Pinebook pro installation Part two

This is a collection of tips and tricks for setting up a laptop with Arch Linux. This continues the basic installation of part1. The natural place to start is with the general recommendations from the arch wiki.

Encrypted user SD’s

This encrypts the content of a filesystem, which is mounted on logging into the user.

• Set up an encrypted filesystem on the SD (see part 1 for a btrfs setup)
• Install pam_mount.
• Add the following line to /etc/security/pam_mount.conf.xml <volume user="username" fstype="crypt" path="/dev/device" mountpoint="~" options="crypto_name=volume_name,allow_discard,fstype=btrfs,compress-force=zlib,noatime,lazytime,discard=async" /> to /etc/security/pam_mount.conf.xml
• Set up /etc/pam.d/system-login

Swap file

• Install zram-generator
• Modify /usr/share/doc/zram-generator/zram-generator.conf.example to your likings
• Move this to /etc/systemd/zram-generator.conf

A secondary swap file could be created, but the system is likely too slow to be useful once it’s swapping to disk.

Sleep

Sleep by default is broken on the pinebook pro. Only the suspend state freeze is supported, and can be set in /etc/systemd/sleep.conf (SuspendState=freeze).

Trackpad

The trackpad on the pinebook pro is known to drift and be in general clunky an awkward. This resource contains a lot of useful information on this. The most useful trick, which makes the trackpad usable to me is adding the evdev entry.

Light controle

Using light from the arch repo, one can control the screen brightness using e.g. light -A 5. This requires a udev modification, see the Arch wiki for the exact rule to add.

Alacritty

Alacritty won’t start by default, since it requires an opengl version greater than delivered by the driver. Adding PAN_MESA_DEBUG=gl3 to .pam_environment enables experimental gl3 support to the graphics driver.