Posted by One of the nice things about the GPD / OneMix UMPC’s is that they run Linux distros with the Linux community stepping up to provide scripts and builds to facilitate this.
I am going to focus on the One Mix 2s although the distro and the tips will work equally well with the GDP Pocket variants.
The first thing to do is to download the GPD Pocket 2 Ubuntu Mate ISO copy it to a USB and then use Echer to make the USB bootable.
This tutorial is based on on the GDP Pocket 2 Ubuntu Mate 19.04 image.
The USB that is used to boot can be a USB-A or a USB-C drive. The OneMix can boot from either.
Once this is complete put the USB into the One Mix and boot, pressing Fn-F7 and when you see the boot screen to be able to select the USB drive to boot from select the USB drive you just inserted.
On first boot you can choose just to try out Ubuntu or install it. You probably want to try it out first, and later if you wish you can install it from within the OS once it has loaded.
When walking through the installation wizard, unless you have an existing OS that you wish to keep just follow the default options which will delete all existing partitions and re-create for the Ubuntu Mate install. Be warned that when you do this you will lose any data that is on the machine, so be careful it is what you wish to do.
Once installed you will walk through setting up locale, password etc and this is so straightforward so I am going to skip it and move straight into tips once the install is done.
Once installed you will find that everything pretty much works straight away. The screen is rotated correctly, WiFi is ready to be setup,Bluetooth is active and working, fonts have been re-scaled. You are pretty much good to go.
Now lets focus on the extra things you should look to do.
Firstly check that the font sizing is to your liking. For me it was too small, so launch the menu key (windows key on OneMix) and navigate to appearance and choose the fonts tab to change the font sizing. You may also want to change the theme I chose Ambiant Mate Dark.
Next lets sort out the power saving. On Ubuntu the Fn-Esc control still works for throttling the fan speed but Ubuntu has plenty of ways to ensure that the fan only kicks in when needed.
First lets install TLP. TLP is a free open source, feature-rich and command line tool for advanced power management.
You may need to install the Ubuntu universe repository to be able to execute the below commands. To do that:
sudo add-apt-repository universe
then to install tlp:
sudo apt install tlp systemctl enable tlp sudo tlp start
Once TLP is installed the TLP daemon is pre-configured to reduce overheating as well as improve battery life.
Next install ThermalD. ThermalD is an open source tool developed by Intel that monitors CPU temperature resulting in reduce overheating, and as it does not conflict with TLP it is worth also installing this.
sudo apt-get install thermald sudo systemctl start thermald.service
You can find out more about ThermalD here.
Next we will take a look at the Touchscreen. Now the touchscreen works out of the box but one of the things that did not work was long touch right click which I was used to on Windows. To fix this install a third party app called TouchEgg.
sudo apt install touchegg touchegg
Long press right click and Two-finger-tap right-clicking is already contained in the default configuration file that comes with touchegg.
You can learn more about TouchEgg here.
The other thing that does not work, if you use Firefox, is Firefox touch scrolling. You can solve that by firing up the terminal (Cntrl-Alt-D) and executing the following:
sudo sed -i "s|Exec=|Exec=env MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 |g" /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop
If you later want to undo this change:
sudo sed -i "s|Exec=env MOZ_USE_XINPUT2=1 |Exec=|g" /usr/share/applications/firefox.desktop
If you now launch and check out Firefox you will see you can touch scroll easily.
The next thing I recommend you think about installing is Crossover for Linux, a commercial WINE application that enables you to run Windows Apps directly on Linux.
You can download Crossover here.
Once downloaded you can install it by launching the Caja File Manager, locating the downloaded Crossover file, right clicking and choosing to open with the Gebi package installer.
Crossover has the concept of bottles which are akin to isolated Windows containers for Apps. You can install supported supported Windows Apps into Bottles and then open them in Ubuntu like regular Apps. Below is an example of the Kindle App.
Next we are going to turn our OneMix into a productivity powerhouse by enabling the ability to install Android Apps alongside the Ubuntu and Windows Apps that we already have the ability to use.
We will install an open source application called AnBox.
Anbox puts the Android OS into LXC containers, integrating core system services into Ubuntu meaning that every Android application will be integrated into the operating system.
OK, so lets get started:
//Add the repository
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:morphis/anbox-support
//Update
sudo apt update
//install kernel modules
//manually load kernel modules
sudo apt install anbox-modules-dkms
sudo modprobe ashmem_linux
sudo modprobe binder_linux
//check nodes exist
ls -1 /dev/{ashmem,binder}
//install anbox
snap install --devmode --beta anbox
//install playstore into anbox
sudo apt install wget lzip unzip squashfs-tools
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/geeks-r-us/anbox-playstore-installer/master/install-playstore.sh
//add executable permissions
chmod +x install-playstore.sh
sudo ./install-playstore.sh
sudo ./install-playstore.sh --clean
Once Anbox is installed you have a reasonably fully functional Android emulator. Its not perfect and not all Apps work, but it’s not bad at all.
To update Anbox in the future simply:
snap refresh --edge --devmode anbox
It is also possible to get VMWARE Player to work with a MacOS image, and OSX, when running through VMWARE is actually pretty snappy once the VMWARE Tools and a small acceleration tweak called BeamOff is installed.
The OneMix and GPD machines really are amazing machines and they can become a kind of portable ‘all in one’ when running Ubuntu mate providing the best of all worlds.
MadBadGadgets 