and pull hard to take them out. There's a
little button next to them to release, I think, but at first it feels
a little scary to pull those pucks out of there. You get used to it
though, and it's one of those things you can do without looking
eventually.
There's only four expansion ports. Once you have two monitors, the
drive, and power plugged in, bam, you're out of ports; there's nowhere
to plug my Yubikey. So if this is going to be my daily driver, with a
dual monitor setup, I will need a dock, which means more crap firmware
and uncertainty, which isn't great. There are actually plans to make a
dual-USB card, but that is blocked on designing an actual
board for this.
I can't wait to see more expansion ports produced. There's a ethernet
expansion card which quickly went out of stock basically the day
it was announced, but was eventually restocked.
I would like to see a proper SD-card reader. There's a MicroSD card
reader, but that obviously doesn't work for normal SD cards, which
would be more broadly compatible anyways (because you can have a
MicroSD to SD card adapter, but I have never heard of the
reverse). Someone actually found a SD card reader that fits and
then someone else managed to cram it in a 3D printed case, which
is kind of amazing.
Still, I really like that idea that I can carry all those little
adapters in a pouch when I travel and can basically do anything I
want. It does mean I need to shuffle through them to find the right
one which is a little annoying. I have an elastic band to keep them
lined up so that all the ports show the same side, to make it easier
to find the right one. But that quickly gets undone and instead I have
a pouch full of expansion cards.
Another awesome thing with the expansion cards is that they don't just
work on the laptop: anything that takes USB-C can take those cards,
which means you can use it to connect an SD card to your phone, for
backups, for example. Heck, you could even connect an external display
to your phone that way, assuming that's supported by your phone of
course (and it probably isn't).
The expansion ports do take up some power, even when idle. See the
power management section below, and particularly the power usage
tests for details.
USB-C charging
One thing that is really a game changer for me is USB-C charging. It's
hard to overstate how convenient this is. I often have a USB-C cable
lying around to charge my phone, and I can just grab that thing and
pop it in my laptop. And while it will obviously not charge as fast as
the provided charger, it will stop draining the battery at least.
(As I wrote this, I had the laptop plugged in the Samsung charger that
came with a phone, and it was telling me it would take 6 hours to
charge the remaining 15%. With the provided charger, that flew down to
15 minutes. Similarly, I can power the laptop from the power grommet
on my desk, reducing clutter as I have that single wire out there
instead of the bulky power adapter.)
I also really like the idea that I can charge my laptop with a power
bank or, heck, with my phone, if push comes to shove. (And
vice-versa!)
This is awesome. And it works from any of the expansion ports, of
course. There's a little led next to the expansion ports as well,
which indicate the charge status:
red/amber: charging
white: charged
off: unplugged
I couldn't find documentation about this, but the forum
answered.
This is something of a recurring theme with the Framework. While it
has a good knowledge base and repair/setup guides (and the
forum is awesome) but it doesn't have a good "owner manual" that
shows you the different parts of the laptop and what they do. Again,
something the MNT reform did well.
Another thing that people are asking about is an external sleep
indicator: because the power LED is on the main keyboard assembly,
you don't actually see whether the device is active or not when the
lid is closed.
Finally, I wondered what happens when you plug in multiple power
sources and it turns out the charge controller is actually pretty
smart: it will pick the best power source and use it. The only
downside is it can't use multiple power sources, but that seems like
a bit much to ask.
Multimedia and other devices
Those things also work:
webcam: splendid, best webcam I've ever had (but my standards are
really low)
onboard mic: works well, good gain (maybe a bit much)
onboard speakers: sound okay, a little metal-ish, loud enough to be
annoying, see this thread for benchmarks, apparently pretty
good speakers
Combo jack mic tests
The Framework laptop ships with a combo jack on the left side, which
allows you to plug in a CTIA (source) headset. In human
terms, it's a device that has both a stereo output and a mono input,
typically a headset or ear buds with a microphone somewhere.
It works, which is better than the Purism (which only had audio
out), but is on par for the course for that kind of onboard
hardware. Because of electrical interference, such sound cards very
often get lots of noise from the board.
With a Jabra Evolve 40, the built-in USB sound card generates
basically zero noise on silence (invisible down to -60dB in Audacity)
while plugging it in directly generates a solid -30dB hiss. There is
a noise-reduction system in that sound card, but the difference is
still quite striking.
On a comparable setup (curie, a 2017 Intel NUC), there is
also a his with the Jabra headset, but it's quieter, more in the order
of -40/-50 dB, a noticeable difference. Interestingly, testing with my
Mee Audio Pro M6 earbuds leads to a little more hiss on curie, more on
the -35/-40 dB range, close to the Framework.
Also note that another sound card, the Antlion USB adapter that comes
with the ModMic 4, also gives me pretty close to silence on a quiet
recording, picking up less than -50dB of background noise. It's
actually probably picking up the fans in the office, which do make
audible noises.
In other words, the hiss of the sound card built in the Framework
laptop is so loud that it makes more noise than the quiet fans in the
office. Or, another way to put it is that two USB sound cards (the
Jabra and the Antlion) are able to pick up ambient noise in my office
but not the Framework laptop.
See also my audio page.
Performance tests
Compiling Linux 5.19.11
On a single core, compiling the Debian version of the Linux kernel
takes around 100 minutes:
I had to plug the normal power supply after a few minutes because
battery would actually run out using my desk's power grommet (34
watts).
During compilation, fans were spinning really hard, quite noisy, but
not painfully so.
The laptop was sucking 55 watts of power, steadily:
Time User Nice Sys Idle IO Run Ctxt/s IRQ/s Fork Exec Exit Watts
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
Average 87.9 0.0 10.7 1.4 0.1 17.8 6583.6 5054.3 233.0 223.9 233.1 55.96
GeoMean 87.9 0.0 10.6 1.2 0.0 17.6 6427.8 5048.1 227.6 218.7 227.7 55.96
StdDev 1.4 0.0 1.2 0.6 0.2 3.0 1436.8 255.5 50.0 47.5 49.7 0.20
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
Minimum 85.0 0.0 7.8 0.5 0.0 13.0 3594.0 4638.0 117.0 111.0 120.0 55.52
Maximum 90.8 0.0 12.9 3.5 0.8 38.0 10174.0 5901.0 374.0 362.0 375.0 56.41
-------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ---- ------ ------ ---- ---- ---- ------
Summary:
CPU: 55.96 Watts on average with standard deviation 0.20
Note: power read from RAPL domains: package-0, uncore, package-0, core, psys.
These readings do not cover all the hardware in this device.
memtest86+
I ran Memtest86+ v6.00b3. It shows something like this:
Software setup
Once I had everything in the hardware setup, I figured, voil , I'm
done, I'm just going to boot this beautiful machine and I can get back
to work.
I don't understand why I am so na ve some times. It's mind boggling.
Obviously, it didn't happen that way at all, and I spent the best of
the three following days tinkering with the laptop.
Secure boot and EFI
First, I couldn't boot off of the NVMe drive I transferred from the
previous laptop (the Purism) and the
BIOS was not very helpful: it was just complaining about not finding
any boot device, without dropping me in the real BIOS.
At first, I thought it was a problem with my NVMe drive, because it's
not listed in the compatible SSD drives from upstream. But I
figured out how to enter BIOS (press F2 manically, of
course), which showed the NVMe drive was actually detected. It just
didn't boot, because it was an old (2010!!) Debian install without
EFI.
So from there, I disabled secure boot, and booted a grml image to
try to recover. And by "boot" I mean, I managed to get to the grml
boot loader which promptly failed to load its own root file system
somehow. I still have to investigate exactly what happened there, but
it failed some time after the initrd load with:
Unable to find medium containing a live file system
This, it turns out, was fixed in Debian lately, so a daily GRML
build will not have this problems. The upcoming 2022 release
(likely 2022.10 or 2022.11) will also get the fix.
I did manage to boot the development version of the Debian
installer which was a surprisingly good experience: it mounted the
encrypted drives and did everything pretty smoothly. It even offered
me to reinstall the boot loader, but that ultimately (and correctly, as
it turns out) failed because I didn't have a /boot/efi partition.
At this point, I realized there was no easy way out of this, and I
just proceeded to completely reinstall Debian. I had a spare NVMe
drive lying around (backups FTW!) so I just swapped that in, rebooted
in the Debian installer, and did a clean install. I wanted to switch
to bookworm anyways, so I guess that's done too.
Storage limitations
Another thing that happened during setup is that I tried to copy over
the internal 2.5" SSD drive from the Purism to the Framework 1TB
expansion card. There's no 2.5" slot in the new laptop, so that's
pretty much the only option for storage expansion.
I was tired and did something wrong. I ended up wiping the partition
table on the original 2.5" drive.
Oops.
It might be recoverable, but just restoring the partition table
didn't work either, so I'm not sure how I recover the data
there. Normally, everything on my laptops and workstations is designed
to be disposable, so that wasn't that big of a problem. I did manage
to recover most of the data thanks to git-annexreinit, but
that was a little hairy.
Bootstrapping Puppet
Once I had some networking, I had to install all the packages I
needed. The time I spent setting up my workstations with Puppet has
finally paid off. What I actually did was to restore two critical
directories:
/etc/ssh
/var/lib/puppet
So that I would keep the previous machine's identity. That way I could
contact the Puppet server and install whatever was missing. I used my
Puppet optimization
trick to do a batch
install and then I had a good base setup, although not exactly as it
was before. 1700 packages were installed manually on angela before
the reinstall, and not in Puppet.
I did not inspect each one individually, but I did go through /etc
and copied over more SSH keys, for backups and SMTP over SSH.
LVFS support
It looks like there's support for the (de-facto) standard LVFS
firmware update system. At least I was able to update the UEFI
firmware with a simple:
Those instructions come from the beta forum post. I performed the
BIOS update on 2023-01-16T16:00-0500.
Resolution tweaks
The Framework laptop resolution (2256px X 1504px) is big enough to
give you a pretty small font size, so welcome to the marvelous world
of "scaling".
The Debian wiki page has a few tricks for this.
Console
This will make the console and grub fonts more readable:
Xorg
Adding this to your .Xresources will make everything look much bigger:
! 1.5*96
Xft.dpi: 144
Apparently, some of this can also help:
! These might also be useful depending on your monitor and personal preference:
Xft.autohint: 0
Xft.lcdfilter: lcddefault
Xft.hintstyle: hintfull
Xft.hinting: 1
Xft.antialias: 1
Xft.rgba: rgb
It my experience it also makes things look a little fuzzier, which is
frustrating because you have this awesome monitor but everything looks
out of focus. Just bumping Xft.dpi by a 1.5 factor looks good to me.
The Debian Wiki has a page on HiDPI, but it's not as good as the
Arch Wiki, where the above blurb comes from. I am not using the
latter because I suspect it's causing some of the "fuzziness".
TODO: find the equivalent of this GNOME hack in i3? (gsettings set
org.gnome.mutter experimental-features
"['scale-monitor-framebuffer']"), taken from this Framework
guide
Issues
BIOS configuration
The Framework BIOS has some minor issues. One issue I personally
encountered is that I had disabled Quick boot and Quiet boot in
the BIOS to diagnose the above boot issues. This, in turn, triggers a
bug where the BIOS boot manager (F12) would just hang
completely. It would also fail to boot from an external USB drive.
The current fix (as of BIOS 3.03) is to re-enable both Quick
boot and Quiet boot. Presumably this is something that will get
fixed in a future BIOS update.
Note that the following keybindings are active in the BIOS POST
check:
Key
Meaning
F2
Enter BIOS setup menu
F12
Enter BIOS boot manager
Delete
Enter BIOS setup menu
WiFi compatibility issues
I couldn't make WiFi work at first. Obviously, the default Debian
installer doesn't ship with proprietary firmware (although that might
change soon) so the WiFi card didn't work out of the box. But even
after copying the firmware through a USB stick, I couldn't quite
manage to find the right combination of ip/iw/wpa-supplicant
(yes, after repeatedly copying a bunch more packages over to get
those bootstrapped). (Next time I should probably try something like
this post.)
Thankfully, I had a little USB-C dongle with a RJ-45 jack lying
around. That also required a firmware blob, but it was a single
package to copy over, and with that loaded, I had network.
Eventually, I did managed to make WiFi work; the problem was more on
the side of "I forgot how to configure a WPA network by hand from the
commandline" than anything else. NetworkManager worked fine and got
WiFi working correctly.
Note that this is with Debian bookworm, which has the 5.19 Linux
kernel, and with the firmware-nonfree (firmware-iwlwifi,
specifically) package.
Battery life
I was having between about 7 hours of battery on the Purism Librem
13v4, and that's after a year or two of battery life. Now, I still
have about 7 hours of battery life, which is nicer than my old
ThinkPad X220 (20 minutes!) but really, it's not that good for a new
generation laptop. The 12th generation Intel chipset probably improved
things compared to the previous one Framework laptop, but I don't have
a 11th gen Framework to compare with).
(Note that those are estimates from my status bar, not wall clock
measurements. They should still be comparable between the Purism and
Framework, that said.)
The battery life doesn't seem up to, say, Dell XPS 13, ThinkPad X1, and
of course not the Apple M1, where I would expect 10+ hours of battery
life out of the box.
That said, I do get those kind estimates when the machine is fully
charged and idle. In fact, when everything is quiet and nothing is
plugged in, I get dozens of hours of battery life estimated (I've
seen 25h!). So power usage fluctuates quite a bit depending on usage,
which I guess is expected.
Concretely, so far, light web browsing, reading emails and writing
notes in Emacs (e.g. this file) takes about 8W of power:
Expansion cards matter a lot in the battery life (see below for a
thorough discussion), my normal setup is 2xUSB-C and 1xUSB-A (yes,
with an empty slot, and yes, to save power).
Interestingly, playing a video in a (720p) window in a window takes up
more power (10.5W) than in full screen (9.5W) but I blame that on my
desktop setup (i3 + compton)... Not sure if mpv hits the
VA-API, maybe not in windowed mode. Similar results with 1080p,
interestingly, except the window struggles to keep up altogether. Full
screen playback takes a relatively comfortable 9.5W, which means a
solid 5h+ of playback, which is fine by me.
Fooling around the web, small edits, youtube-dl, and I'm at around 80%
battery after about an hour, with an estimated 5h left, which is a
little disappointing. I had a 7h remaining estimate before I started
goofing around Discourse, so I suspect the website is a pretty
big battery drain, actually. I see about 10-12 W, while I was probably at
half that (6-8W) just playing music with mpv in the background...
In other words, it looks like editing posts in Discourse with Firefox
takes a solid 4-6W of power. Amazing and gross.
(When writing about abusive power usage generates more power usage, is
that an heisenbug? Or schr dinbug?)
Power management
Compared to the Purism Librem 13v4, the ongoing power usage seems to
be slightly better. An anecdotal metric is that the Purism would take
800mA idle, while the more powerful Framework manages a little over
500mA as I'm typing this, fluctuating between 450 and 600mA. That is
without any active expansion card, except the storage. Those numbers
come from the output of tlp-stat -b and, unfortunately, the "ampere"
unit makes it quite hard to compare those, because voltage is not
necessarily the same between the two platforms.
TODO: i915 driver has a lot of parameters, including some about
power saving, see, again, the arch wiki, and particularly
enable_fbc=1
TL:DR; power management on the laptop is an issue, but there's various
tweaks you can make to improve it. Try:
powertop --auto-tune
apt install tlp && systemctl enable tlp
nvme.noacpi=1 mem_sleep_default=deep on the kernel command line
may help with standby power usage
keep only USB-C expansion cards plugged in, all others suck power
even when idle
consider upgrading the BIOS to latest beta (3.06 at the time of
writing), unverified power savings
latest Linux kernels (6.2) promise power savings as well
(unverified)
Update: also try to follow the official optimization guide. It
was made for Ubuntu but will probably also work for your distribution
of choice with a few tweaks. They recommend using tlpui but it's
not packaged in Debian. There is, however, a Flatpak
release. In my case, it resulted in the following diff to
tlp.conf: tlp.patch.
Background on CPU architecture
There were power problems in the 11th gen Framework laptop, according
to this report from Linux After Dark, so the issues with power
management on the Framework are not new.
The 12th generation Intel CPU (AKA "Alder Lake") is a big-little
architecture with "power-saving" and "performance" cores. There
used to be performance problems introduced by the scheduler in Linux
5.16 but those were eventually fixed in 5.18, which uses
Intel's hardware as an "intelligent, low-latency hardware-assisted
scheduler". According to Phoronix, the 5.19 release improved the
power saving, at the cost of some penalty cost. There were also patch
series to make the scheduler configurable, but it doesn't look
those have been merged as of 5.19. There was also a session about this
at the 2022 Linux Plumbers, but they stopped short of
talking more about the specific problems Linux is facing in Alder
lake:
Specifically, the kernel's energy-aware scheduling heuristics don't
work well on those CPUs. A number of features present there
complicate the energy picture; these include SMT, Intel's "turbo
boost" mode, and the CPU's internal power-management mechanisms. For
many workloads, running on an ostensibly more power-hungry Pcore can
be more efficient than using an Ecore. Time for discussion of the
problem was lacking, though, and the session came to a close.
All this to say that the 12gen Intel line shipped with this Framework
series should have better power management thanks to its
power-saving cores. And Linux has had the scheduler changes to make
use of this (but maybe is still having trouble). In any case, this
might not be the source of power management problems on my laptop,
quite the opposite.
Also note that the firmware updates for various chipsets are
supposed to improve things eventually.
On the other hand, The Verge simply declared the whole P-series
a mistake...
Attempts at improving power usage
I did try to follow some of the tips in this forum post. The
tricks powertop --auto-tune and tlp's
PCIE_ASPM_ON_BAT=powersupersave basically did nothing: I was stuck
at 10W power usage in powertop (600+mA in tlp-stat).
Apparently, I should be able to reach the C8 CPU power state (or
even C9, C10) in powertop, but I seem to be stock at
C7. (Although I'm not sure how to read that tab in powertop: in the
Core(HW) column there's only C3/C6/C7 states, and most cores are 85%
in C7 or maybe C6. But the next column over does show many CPUs in
C10 states...
As it turns out, the graphics card actually takes up a good chunk of
power unless proper power management is enabled (see below). After
tweaking this, I did manage to get down to around 7W power usage in
powertop.
Expansion cards actually do take up power, and so does the screen,
obviously. The fully-lit screen takes a solid 2-3W of power compared
to the fully dimmed screen. When removing all expansion cards and
making the laptop idle, I can spin it down to 4 watts power usage at
the moment, and an amazing 2 watts when the screen turned off.
Caveats
Abusive (10W+) power usage that I initially found could be a problem
with my desktop configuration: I have this silly status bar that
updates every second and probably causes redraws... The CPU certainly
doesn't seem to spin down below 1GHz. Also note that this is with an
actual desktop running with everything: it could very well be that
some things (I'm looking at you Signal Desktop) take up unreasonable
amount of power on their own (hello, 1W/electron, sheesh). Syncthing
and containerd (Docker!) also seem to take a good 500mW just sitting
there.
Beyond my desktop configuration, this could, of course, be a
Debian-specific problem; your favorite distribution might be better at
power management.
Idle power usage tests
Some expansion cards waste energy, even when unused. Here is a summary
of the findings from the powerstat page. I also include other
devices tested in this page for completeness:
Device
Minimum
Average
Max
Stdev
Note
Screen, 100%
2.4W
2.6W
2.8W
N/A
Screen, 1%
30mW
140mW
250mW
N/A
Backlight 1
290mW
?
?
?
fairly small, all things considered
Backlight 2
890mW
1.2W
3W?
460mW?
geometric progression
Backlight 3
1.69W
1.5W
1.8W?
390mW?
significant power use
Radios
100mW
250mW
N/A
N/A
USB-C
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
negligible power drain
USB-A
10mW
10mW
?
10mW
almost negligible
DisplayPort
300mW
390mW
600mW
N/A
not passive
HDMI
380mW
440mW
1W?
20mW
not passive
1TB SSD
1.65W
1.79W
2W
12mW
significant, probably higher when busy
MicroSD
1.6W
3W
6W
1.93W
highest power usage, possibly even higher when busy
Ethernet
1.69W
1.64W
1.76W
N/A
comparable to the SSD card
So it looks like all expansion cards but the USB-C ones are active,
i.e. they draw power with idle. The USB-A cards are the least concern,
sucking out 10mW, pretty much within the margin of error. But both the
DisplayPort and HDMI do take a few hundred miliwatts. It looks like
USB-A connectors have this fundamental flaw that they necessarily draw
some powers because they lack the power negotiation features of
USB-C. At least according to this post:
It seems the USB A must have power going to it all the time, that
the old USB 2 and 3 protocols, the USB C only provides power when
there is a connection. Old versus new.
Apparently, this is a problem specific to the USB-C to USB-A
adapter that ships with the Framework. Some people have actually
changed their orders to all USB-C because of this problem, but I'm
not sure the problem is as serious as claimed in the forums. I
couldn't reproduce the "one watt" power drains suggested elsewhere,
at least not repeatedly. (A previous version of this post did show
such a power drain, but it was in a less controlled test
environment than the series of more rigorous tests above.)
The worst offenders are the storage cards: the SSD drive takes at
least one watt of power and the MicroSD card seems to want to take all
the way up to 6 watts of power, both just sitting there doing
nothing. This confirms claims of 1.4W for the SSD (but not
5W) power usage found elsewhere. The former post has
instructions on how to disable the card in software. The MicroSD card
has been reported as using 2 watts, but I've seen it as high as 6
watts, which is pretty damning.
The Framework team has a beta update for the DisplayPort adapter
but currently only for Windows (LVFS technically possible, "under
investigation"). A USB-A firmware update is alsounder
investigation. It is therefore likely at least some of those power
management issues will eventually be fixed.
Note that the upcoming Ethernet card has a reported 2-8W power usage,
depending on traffic. I did my own power usage tests in
powerstat-wayland and they seem lower than 2W.
The upcoming 6.2 Linux kernel might also improve battery usage when
idle, see this Phoronix article for details, likely in early
2023.
Idle power usage tests under Wayland
Update: I redid those tests under Wayland, see powerstat-wayland
for details. The TL;DR: is that power consumption is either smaller or
similar.
Idle power usage tests, 3.06 beta BIOS
I redid the idle tests after the 3.06 beta BIOS update and ended
up with this results:
Device
Minimum
Average
Max
Stdev
Note
Baseline
1.96W
2.01W
2.11W
30mW
1 USB-C, screen off, backlight off, no radios
2 USB-C
1.95W
2.16W
3.69W
430mW
USB-C confirmed as mostly passive...
3 USB-C
1.95W
2.16W
3.69W
430mW
... although with extra stdev
1TB SSD
3.72W
3.85W
4.62W
200mW
unchanged from before upgrade
1 USB-A
1.97W
2.18W
4.02W
530mW
unchanged
2 USB-A
1.97W
2.00W
2.08W
30mW
unchanged
3 USB-A
1.94W
1.99W
2.03W
20mW
unchanged
MicroSD w/o card
3.54W
3.58W
3.71W
40mW
significant improvement! 2-3W power saving!
MicroSD w/ card
3.53W
3.72W
5.23W
370mW
new measurement! increased deviation
DisplayPort
2.28W
2.31W
2.37W
20mW
unchanged
1 HDMI
2.43W
2.69W
4.53W
460mW
unchanged
2 HDMI
2.53W
2.59W
2.67W
30mW
unchanged
External USB
3.85W
3.89W
3.94W
30mW
new result
Ethernet
3.60W
3.70W
4.91W
230mW
unchanged
Note that the table summary is different than the previous table: here
we show the absolute numbers while the previous table was doing a
confusing attempt at showing relative (to the baseline) numbers.
Conclusion: the 3.06 BIOS update did not significantly change idle
power usage stats except for the MicroSD card which has
significantly improved.
The new "external USB" test is also interesting: it shows how the
provided 1TB SSD card performs (admirably) compared to existing
devices. The other new result is the MicroSD card with a card which,
interestingly, uses less power than the 1TB SSD drive.
That's 8mAh per 10 minutes (and 2 seconds), or 48mA, or, with this
battery, about 127 hours or roughly 5 days of standby. Not bad!
In comparison, here is my really old x220, before:
sep 29 22:13:54 emma systemd-sleep[176315]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_now = 5070 [mWh]
... after:
sep 29 22:23:54 emma systemd-sleep[176486]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_now = 4980 [mWh]
... which is 90 mwH in 10 minutes, or a whopping 540mA, which was
possibly okay when this battery was new (62000 mAh, so about 100
hours, or about 5 days), but this battery is almost dead and has
only 5210 mAh when full, so only 10 hours standby.
And here is the Framework performing a similar test, before:
... which is 49mAh in a little over 10 minutes (and 4 seconds), or
292mA, much more than the Purism, but half of the X220. At this rate,
the battery would last on standby only 12 hours!! That is pretty
bad.
Note that this was done with the following expansion cards:
2 USB-C
1 1TB SSD drive
1 USB-A with a hub connected to it, with keyboard and LAN
Preliminary tests without the hub (over one minute) show that it
doesn't significantly affect this power consumption (300mA).
This guide also suggests booting with nvme.noacpi=1 but this
still gives me about 5mAh/min (or 300mA).
Adding mem_sleep_default=deep to the kernel command line does make a
difference. Before:
... which is 2mAh in 74 seconds, which is 97mA, brings us to a more
reasonable 36 hours, or a day and a half. It's still above the x220
power usage, and more than an order of magnitude more than the Purism
laptop. It's also far from the 0.4% promised by upstream, which
would be 14mA for the 3500mAh battery.
It should also be noted that this "deep" sleep mode is a little more
disruptive than regular sleep. As you can see by the timing, it took
more than 10 seconds for the laptop to resume, which feels a little
alarming as your banging the keyboard to bring it back to life.
You can confirm the current sleep mode with:
# cat /sys/power/mem_sleep
s2idle [deep]
In the above, deep is selected. You can change it on the fly with:
... better! 6 mAh in about 6 minutes, works out to 63.5mA, so more
than two days standby.
A longer test:
oct 01 09:22:56 angela systemd-sleep[62978]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now = 3327 [mAh]
oct 01 12:47:35 angela systemd-sleep[63219]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now = 3147 [mAh]
That's 180mAh in about 3.5h, 52mA! Now at 66h, or almost 3 days.
I wasn't sure why I was seeing such fluctuations in those tests, but
as it turns out, expansion card power tests show that they do
significantly affect power usage, especially the SSD drive, which can
take up to two full watts of power even when idle. I didn't control
for expansion cards in the above tests running them with whatever
card I had plugged in without paying attention so it's likely the
cause of the high power usage and fluctuations.
It might be possible to work around this problem by disabling USB
devices before suspend. TODO. See also this post.
In the meantime, I have been able to get much better suspend
performance by unplugging all modules. Then I get this result:
oct 04 11:15:38 angela systemd-sleep[257571]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now = 3203 [mAh]
oct 04 15:09:32 angela systemd-sleep[257866]: /sys/class/power_supply/BAT1/charge_now = 3145 [mAh]
Which is 14.8mA! Almost exactly the number promised by Framework! With
a full battery, that means a 10 days suspend time. This is actually
pretty good, and far beyond what I was expecting when starting down
this journey.
So, once the expansion cards are unplugged, suspend power usage is
actually quite reasonable. More detailed standby tests are available
in the standby-tests page, with a summary below.
There is also some hope that the Chromebook edition
specifically designed with a specification of 14 days standby
time could bring some firmware improvements back down to the
normal line. Some of those issues were reported upstream in April
2022, but there doesn't seem to have been any progress there
since.
TODO: one final solution here is suspend-then-hibernate, which
Windows uses for this
TODO: consider implementing the S0ix sleep states , see also troubleshooting
TODO: consider https://github.com/intel/pm-graph
Standby expansion cards test results
This table is a summary of the more extensive standby-tests I have performed:
Device
Wattage
Amperage
Days
Note
baseline
0.25W
16mA
9
sleep=deep nvme.noacpi=1
s2idle
0.29W
18.9mA
~7
sleep=s2idle nvme.noacpi=1
normal nvme
0.31W
20mA
~7
sleep=s2idle without nvme.noacpi=1
1 USB-C
0.23W
15mA
~10
2 USB-C
0.23W
14.9mA
same as above
1 USB-A
0.75W
48.7mA
3
+500mW (!!) for the first USB-A card!
2 USB-A
1.11W
72mA
2
+360mW
3 USB-A
1.48W
96mA
<2
+370mW
1TB SSD
0.49W
32mA
<5
+260mW
MicroSD
0.52W
34mA
~4
+290mW
DisplayPort
0.85W
55mA
<3
+620mW (!!)
1 HDMI
0.58W
38mA
~4
+250mW
2 HDMI
0.65W
42mA
<4
+70mW
Conclusions:
USB-C cards take no extra power on suspend, possibly less
than empty slots, more testing required
USB-A cards take a lot more power on suspend
(300-500mW) than on regular idle (~10mW, almost negligible)
1TB SSD and MicroSD cards seem to take a reasonable
amount of power (260-290mW), compared to their runtime
equivalents (1-6W!)
DisplayPort takes a surprising lot of power (620mW), almost
double its average runtime usage (390mW)
HDMI cards take, surprisingly, less power (250mW) in
standby than the DP card (620mW)
and oddly, a second card adds less power usage (70mW?!) than the
first, maybe a circuit is used by both?
Standby expansion cards test results, 3.06 beta BIOS
Framework recently (2022-11-07) announced that they will publish
a firmware upgrade to address some of the USB-C issues, including
power management. This could positively affect the above result,
improving both standby and runtime power usage.
The update came out in December 2022 and I redid my analysis with
the following results:
Device
Wattage
Amperage
Days
Note
baseline
0.25W
16mA
9
no cards, same as before upgrade
1 USB-C
0.25W
16mA
9
same as before
2 USB-C
0.25W
16mA
9
same
1 USB-A
0.80W
62mA
3
+550mW!! worse than before
2 USB-A
1.12W
73mA
<2
+320mW, on top of the above, bad!
Ethernet
0.62W
40mA
3-4
new result, decent
1TB SSD
0.52W
34mA
4
a bit worse than before (+2mA)
MicroSD
0.51W
22mA
4
same
DisplayPort
0.52W
34mA
4+
upgrade improved by 300mW
1 HDMI
?
38mA
?
same
2 HDMI
?
45mA
?
a bit worse than before (+3mA)
Normal
1.08W
70mA
~2
Ethernet, 2 USB-C, USB-A
Full results in standby-tests-306. The big takeaway for me is that
the update did not improve power usage on the USB-A ports which is a
big problem for my use case. There is a notable improvement on the
DisplayPort power consumption which brings it more in line with the
HDMI connector, but it still doesn't properly turn off on suspend
either.
Even worse, the USB-A ports now sometimes fails to resume after
suspend, which is pretty annoying. This is a known problem
that will hopefully get fixed in the final release.
I looked at building this myself but failed to run it. I opened a
RFP in Debian so that we can ship this in Debian, and also documented
my work there.
Note that there is now a counter that tracks charge/discharge
cycles. It's visible in tlp-stat -b, which is a nice
improvement:
Ethernet expansion card
The Framework ethernet expansion card is a fancy little doodle:
"2.5Gbit/s and 10/100/1000Mbit/s Ethernet", the "clear housing lets
you peek at the RTL8156 controller that powers it". Which is another
way to say "we didn't completely finish prod on this one, so it kind
of looks like we 3D-printed this in the shop"....
The card is a little bulky, but I guess that's inevitable considering
the RJ-45 form factor when compared to the thin Framework laptop.
I have had a serious issue when trying it at first: the link LEDs
just wouldn't come up. I made a full bug report in the forum and
with upstream support, but eventually figured it out on my own. It's
(of course) a power saving issue: if you reboot the machine, the links
come up when the laptop is running the BIOS POST check and even when
the Linux kernel boots.
I first thought that the problem is likely related to the
powertop service which I run at boot time to tweak some power saving
settings.
It seems like this:
By default, USB power saving is active in the kernel, but not
force-enabled for incompatible drivers. That is, devices that
support suspension will suspend, drivers that do not, will not.
So the fix is actually to uninstall tlp or disable that setting by
adding this to /etc/tlp.conf:
USB_AUTOSUSPEND=0
... but that disables auto-suspend on all USB devices, which may
hurt other power usage performance. I have found that a a
combination of:
USB_AUTOSUSPEND=1
USB_DENYLIST="0bda:8156"
and this on the kernel commandline:
usbcore.quirks=0bda:8156:k
... actually does work correctly. I now have this in my
/etc/default/grub.d/framework-tweaks.cfg file:
# net.ifnames=0: normal interface names ffs (e.g. eth0, wlan0, not wlp166
s0)
# nvme.noacpi=1: reduce SSD disk power usage (not working)
# mem_sleep_default=deep: reduce power usage during sleep (not working)
# usbcore.quirk is a workaround for the ethernet card suspend bug: https:
//guides.frame.work/Guide/Fedora+37+Installation+on+the+Framework+Laptop/
108?lang=en
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="net.ifnames=0 nvme.noacpi=1 mem_sleep_default=deep usbcore.quirks=0bda:8156:k"
# fix the resolution in grub for fonts to not be tiny
GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768
Other than that, I haven't been able to max out the card because I
don't have other 2.5Gbit/s equipment at home, which is strangely
satisfying. But running against my Turris Omnia
router, I could pretty much max a gigabit fairly easily:
The card doesn't require any proprietary firmware blobs which is
surprising. Other than the power saving issues, it just works.
In my power tests (see powerstat-wayland), the Ethernet card seems
to use about 1.6W of power idle, without link, in the above "quirky"
configuration where the card is functional but without autosuspend.
Proprietary firmware blobs
The framework does need proprietary firmware to operate. Specifically:
the WiFi network card shipped with the DIY kit is a AX210 card that
requires a 5.19 kernel or later, and the firmware-iwlwifi non-free firmware package
the Bluetooth adapter also loads the firmware-iwlwifi
package (untested)
the graphics work out of the box without firmware, but certain
power management features come only with special proprietary
firmware, normally shipped in the firmware-misc-nonfree
but currently missing from the package
Note that, at the time of writing, the latest i915 firmware from
linux-firmware has a serious bug where loading all the
accessible firmware results in noticeable I estimate 200-500ms lag
between the keyboard (not the mouse!) and the display. Symptoms also
include tearing and shearing of windows, it's pretty nasty.
One workaround is to delete the two affected firmware files:
cd /lib/firmware && rm adlp_guc_70.1.1.bin adlp_guc_69.0.3.bin
update-initramfs -u
You will get the following warning during build, which is good as
it means the problematic firmware is disabled:
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/adlp_guc_69.0.3.bin for module i915
W: Possible missing firmware /lib/firmware/i915/adlp_guc_70.1.1.bin for module i915
But then it also means that critical firmware isn't loaded, which
means, among other things, a higher battery drain. I was able to move
from 8.5-10W down to the 7W range after making the firmware work
properly. This is also after turning the backlight all the way down,
as that takes a solid 2-3W in full blast.
The proper fix is to use some compositing manager. I ended up using
compton with the following systemd unit:
compton is orphaned however, so you might be tempted to use
picom instead, but in my experience the latter uses much
more power (1-2W extra, similar experience). I also tried
compiz but it would just crash with:
anarcat@angela:~$ compiz --replace
compiz (core) - Warn: No XI2 extension
compiz (core) - Error: Another composite manager is already running on screen: 0
compiz (core) - Fatal: No manageable screens found on display :0
When running from the base session, I would get this instead:
Also note that the iwlwifi firmware also looks incomplete. Even with
the package installed, I get those errors in dmesg:
[ 19.534429] Intel(R) Wireless WiFi driver for Linux
[ 19.534691] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: enabling device (0000 -> 0002)
[ 19.541867] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541881] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541882] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode failed with error -2
[ 19.541890] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541895] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541896] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode failed with error -2
[ 19.541903] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-70.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541907] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-70.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541908] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-70.ucode failed with error -2
[ 19.541913] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-69.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541916] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-69.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541917] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-69.ucode failed with error -2
[ 19.541922] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-68.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541926] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-68.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541927] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-68.ucode failed with error -2
[ 19.541933] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-67.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541937] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-67.ucode (-2)
[ 19.541937] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: Direct firmware load for iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-67.ucode failed with error -2
[ 19.544244] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: direct-loading firmware iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-66.ucode
[ 19.544257] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: api flags index 2 larger than supported by driver
[ 19.544270] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: TLV_FW_FSEQ_VERSION: FSEQ Version: 0.63.2.1
[ 19.544523] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwl-debug-yoyo.bin (-2)
[ 19.544528] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwl-debug-yoyo.bin (-2)
[ 19.544530] iwlwifi 0000:a6:00.0: loaded firmware version 66.55c64978.0 ty-a0-gf-a0-66.ucode op_mode iwlmvm
Some of those are available in the latest upstream firmware package
(iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-71.ucode, -68, and -67), but not all
(e.g. iwlwifi-ty-a0-gf-a0-72.ucode is missing) . It's unclear what
those do or don't, as the WiFi seems to work well without them.
I still copied them in from the latest linux-firmware package in the
hope they would help with power management, but I did not notice a
change after loading them.
There are also multiple knobs on the iwlwifi and iwlmvm
drivers. The latter has a power_schmeme setting which defaults to
2 (balanced), setting it to 3 (low power) could improve
battery usage as well, in theory. The iwlwifi driver also has
power_save (defaults to disabled) and power_level (1-5, defaults
to 1) settings. See also the output of modinfo iwlwifi and
modinfo iwlmvm for other driver options.
Graphics acceleration
After loading the latest upstream firmware and setting up a
compositing manager (compton, above), I tested the classic
glxgears.
Running in a window gives me odd results, as the gears basically grind
to a halt:
Running synchronized to the vertical refresh. The framerate should be
approximately the same as the monitor refresh rate.
137 frames in 5.1 seconds = 26.984 FPS
27 frames in 5.4 seconds = 5.022 FPS
Ouch. 5FPS!
But interestingly, once the window is in full screen, it does hit the
monitor refresh rate:
300 frames in 5.0 seconds = 60.000 FPS
I'm not really a gamer and I'm not normally using any of that fancy
graphics acceleration stuff (except maybe my browser does?).
I installed intel-gpu-tools for the intel_gpu_top
command to confirm the GPU was engaged when doing those simulations. A
nice find. Other useful diagnostic tools include glxgears and
glxinfo (in mesa-utils) and (vainfo in vainfo).
Following to this post, I also made sure to have those settings
in my about:config in Firefox, or, in user.js:
user_pref("media.ffmpeg.vaapi.enabled", true);
Note that the guide suggests many other settings to tweak, but those
might actually be overkill, see this comment and its parents. I
did try forcing hardware acceleration by setting gfx.webrender.all
to true, but everything became choppy and weird.
The guide also mentions installing the intel-media-driver package,
but I could not find that in Debian.
The Arch wiki has, as usual, an excellent reference on hardware
acceleration in Firefox.
Chromium / Signal desktop bugs
It looks like both Chromium and Signal Desktop misbehave with my
compositor setup (compton + i3). The fix is to add a persistent
flag to Chromium. In Arch, it's conveniently in
~/.config/chromium-flags.conf but that doesn't actually work in
Debian. I had to put the flag in
/etc/chromium.d/disable-compositing, like this:
It's possible another one of the hundreds of flags might fix this
issue better, but I don't really have time to go through this entire,
incomplete, and unofficial list (!?!).
Signal Desktop is a similar problem, and doesn't reuse those flags
(because of course it doesn't). Instead I had to rewrite the wrapper
script in /usr/local/bin/signal-desktop to use this instead:
exec /usr/bin/flatpak run --branch=stable --arch=x86_64 org.signal.Signal --disable-gpu-compositing "$@"
This was mostly done in this Puppet commit.
I haven't figured out the root of this problem. I did try using
picom and xcompmgr; they both suffer from the same issue. Another
Debian testing user on Wayland told me they haven't seen this problem,
so hopefully this can be fixed by switching to
wayland.
Graphics card hangs
I believe I might have this bug which results in a total
graphical hang for 15-30 seconds. It's fairly rare so it's not too
disruptive, but when it does happen, it's pretty alarming.
The comments on that bug report are encouraging though: it seems this
is a bug in either mesa or the Intel graphics driver, which means many
people have this problem so it's likely to be fixed. There's actually
a merge request on mesa already (2022-12-29).
It could also be that bug because the error message I get is
actually:
Jan 20 12:49:10 angela kernel: Asynchronous wait on fence 0000:00:02.0:sway[104431]:cb0ae timed out (hint:intel_atomic_commit_ready [i915])
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GPU HANG: ecode 12:0:00000000
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] Resetting chip for stopped heartbeat on rcs0
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GuC firmware i915/adlp_guc_70.1.1.bin version 70.1
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] HuC firmware i915/tgl_huc_7.9.3.bin version 7.9
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] HuC authenticated
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GuC submission enabled
Jan 20 12:49:15 angela kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GuC SLPC enabled
It's a solid 30 seconds graphical hang. Maybe the keyboard and
everything else keeps working. The latter bug report is quite long,
with many comments, but this one from January 2023 seems to say
that Sway 1.8 fixed the problem. There's also an earlier patch to
add an extra kernel parameter that supposedly fixes that too. There's
all sorts of other workarounds in there, for example this:
from this comment... So that one is unsolved, as far as the
upstream drivers are concerned, but maybe could be fixed through Sway.
Weird USB hangs / graphical glitches
I have had weird connectivity glitches better described in this
post, but basically: my USB keyboard and mice (connected over a
USB hub) drop keys, lag a lot or hang, and I get visual glitches.
The fix was to tighten the screws around the CPU on the motherboard
(!), which is, thankfully, a rather simple repair.
USB docks are hell
Note that the monitors are hooked up to angela through a USB-C /
Thunderbolt dock from Cable Matters, with the lovely name of
201053-SIL. It has issues, see this blog
post for an in-depth discussion.
Shipping details
I ordered the Framework in August 2022 and received it about a month
later, which is sooner than expected because the August batch was
late.
People (including me) expected this to have an impact on the September
batch, but it seems Framework have been able to fix the delivery
problems and keep up with the demand.
As of early 2023, their website announces that laptops ship "within 5
days". I have myself ordered a few expansion cards in November 2022,
and they shipped on the same day, arriving 3-4 days later.
The supply pipeline
There are basically 6 steps in the Framework shipping pipeline, each
(except the last) accompanied with an email notification:
pre-order
preparing batch
preparing order
payment complete
shipping
(received)
This comes from the crowdsourced spreadsheet, which should be
updated when the status changes here.
I was part of the "third batch" of the 12th generation laptop, which
was supposed to ship in September. It ended up arriving on my door
step on September 27th, about 33 days after ordering.
It seems current orders are not processed in "batches", but in real
time, see this blog post for details on shipping.
Shipping trivia
I don't know about the others, but my laptop shipped through no less
than four different airplane flights. Here are the hops it took:
I can't quite figure out how to calculate exactly how much mileage
that is, but it's huge. The ride through Alaska is surprising enough
but the bounce back through Winnipeg is especially weird. I guess
the route happens that way because of Fedex shipping hubs.
There was a related oddity when I had my Purism laptop shipped: it
left from the west coast and seemed to enter on an endless, two week
long road trip across the continental US.
I read somewhere a nice meme about Linux: Do you want an operating system or do you want an adventure? I love
it, because it is so true. What you are about to read is my adventure to set a usable screen resolution in a fresh
Debian testing installation.
The context is that I have two different Lenovo Thinkpad laptops with 16 screen and nvidia graphic cards. They are both
installed with the latest Debian testing. I use the closed-source nvidia drivers (they seem to work better than the nouveau
module). The desktop manager and environment that I use is lightdm + XFCE4. The monitor native resolution in both machines
is very high: 3840x2160 (or 4K UHD if you will).
The thing is that both laptops show an identical problem: when freshly installed with the Debian default config,
the native resolution is in use. For a 16 screen laptop, this high resolution means that the font is tiny.
Therefore, the raw native resolution renders the machine almost unusable.
This is a picture of what you get by running htop in the console (tty1, the terminal you would get by
hitting CTRL+ALT+F1) with the default install:
Everything in the system is affected by this:
the grub menu is unreadable. Thanksfully the right option is selected by default.
the tty console, with the boot splash by systemd is unreadable as well. There are some colors, so you at least see some systemd stuff happening in green .
when lightdm starts, the resolution keeps being very high. Can barely click the login button.
when XFCE4 starts, it is a pain to navigate the menu and click the right buttons to set a more reasonable resolution.
The adventure begins after installing the system. Each of these four points must be fixed by hand by the user.
XFCE4
Point #4 is the easiest. Navigate with the mouse pointer to the tiny Applications menu, then Settings, then Displays.
This is more or less the same in every other desktop operating system. There are no further actions required to persist this
setting. Thanks you XFCE4.
lightdm
Point #3, about lightdm, is more tricky to solve. It involves running xrandr when lightdm sets up the display.
Nobody will tell you this trick. You have to search for it on the internet. Thankfully is a common problem, and a
person who knows what to search for can find good results.
The file /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf needs to contain something like this:
[LightDM]
[Seat:*]
# set up correct display resolution
display-setup-script=sh -c -- "xrandr -s 1920x1080"
By the way, depending on your system hardware setup, you may also need an additional call to xrandr here. If you
want to plug in an HDMI monitor, chances are you require something like xrandr --setprovideroutputsource NVIDIA-G0 modesetting && xrandr --auto
to instruct the NVIDIA graphic card to work will with the kernel graphic system.
In my case, one of my laptops require it, so I have:
[LightDM]
[Seat:*]
# don't ask me to type my username
greeter-hide-users=false
# set up correct display resolution, and prepare NVIDIA card for HDMI output
display-setup-script=sh -c "xrandr -s 1920x1080 && xrandr --setprovideroutputsource NVIDIA-G0 modesetting && xrandr --auto"
grub
Point #1 about the grub menu is also not trivial to solve, but also widely known on the internet. Grub allows you to
set arbitrary graphical modes. In Debian systems, adding something like GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768 to /etc/default/grub and then
running sudo update-grub should do the magic.
console
So we get to point #2 about the tty1 console. For months, I ve been investing my scarce personal time into trying to
solve this annoyance. There are a lot of conflicting information about this on the internet. Plenty of misleading solutions,
essays about framebuffer, kernel modeset, and other stuff I don t want to read just to get my tty1 in a readable status.
People point in different directions, like using GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep in /etc/default/grub. Which is a good solution,
but won t work: my best bet is that the kernel indeed keeps the resolution as told by grub, but the moment systemd loads the nvidia
driver, it enables 4K in the display and the console gets the high resolution.
Actually, for a few weeks, I blamed plymouth. Because the plymouth service is loaded early by
systemd, it could be responsible for setting some of the display settings. It actually contains some (undocummented)
DeviceScale configuration option that is seemingly aimed to integrate into high resolution scenarios. I played with it to no avail.
Some folks from IRC suggested reconfiguring the console-font package. Back-then unknown to me. Running
sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-font would indeed show a menu to select some preferences for the console, including font size.
But apparently, a freshly installed system already uses the biggest possible, so this was a dead end.
Other option I evaluted for a few days was touching the kernel framebuffer setting. I honestly don t understand this, and all the
solutions pointing to use fbset didn t work for me anyways. This is the default framebuffer configuration in one of the laptops:
Playing with these numbers, I was able to modify the geometry of the console, only to reduce the panel to a tiny square in the console
display (with equally small fonts anyway). If it was possible to scale or resize the panel in other way, I was unable to understand
how to do so by reading the associated docs.
One day, out of despair, I tried disabling kernel modesetting (or KMS). It indeed got me a more readable tty1, only to prevent
the whole graphic stack from starting, with Xorg complaining about the lack of kernel modeset.
After lots of wasted time, I decided to blame the NVIDIA graphic card. Because why not: a closed source module in my system looks fishy.
I registered in their official forum and wrote a message about my suspicion on the module, asking for advice on how
to modify the driver default resolution. I was hoping that something like modprobe nvidia my_desired_resolution=1920x1080 could
exist. Apparently not :-(
I was about to give up. I had walked every corner of the known internet. I even tried summoning the ancient gods, I used ChatGPT.
I asked the AI god for mercy, for a working solution to no avail.
Then I decided to change the kind of queries I was issuing the search engines (don t ask me, I no longer remember). Eventually I landed in
this askubuntu.com page. The question described the exact same problem I was experiencing. Finally, that was encouraging!
I was not alone in my adventure after all!
The solution section included a font size I hadn t seen before in my previous tests: 16x32. More excitement!
I did all the steps. I installed the xfonts-terminus package, and in the file /etc/default/console-setup I put:
Then I run setupcon from a tty, and the miracle happened! I finally got a bigger font in the tty1 console!
Turned out a potential solution was about playing with console-setup, which I had tried wihtout success before.
I m not even sure if the additional package was required.
This is how my console looks now:
The truth is the solution is satisfying only to a degree. I m a person with good eyesight and can work with
these bit larger fonts. I m not sure if I can get larger fonts using this method, honestly.
After some search, I discovered that some folks already managed to describe the problem in detail and
filed a proper bug report in Debian, see #595696 opened more than 10 years ago.
2023 is the year of linux on the desktop
Nope.
I honestly don t see how this disconnected pile of settings can be all reconciled together.
Can we please have a systemd-whatever that homogeinizes all of this mess?
I m referring to grub + kernel drivers + console + lightdm + XFCE4.
Next adventure
When I lock the desktop (with CTRL+ALT+L) and close the laptop lid to suspend it, then reopen it, type the login info
into the lightdm greeter, then the desktop environment never loads, black screen.
I have already tried the first few search results without luck. Perhaps the nvidia card is to blame this time? Perhaps
poorly coupled power management by the different system software pieces?
Who knows what s going on here. This will probably be my next Debian desktop adventure.
DebConf20 will be held online this year and I've started doing some work
for the DebConf videoteam to prepare what's to come.
One thing I want us to do is capture a live IRC session and use it as a video
input in Voctomix, the live video mixer we use. This way, at the end of a
talk we could show both the attendees asking questions on IRC and the presenter
replying to them side-by-side.
Capturing a live video of an IRC client on a remote headless server is somewhat
more complicated than you might think; as far as I know, neither ffmpeg nor
gstreamer support recording a live ssh pseudoterminal1.
Worse, neither weechat nor irssi run on X: they use ncurses... Although you
can capture an X11 window with ffmpeg -f x11grab, I wasn't able to get them to
run with Xvfb.
Capturing the framebuffer
One thing I dislike with this method is the framebuffer isn't always easy to
access on remote machines. If you don't have a serial connection, you can try
using a VNC server that can.
I did my tests in a VM on an KVM hypervisor and used virt-manager to access
the framebuffer.
I had a hard time setting the framebuffer resolution to a 16:9 aspect ratio. The
winning combination ended up passing the nomodeset kernel parameter at boot
and setting up these parameters in /etc/default/grub2:
GRUB_GFXMODE=1280x720
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=keep
To make the text more readable, this is the /etc/default/console-setup file
that seemed to make the most sense:
# CONFIGURATION FILE FOR SETUPCON
# Consult the console-setup(5) manual page.
ACTIVE_CONSOLES="/dev/tty[1-6]"
CHARMAP="UTF-8"
CODESET="Lat15"
FONTFACE="TerminusBold"
FONTSIZE="12x24"
Once that is done, the only thing left is to run the IRC client and launch
ffmpeg. The magic command to record the framebuffer seems to be something
like:
Earlier this week, I finally got my new machine that came with my new position at the University of Pennsylvania: A shiny Thinkpad T460s that now replaces my T430s. (Yes, there is a pattern. It continues with T400 and T41p.) I decided to re-install my Debian system from scratch and copy over only the home directory a bit of purification does not hurt. This blog post contains some random notes that might be useful to someone or alternative where I hope someone can tell me how to fix and improve things.
Installation
The installation (using debian-installer from a USB drive) went mostly smooth, including LVM on an encrypted partition. Unfortunately, it did not set up grub correctly for the UEFI system to boot, so I had to jump through some hoops (using the grub on the USB drive to manually boot into the installed system, and installing grub-efi from there) until the system actually came up.
High-resolution display
This laptop has a 2560 1440 high resolution display. Modern desktop environments like GNOME supposedly handle that quite nicely, but for reasons explained in an earlier post, I do not use a desktop envrionment but have a minimalistic setup based on Xmonad. I managed to get a decent setup now, by turning lots of manual knobs:
For the linux console, setting
FONTFACE="Terminus"
FONTSIZE="12x24"
in /etc/default/console-setup yielded good results.
For the few GTK-2 applications that I am still running, I set
gtk-font-name="Sans 16"
in ~/.gtkrc-2.0. Similarly, for GTK-3 I have
[Settings]
gtk-font-name = Sans 16
in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini.
Programs like gnome-terminal, Evolution and hexchat refer to the System default document font and System default monospace font . I remember that it was possible to configure these in the GNOME control center, but I could not find any way of configuring these using command line tools, so I resorted to manually setting the font for these. With the help from Alexandre Franke I figured out that the magic incarnation here is:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface monospace-font-name 'Monospace 16'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface document-font-name 'Serif 16'
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface font-name 'Sans 16'
Firefox seemed to have picked up these settings for the UI, so that was good. To make web pages readable, I set layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to 1.5 in about:config.
GVim has set guifont=Monospace\ 16 in ~/.vimrc. The toolbar is tiny, but I hardly use it anyways.
Setting the font of Xmonad prompts requires the sytax
, font = "xft:Sans:size=16"
Speaking about Xmonad prompts: Check out the XMonad.Prompt.Unicode module that I have been using for years and recently submitted upstream.
I launch Chromium (or rather the desktop applications that I use that happen to be Chrome apps) with the parameter --force-device-scale-factor=1.5.
Libreoffice seems to be best configured by running xrandr --dpi 194 before hand. This seems also to be read by Firefox, doubling the effect of the font size in the gtk settings, which is annoying. Luckily I do not work with Libreoffice often, so for now I ll just set that manually when needed.
I am not quite satisfied. I have the impression that the 16 point size font, e.g. in Evolution, is not really pretty, so I am happy to take suggestions here.
I found the ArchWiki page on HiDPI very useful here.
Trackpoint and Touchpad
One reason for me to sticking with Thinkpads is their trackpoint, which I use exclusively. In previous models, I disabled the touchpad in the BIOS, but this did not seem to have an effect here, so I added the following section to /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/30-touchpad.conf
At one point I left out the MatchProduct line, disabling all input in the X server. Had to boot into recovery mode to fix that.
Unfortunately, there is something wrong with the trackpoint and the buttons: When I am moving the trackpoint (and maybe if there is actual load on the machine), mouse button press and release events sometimes get lost. This is quite annoying I try to open a folder in Evolution and accidentially move it.
I installed the latest Kernel from Debian experimental (4.8.0-rc8), but it did not help.
I filed a bug report against libinput although I am not fully sure that that s the culprit.
Update: According to Benjamin Tissoires it is a known firmware bug and the appropriate people are working on a work-around. Until then I am advised to keep my palm of the touchpad.
Also, I found the trackpoint too slow. I am not sure if it is simply because of the large resolution of the screen, or because some movement events are also swallowed. For now, I simply changed the speed by writing
Brightness control
The system would not automatically react to pressing Fn-F5 and Fn-F6, which are the keys to adjust the brightness. I am unsure about how and by what software component it should be handled, but the solution that I found was to set
The T460s does not actually have a sleep button, that line is a reminiscence from my T430s. I suspend the machine by pressing the power button now, thanks to HandlePowerKey=suspend in /etc/systemd/logind.conf.
Profile Weirdness
Something strange happend to my environment variables after the move. It is clearly not hardware related, but I simply cannot explain what has changed: All relevant files in /etc look similar enough.
I use ~/.profile to extend the PATH and set some other variables. Previously, these settings were in effect in my whole X session, which is started by lightdm with auto-login, followed by xmonad-session. I could find no better way to fix that than stating . ~/.profile early in my ~/.xmonad/xmonad-session-rc. Very strange.
TL;DR: I put a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero, a Bluetooth USB dongle, and the
required adapter cable into my new Handy Tech Active Star 40 braille
display. An internal USB port provides the power. This has transformed
my braille display into an ARM-based, monitorless, Linux laptop that has
a keyboard and a braille display. It can be charged/powered via USB so it can
also be run from a power bank or a solar charger, thus potentially being able
to run for days, rather than just hours, without needing a standard wall-jack.
Some Background on Braille Display Form Factors
Braille displays come in various sizes. There are
models tailored for desktop use (with 60 cells or more), models tailored
for portable use with a laptop (usually with 40 cells), and, nowadays,
there are even models tailored for on-the-go use with a smartphone or similar
(with something like 14 or 18 cells).
Back in the old days, braille displays were rather massive.
A 40-cell braille display was typically about the size of a 13" laptop.
In modern times, manufacturers have managed to reduce the size of the internals
such that a 40-cell display can be placed in front of a laptop or keyboard
instead of placing the laptop on top of the braille display.
While this is a nice achievement, I personally haven't found it to be
very convenient because you now have to place two physically separate
devices on your lap. It's OK if you have a real desk,
but, at least in my opinion, if you try to use your laptop as its name suggests,
it's actually inconvenient to use a small form factor, 40-cell display.
For this reason, I've been waiting for a long-promised new model
in the Handy Tech Star series. In 2002, they released
the Handy Tech Braille Star 40, which is a 40-cell braille
display with enough space to put a laptop directly on top
of it. To accommodate larger laptop models, they even built in a little
platform at the back that can be pulled out to effectively enlarge the
top surface.
Handy Tech has now released a new model, the Active Star 40,
that has essentially the same layout but modernized internals.
You can still pull out the little platform to increase the space
that can be used to put something on top.
But, most conveniently,
they've designed in an empty compartment, roughly the size of a modern
smartphone, beneath the platform. The original idea was to actually
put a smartphone inside, but this has turned out (at least to me)
to not be very feasible. Fortunately, they thought about the
need for electricity and added a Micro USB cable terminating within the
newly created, empty compartment.
My first idea was to put a conventional Raspberry Pi inside.
When I received the braille display, however, we immediately
noticed that a standard-sized rpi is roughly 3mm too high
to fit into the empty compartment.
Fortunately, though, a co-worker noticed that the Raspberry Pi Zero
was available for order. The Raspberry Pi Zero is a lot thinner,
and fits perfectly inside (actually, I think there's enough space
for two, or even three, of them). So we ordered one, along with some
accessories like a 64GB SDHC card, a Bluetooth dongle, and
a Micro USB adapter cable. The hardware arrived a few days later, and was
immediately bootstrapped with the assistance of very helpful friends.
It works like a charm!
Technical Details
The backside of the Handy Tech Active Star 40 features two USB host ports
that can be used to connect devices such as a keyboard. A small form-factor,
USB keyboard with a magnetic clip-on is included. When a USB keyboard
is connected, and when the display is used via Bluetooth, the braille display
firmware additionally offers the Bluetooth HID profile, and key press/release
events received via the USB port are passed through to it.
I use the Bluetooth dongle for all my communication needs.
Most importantly, BRLTTY is used as a console screen reader.
It talks to the braille display via Bluetooth (more precisely, via an RFCOMM channel).
The keyboard connects through to Linux via the Bluetooth HID profile.
Now, all that is left is network connectivity. To keep the energy
consumption as low as possible, I decided to go for Bluetooth PAN.
It appears that the tethering mode of my mobile phone works (albeit with a quirk),
so I can actually access the internet as long as I have cell phone reception.
Additionally, I configured a Bluetooth PAN access point on my desktop
machines at home and at work, so I can easily (and somewhat more reliably)
get IP connectivity for the rpi when I'm near one of these machines.
I plan to configure a classic Raspberry Pi as a mobile Bluetooth access point.
It would essentially function as a Bluetooth to ethernet adapter, and should
allow me to have network connectivity in places where I don't want to use my phone.
BlueZ 5 and PAN
It was a bit challenging to figure out how to actually configure
Bluetooth PAN with BlueZ 5. I found the bt-pan python script
(see below) to be the only way so far to configure PAN without a GUI.
It handles both ends of a PAN network, configuring a server and a client.
Once instructed to do so (via D-Bus) in client mode, BlueZ will
create a new network device - bnep0 - once a connection to a server has been
established. Typically, DHCP is used to assign IP addresses
for these interfaces. In server mode, BlueZ needs to know the
name of a bridge device to which it can add a slave device for
each incoming client connection. Configuring an address for
the bridge device, as well as running a DHCP server + IP Masquerading
on the bridge, is usually all you need to do.
Now, BlueZ needs to be told to configure a NAP profile.
To my surprise, there seems to be no way to do this with stock BlueZ 5.36
utilities. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Luckily, I found a very nice blog post, as well as an accommodating
Python script that performs the required D-Bus calls.
For convenience, I use a Systemd service to invoke the script
and to ensure that its dependencies are met.
/etc/systemd/system/pan.service:
[Unit]
Description=Bluetooth Personal Area Network
After=bluetooth.service systemd-networkd.service
Requires=systemd-networkd.service
PartOf=bluetooth.service
[Service]
Type=notify
ExecStart=/usr/local/sbin/pan
[Install]
WantedBy=bluetooth.target
/usr/local/sbin/pan:
#!/bin/sh# Ugly hack to work around #787480
iptables -F
iptables -t nat -F
iptables -t mangle -F
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
exec /usr/local/sbin/bt-pan --systemd --debug server pan
This last file wouldn't be necessary if IPMasquerade= were
supported in Debian right now (see #787480).
After the obligatory systemctl daemon-reload and systemctl restart systemd-networkd,
you can start your Bluetooth Personal Area Network with systemctl start pan.
Bluetooth PAN Client with Systemd
Configuring the client is also quite easy to do with Systemd.
/etc/systemd/network/pan-client.network:
[Match]
Name=bnep*
[Network]
DHCP=yes
/etc/systemd/system/pan@.service:
[Unit]
Description=Bluetooth Personal Area Network client
[Service]
Type=notify
ExecStart=/usr/local/sbin/bt-pan --debug --systemd client %I --wait
Now, after the usual configuration reloading, you should be able to connect
to a specific Bluetooth access point with:
systemctl start pan@00:11:22:33:44:55
Pairing via the Command Line
Of course, the server and client-side service configuration require
a pre-existing pairing between the server and each of its clients.
On the server, start bluetoothctl and issue the following commands:
power on
agent on
default-agent
scan on
scan off
pair XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
trust XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
Once you've set scan mode to on, wait a few seconds until
you see the device you're looking for scroll by. Note its
device address, and use it for the pair and (optional) trust commands.
On the client, the sequence is essentially the same except that
you don't need to issue the trust command. The server needs
to trust a client in order to accept NAP profile connections from it
without waiting for manual confirmation by the user.
I'm actually not sure if this is the optimal sequence of commands.
It might be enough to just pair the client with the server
and issue the trust command on the server,
but I haven't tried this yet.
Enabling Use of the Bluetooth HID Profile
Essentially the same as above also needs to be done
in order to use the Bluetooth HID profile of the Active Star 40 on Linux.
However, instead of agent on, you need to issue the command agent KeyboardOnly.
This explicitly tells bluetoothctl that you're specifically looking for a HID profile.
Configuring Bluetooth via the Command Line Feels Vague
While I'm very happy that I actually managed to set all of this up,
I must admit that the command-line interface to BlueZ feels
a bit incomplete and confusing. I initially thought that agents
were only for PIN code entry. Now that I've discovered that "agent KeyboardOnly"
is used to enable the HID profile, I'm not sure anymore.
I'm surprised that I needed to grab a script from a random git repository
in order to be able to set up PAN. I remember, with earlier version of BlueZ,
that there was a tool called pand that you could use to do all of this
from the command-line. I don't seem to see anything like that
for BlueZ 5 anymore. Maybe I'm missing something obvious?
Performance
The data rate is roughly 120kB/s, which I consider acceptable for such a low
power solution.
The 1GHz ARM CPU actually feels sufficiently fast for a console/text-mode
person like me.
I'll rarely be using much more than ssh and emacs on it anyway.
Console fonts and screen dimensions
The default dimensions of the framebuffer on the Raspberry Pi Zero are a bit
unexpectedly strange. fbset reports that the screen dimension
is 656x416 pixels (of course, no monitor connected). With a typical console
font of 8x16, I got 82 columns and 26 lines.
With a 40 cell braille display, the 82 columns are very inconvenient.
Additionally, as a braille user, I would like to be able to view Unicode
braille characters in addition to the normal charset on the console.
Fortunately, Linux supports 512 glyphs, while most console fonts
do only provide 256. console-setup can load and combine two
256-glyph fonts at once. So I added the following to /etc/default/console-setup
to make the text console a lot more friendly to braille users:
You need console-braille installed for brl-16x8.psf to be available.
Further Projects
There's a 3.5mm audio jack inside the braille display as well.
Unfortunately, there are no converters from Mini-HDMI to 3.5mm audio
that I know of. It would be very nice to be able to use the
sound card that is already built into the Raspberry Pi Zero,
but, unfortunately, this doesn't seem possible at the moment.
Alternatively, I'm looking at using a Micro USB OTG hub and an
additional USB audio adapter to get sound from the Raspberry Pi Zero
to the braille display's speakers. Unfortunately, the two USB audio
adapters I've tried so far have run hot for some unknown reason.
So I have to find some other chipset to see if the problem goes away.
A little nuisance, currently, is that you need to manually power off
the Raspberry, wait a few seconds, and then power down the braille display.
Turning the braille display off cuts power delivery via the internal USB port.
If this is accidentally done too soon then the Raspberry Pi Zero
is shut down ungracefully (which is probably not the best way to do it).
We're looking into connecting a small, buffering battery to the GPIO pins
of the rpi, and into notifying the rpi when external power has dropped.
A graceful, software-initiated shutdown can then be performed.
You can think of it as being like a mini UPS for Micro USB.
The image
If you are a happy owner of a Handy Tech Active Star 40 and would like
to do something similar, I am happy to share my current
(Raspbian Stretch based) image. In fact, if there is enough interest by
other blind users, we might even consider putting a kit together that makes it
as easy as possible for you to get started. Let me know if this could be
of interest to you.
Thanks
Thanks to Dave Mielke for reviewing the text of this posting.
Thanks to Simon Kainz for making the photos for this article.
And I owe a big thank you to my co-workers at Graz University
of Technology who have helped me a lot to bootstrap really quickly into the
rpi world.
P.S.
My first tweet about this topic is just
five days ago, and apart from the soundcard not working yet, I feel
like the project is already almost complete! By the way, I am editing
the final version of this blog posting from my newly created monitorless
ARM-based Linux laptop via an ssh connection to my home machine.
I ve uploaded puppet 4.4.2-1 to Debian
experimental.
Please test with caution, and expect sharp corners. This is a new
major version of Puppet in Debian, with
many new features and potentially breaking changes,
as well as a big rewrite of the .deb packaging. Bug reports for
src:puppet are very welcome.
As previously described in #798636, the new package
names are:
puppet (all the software)
puppet-agent (package containing just the init script and systemd unit
for the puppet agent)
puppet-master (init script and systemd unit for starting a single
master)
puppet-master-passenger (This package depends on
apache2 and
libapache2-mod-passenger,
and configures a puppet master scaled for more than a handful of
puppet agents)
Lots of hugs to the authors, keepers and maintainers of
autopkgtest,
debci,
piuparts and
ruby-serverspec
for their software. They helped me figure out when I had reached good
enough for experimental .
Some notes:
To use exported resources with puppet 4, you need a puppetdb
installation and a relevant puppetdb-terminus package on your puppet
master. This is not available in Debian, but is available from
Puppet s repositories.
Syntax highlighting for Emacs and Vim are no longer built from the
puppet package. Standalone packages will be made.
The packaged puppet modules need an overhaul of their dependencies
to install alongside this version of puppet. Testing would probably
also be great to see if they actually work.
Wow. 3G delta. I haven t booted this laptop for a while I think I m finally ready to make the move from gnome2 to gnome3. There are bits that still annoy me, but I think it s off to a good start. Upgrading perl from 5.10 to 5.14.
I have happily used FVWM as my window manager for more than 10
years. However, I recently got tired of manually arranging windows and
using the mouse so much. A window manager is one of the handful pieces
of software getting in your way at every moment which explains why
there are so many of them and why we might put so much time in it.
I decided to try a tiling window manager. While i3 seemed
pretty hot and powerful (watch the screencast!), I
really wanted something configurable and extensible with some
language. So far, the common choices are:
awesome, written in C, configurable and extensible in Lua,
xmonad, written, configurable and extensible in Haskell.
I chose awesome, despite the fact that StumpWM vote for Lisp
seemed a better fit (but it is more minimalist). I hope there is some
parallel universe where I enjoy StumpWM.
Awesome configuration
Without a configuration file, awesome does nothing. It does not come
with any hard-coded behavior: everything needs to be configured
through its Lua configuration file. Of course, a default one is
provided but you can also start from scratch. If you like to control
your window manager, this is somewhat wonderful.
awesome is well documented. The wiki provides a FAQ, a
good introduction and the API reference is concise enough to
be read from the top to the bottom. Knowing Lua is not mandatory since
it is quite easy to dive into such a language.
I have posted my configuration on GitHub. It should not be used as
is but some snippets may be worth to be stolen and adapted into your
own configuration. The following sections put light on some notable points.
Keybindings
Ten years ago was the epoch of scavanger hunts to recover
IBM Model M keyboards from waste containers. They were great to
type on and they did not feature the infamous Windows keys. Nowadays,
this is harder to get such a keyboard. All my keyboards now have
Windows keys. This is a major change with respect to configure a
window manager: the left Windows key is mapped to Mod4 and is
usually unused by most applications and can therefore be dedicated to
the window manager.
The main problem with the ability to define many keybindings is to
remember the less frequently used one. I have monkey-patched
awful.key module to be able to attach a documentation string to a
keybinding. I have documented the whole process on the
awesome wiki.
Quake console
A Quake console is a drop-down terminal which can be toggled with
some key. I was heavily relying on it in FVWM. I think this is still a
useful addition to any awesome configuration. There are several
possible solutions documented in the awesome wiki. I
have added my own1 which works great for me.
XRandR
XRandR is an extension which allows to dynamically reconfigure
outputs: you plug an external screen to your laptop and you issue
some command to enable it:
$ xrandr --output VGA-1 --auto --left-of LVDS-1
awesome detects the change and will restart automatically. Laptops
usually come with a special key to enable/disable an external
screen. Nowadays, this key does nothing unless configured
appropriately. Out of the box, it is mapped to XF86Display symbol. I
have associated this key to a function that will
cycle through possible configurations depending on the
plugged screens. For example, if I plug an external screen to my
laptop, I can cycle through the following configurations:
only the internal screen,
only the external screen,
internal screen on the left, external screen on the right,
external screen on the left, internal screen on the right,
no change.
The proposed configuration is displayed using naughty, the
notification system integrated in awesome.
Widgets
I was previously using Conky to display various system-related
information, like free space, CPU usage and network usage. awesome
comes with widgets that can fit the same use. I am relying on
vicious, a contributed widget manager, to manage most of them. It
allows one to attach a function whose task is to fetch values to be
displayed. This is quite powerful.
Here is an example with a volume widget:
You can also use a function to format the text as you wish. For
example, you can display a value in red if it is too low. Have a look
at my battery widget for an example.
Miscellaneous
While I was working on my awesome configuration, I also changed some
other desktop-related bits.
Keyboard configuration
I happen to setup all my keyboards to use the QWERTY layout. I use a
compose key to input special characters like . I have also
recently use Caps Lock as a Control key. All this is perfectly
supported since ages by X11 I am also mapping the Pause key to
XF86ScreenSaver key symbol which will in turn be bound to a function
that will trigger xautolock to lock the screen.
Thanks to a great article about
extending the X keyboard map with xkb, I discovered
that X was able to switch from one layout to another using
groups2. I finally opted for this simple configuration:
I switch from us to fr by pressing both left Control and left
Shift keys.
Getting rid of most GNOME stuff
Less than one year ago, to take a step forward to the future, I
started to heavily rely on some GNOME components like GNOME
Display Manager, GNOME Power Manager, the screen saver,
gnome-session, gnome-settings-daemon and others. I had numerous
problems when I tried to setup everything without pulling the whole
GNOME stack. At each GNOME update, something was broken: the
screensaver didn t start automatically anymore until a full session
restart or some keybindings were randomly hijacked by
gnome-settings-daemon.
Therefore, I have decided to get rid of most of those components. I
have replaced GNOME Power Manager with system-level tools like
sleepd and the PM utilities. I replaced the GNOME screensaver with
i3lock and xautolock. GDM has been replaced by SLiM which
now features ConsoleKit support3. I use ~/.gtkrc-2.0
and ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini to configure GTK+.
The future will wait.
Terminal color scheme
I am using rxvt-unicode as my terminal with a black background
(and some light transparency). The default color scheme is suboptimal
on the readability front.
Sharing terminal color schemes seems a popularactivity. I finally opted for the
derp color scheme which brings a major improvement over the
default configuration.
I have also switched to Xft for font rendering using DejaVu Sans
Mono as my default font (instead of fixed) with the following
configuration in ~/.Xresources:
The result is less crisp but seems a bit more readable. I may switch
back in the future.
Next steps
My reliance to the mouse has been greatly reduced. However, I still
need it for casual browsing. I am looking at luakit a
WebKit-based browser extensible with Lua for this purpose.
The console gets its own unique name. This allows awesome to
reliably detect when it is spawned, even on restart. It is how
the Quake console works in the mod of FVWM I was using.
However, the layout is global, not per-window. If you
are interested by a per-window layout, take a look at
kbdd.
Nowadays, you cannot really survive without
ConsoleKit. Many PolicyKit policies do not rely on
groups any more to grant access to your devices.
A while ago, I used to use the Fixed font, which I very much liked,
since it featured a quite decent Unicode coverage, and was available
in tiny sizes. Then time passed, I switched systems a few times and it
kind of disappeared. Terminus is also nice, but quite bigger (for a
given terminal geometry, 60 lines for Terminus, 72 for Fixed).
Today, wondering why some fonts I dropped in ~/.fonts weren't picked
up by fc-cache -rv ~/.fonts/, I found out a configuration file was
preventing fontconfig from considering them:
/etc/fonts/conf.d/70-no-bitmaps.conf
Kill it with fire, and tada: Fixed is back!
Processor : ARMv7 Processor rev 5 (v7l)
BogoMIPS : 799.53
Features : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp thumbee neon vfpv3
CPU implementer : 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant : 0x2
CPU part : 0xc08
CPU revision : 5
Hardware : Genesi Efika MX
Revision : 51030
Serial : 0000000000000000
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 482740 44836 437904 0 4672 21104
-/+ buffers/cache: 19060 463680
Swap: 0 0 0
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0b95:772a ASIX Electronics Corp.
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 13d3:3273 IMC Networks 802.11 n/g/b Wireless LAN USB Mini-Card
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 1a40:0101 TERMINUS TECHNOLOGY INC. USB-2.0 4-Port HUB
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bastian,
You could also have a look at
console-setup. In
your case, installing it would be sufficient to get the desired result:
it depends on console-terminus and uses it in its default
configuration.
Another benefit is ckbcomp, an xkbcomp clone for the console which
is absolutely cool if you use some obscure keyboard layout which doesn t
come with an up-to-date Linux console keymap. Just dpkg-reconfigure
(or set XKBLAYOUT and friends in /etc/default/console-setup) and let
the setupcon script do everything for you.
Ever wanted to get a nicer console font than the default one delivered with Debian?
First you need to get a nice font. I chose console-terminus:
$ sudo aptitude install console-terminus
that alone won t change anything but install a whole bunch of new fonts into /usr/share/consolefonts/. To enable one of them, you have to edit /etc/console-tools/config:
set SCREEN_FONT=Uni3-Terminus16
Optional: comment out the following lines with SCREEN_FONT_vc*, so every terminal will have the same settings.
To test the new font:
$ sudo /etc/init.d/console-screen.sh start
The new font kicks in at the second half of the boot process, which is fixable but sufficient for me. I think the new font is much easier to the eyes than the default one, especially on big monitors with high resolutions.
I have always had some trouble with my eyes. One bizarre side effect of this is that switching fonts is very unpleasant. I recently got fed up with fighting things to live in the stone age of pre-Unicode fonts and locales and started hunting for a new console font. First I looked for nice new ones already designed for Unicode, with a selection of accented characters and so forth. The nicest I found was Terminus, but I’ve had trouble adjusting to it. So eventually I decided to stick with the font I’d been using - at least for now.
I have been using the same font for my consoles since before 1997. This is, or at least was, the default Linux console font back when I did all my work on a VT on Linux/PPC: /usr/share/consolefonts/default8x16.psf.gz. When I started using X routinely I missed it quite a lot. Mostly that was because I used BitchX, and BitchX is written for an IBM437 code page set of line drawing characters. So I opened up that console font in xmbdfed and converted it to a PCF file. If you have Debian’s BitchX package installed, you’ve got a copy of this work in /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc/default8x16.pcf.gz.
So I’ve done the same trick again. Here’s the steps I followed:
Choose Add Enconding Name… from the Encoding menu.
Enter IBM437, which is the iconv name for the traditional PC ROM character set.
Choose Force Encoding and select IBM437.
Choose Reencode and select ISO 10646 (BMP).
Choose Generate Fonts… and save it as a BDF file, since PCF wasn’t an option.
Create a fonts.dir file by running mkfontdir.
Add the directory to the font path using xset +fp.
Attempt to start an xterm.
Actually, after all that I was having trouble with the font’s name and eventually getting scary resource errors from X. I opened the font in gbdfed and saved it, which added some attributes and modified the bitmaps. Then I tried again and it worked.
And now, I can use a UTF-8 locale and gcc’s error messages come out with foo’ (”angled” quotes) instead of display corruption!
The resulting font is uni8×16, if anyone else would like it. I have switched to using it for all my terminals other than the one I run BitchX in; BitchX still needs the IBM437 version in order to display correctly.
Of course, as soon as I finished this Paul Brook informed me that Konsole includes basically the same sort of font. I do not know the origins of KDE’s console8×16, but I do know that it’s a slightly different font (the @ has a smaller center, for example). And I know that I’m mighty annoyed it didn’t get added to my font path correctly when I installed konsole ages ago, since I might otherwise have found it!
I switched to modularized X last night and it went quite well. Thanks to whole X team for their tremendous work on it.
I had only two problems. First one was not-working my beloved font for xterm (xfonts-terminus), but that's effect of some changes in paths. Second one is still not-solved... xev stopped printing symbol names for multimedia keys of my keyboard and installing xkb-data as I was told on #debian-devel didn't help to fix that. I suppose because of that my fvwm behaves strange and I'm not sure whether fvwm have to be fixed or the problem is new X.
Update: As usual fix was trivial. I chose wrong keyboard layout.
The coffee shop Ibtehal and me used to visit during the midnight
Grating at a chemist shop in Mombasa, Kenya
Me with players at the Nairobi Gymkhana Club
Cricket pitch at the Nairobi Gymkhana Club
A view of the cricket ground inside the Nairobi Gymkhana Club
Scoreboard at the Nairobi Gymkhana cricket ground
A matatu with a Notorious BIG portrait.
Inside the Giraffe Center
SGR train at Nairobi Terminus.
Interior of the SGR train
Mombasa Terminus station.
The balcony at Tulia Backpackers Hostel had a nice view of the ocean.
A room inside the hostel with fans and mosquito nets on the beds
Nyali beach is a white sand beach
This is the ferry service for crossing the river.
Diani beach is a popular beach in Kenya. It is a white sand beach.
Selfie with truck drivers who gave me the free ride
Newspapers at a stand in Kenya covering news on the airport closure
Spanish Omelette served in breakfast at Nairobi Transit Hotel
Ugali with eggs.
For the purposes of what I m trying to fix, there are two paths that matter.
(no site yet)
in October 2021. they generally seem to keep up with
shipping. update (august 2022): they rolled out a second line of
laptops (12th gen), first batch shipped, second batch 
I read somewhere a nice meme about Linux: Do you want an operating system or do you want an adventure? I love
it, because it is so true. What you are about to read is my adventure to set a usable screen resolution in a fresh
Debian testing installation.
The context is that I have two different Lenovo Thinkpad laptops with 16 screen and nvidia graphic cards. They are both
installed with the latest Debian testing. I use the closed-source nvidia drivers (they seem to work better than the nouveau
module). The desktop manager and environment that I use is lightdm + XFCE4. The monitor native resolution in both machines
is very high: 
Everything in the system is affected by this:
The truth is the solution is satisfying only to a degree. I m a person with good eyesight and can work with
these bit larger fonts. I m not sure if I can get larger fonts using this method, honestly.
After some search, I discovered that some folks already managed to describe the problem in detail and
filed a proper bug report in Debian, see 
Capturing a live video of an IRC client on a remote headless server is somewhat
more complicated than you might think; as far as I know, neither 
Earlier this week, I finally got my new machine that came with my 
TL;DR: I put a $5 ![[picture: a Raspberry Pi Zero embedded within an Active Star 40]](https://blind.guru/images/as40-rpi.jpg)
![[picture: a braille display with a keyboard on top and a Raspberry Pi Zero inside]](https://blind.guru/images/as40-kbd.jpg)
![[picture: a plain Active Star 40]](https://blind.guru/images/as40-plain.jpg)
You can still pull out the little platform to increase the space
that can be used to put something on top.
![[picture: an Active Star 40 with extended platform and a laptop on top]](https://blind.guru/images/as40-laptop.jpg)
But, most conveniently,
they've designed in an empty compartment, roughly the size of a modern
smartphone, beneath the platform. The original idea was to actually
put a smartphone inside, but this has turned out (at least to me)
to not be very feasible. Fortunately, they thought about the
need for electricity and added a Micro USB cable terminating within the
newly created, empty compartment.
My first idea was to put a conventional Raspberry Pi inside.
When I received the braille display, however, we immediately
noticed that a standard-sized rpi is roughly 3mm too high
to fit into the empty compartment.
Fortunately, though, a co-worker noticed that the 
Wow. 3G delta. I haven t booted this laptop for a while I think I m finally ready to make the move from gnome2 to gnome3. There are bits that still annoy me, but I think it s off to a good start. Upgrading perl from 5.10 to 5.14.
I have happily 
I have also switched to Xft for font rendering using DejaVu Sans
Mono as my default font (instead of 
Ever wanted to get a nicer console font than the default one delivered with Debian?
First you need to get a nice font. I chose console-terminus: