 Hello and welcome to yet another episode of yeah this is the linux a ink tablet and I've actually been sent a developer unit because I really want to try to contribute to the project so today what we're going to do is talk about the project itself how it is currently what it's supported and what isn't how is the actual device in its you know specs and such and then we're actually going to talk about what are my plans to try to improve the project what I'm currently working on and what I will work on so it is always a bit of a tab lock as my videos usually are so the pine note was announced roughly one year and a half ago I remember the moment where I saw the tweet announcing it and I was like super excited about the project the device itself is extremely appealing in my opinion it has a 10.3 inches antiglare ink display 2 and 26 dpi it uses a quad core rk3566 which is actually the same chip that will be in theory in the pine tab 2 which is pretty nice basically this thing is as powerful as an actual tablet it does have front light and it has both hot and cold front lights maybe if it's late you'll prefer the hot one otherwise the the cold one depends on what you're trying to do and then it has you know microphones front speakers sensor to see if it's rotated so it's a tablet de facto which can run linux with an ink display which is super cool it does have like four gigabytes of ram which for a ink device is totally fine to be honest and I feel like the build quality of the chassis is absolutely on par with the current competition it's very nice it's thin and it also comes with a cover that you can attach to it which has a super nice texture on the outside along with the pine logo which looks so cool fun fact I went to university with this device to try it out and somebody actually recognized pine 64 and was like wow I follow pine 64 and was like wow by the way there's also a pen for the display and it attaches magnetically to the tablet but we're going to talk about that later currently however it's only an experimental device it's not meant to be really to use yet and as it says in the webpage there's no default os yet if I understood this correctly this does ship with an os which is like the factory android image I'm also going to talk about that in fact what I'm going to do is highlight how the tablet works with the factory android image which I think is a bit of a reference implementation on how the linux part should be and then I'm going to talk about how the linux part actually works right now and what should be done I think okay so first of all the image is actually pretty powerful and well made for a ink it starts off with a lot of functions the first one is note taking with support for both folders and search throughout your notes if you do create a note you can use like the pen with various kind of sizes and brushes obviously but also you can insert text pictures and you can use templates as the background as an example I really like the dotted one the pen is actually quite responsive when you start writing you can notice that there is a bit of thickness to the display glass but so it's not like a drawing tablet but it's absolutely fine for everyday use for most people I would say when you're doing writing or drawing you can share the current page as a png or the entire notes as a pdf I've actually tried this I wrote I took some notes from a university lecturer as I said and then I exported everything to pdf sent it over my computer and everything worked super nicely so it does work again I've used it quite a while to see how it works because I do want to replicate that it has same exact functionalities in kitty plasma linux so you do get a task manager too which actually surprised me a bit you can basically create some tasks with some handwriting associated to it and write down which one of the tasks you've done which is interesting it's not something that I usually consider a core part of an a ink tablet however it might be interesting for users however I never actually used it so maybe not I don't know you tell me by the way it has a very nice functionality which again should total be replicated in linux in my opinion that is whenever you think that the screen is getting a bit noisy because you do get that effect from you know a ink devices you can just swipe from the bottom and the screen will immediately refresh which is nice then there is the core application of this kind of devices in my opinion which is reading books there is an application to do that and it does not distinguish between pdfs and epops which is interesting from my user point of view because yes it's a bit easier to convey that you know you just read a book however they actually work very differently as an example in epops you can actually change the themes and the text size so I'm not too sure about this reading the book works nicely I'm not sure what else to expect I did not test some very various epops configurations that was not my goal really you can annotate on the book right away you just take the pen and start writing which is super nice you don't have to access any you know writing mode so that is something that in my opinion should be kept you do also get an office document section for the ink which is interesting however it only has like ppt's xls docs that that's microsoft proprietary stuff I'm not too interested into you know trying those out but it does show that there is some interest in having you know a library of kind of functionality in this kind of tablets especially since you can you know connect a keyboard to it more stuff you can start accessing local directories you can very easily see all your local files and external storage as well and that works nicely and it's a very easy way to add your books because you have to open them from this part of the device you can also turn on the ability to install custom apk's they work nicely and it's actually necessary if you want to try out linux because you do have to install magisk to do stuff we'll get to that and you do also get a browser which is also very nice I try to do as an example playing some chess games and although the noise sometimes is a bit too much it works very nicely and I probably have to like change the refresh type which you can by the way just sliding from the top and you get to all the quick settings so this is the situation around this factory android image if I understood this correctly and now there's the very important topic on house linux because you know that that is the whole point isn't it so as I said by not stealing heavy development there is no easy way to install linux you have to do a lot of work to get it it took me roughly three to four weeks I took like one hour every day to start you know the process it was not so easy for me I'm not super expert in this kind of things but if I managed to it means that you can as well this was my reference guide it's pretty technical it has to be but it's very nicely explained and if you follow it you should be able to understand kind of what you're doing for me the keyword is kind of kind of as an example nicely enough you can get into the download mode of the device just by placing the pen into a nice spot on the back of the device and then just rebooting and then the steps are like you install a custom u-boot you start using magisk you compile the custom kernel for the device you export the firmware you connect with a UART adapter by the way I somehow managed to lose that adapter and pine 64 sent another one to me so thank you so much pine 64 for everything as I was saying use that to enter with anal pine installation and use that to resize partitions and install arch linux on the device and then through arch linux again you boot that through the UART device and when you're into arch linux I mean the hard work's done you install plasma install ss install stdm this part actually kind of works out of the box which is nice so I managed to log in with an actual GUI so how's the experience well out of the box of course you do have some issues as an example the screen refresh is terrible but that's not surprise considering that I literally didn't do anything yet I haven't disabled animations and you still get plasma trying to draw all the colors and gradients it shouldn't be doing that so that's to be addressed but I was actually surprised by most of this stuff actually works nicely as an example you can easily change the brightness of the cold and hot lights of course you have to use the terminal to do that but you can you can also change the refresh modes that is you have to do that to keep a balance between the quality of the image and how fast the screen refreshes you have to choose between the two of course still only using a linux command obviously wi-fi works bluetooth works basically I can just plug in my keyboard and mouse and just start working and at this point you might ask like what work on what what are you going to do with the device so let's talk about what I'm going to do and kind of the future that I personally see for this image again I received this as a development unit so that's my main goal and the first thing I did quite a while ago actually was to make a plasma theme just like you know breeze for the desktop that only uses black and white that should make stuff easier on an ink display you still get you know gray scale gradients but those might slow down the refresh rate so white and gray it is of course you can also change the color scheme to having just like you know white and blacks depending on the application that will be respected not just in the plasma thing but in the applications as well but I still have to see how well that works how well that works because obviously you cannot just like change completely the look of an application just using the color scheme so it's to be seen also just having a plasma theme that is black and white won't help that much you actually need a shell that is not plasma desktop obviously to run on this kind of devices personally I wanted to see how plasma mobile works on this so that's what I'm going to be testing if it doesn't fit well then we can actually just write I can actually just write a new shell similarly to plasma mobile like plasma ink to work on this tablet and you know in that case I would quite use the android image as a reference yeah you would have a note-taking application immediately in your face and then like a book application with immediately your library this kind of things another thing that I would like to do is make a naplet to change between the screen brightnesses you know hot and cold ones and also between the screen refresh rates because I've seen that it is very very common for powerful ink displays to allow the user to override an application request for a specific refresh type and I think it makes sense like sometimes you want a screen a faster refresh rate other times you want better image quality although at the same time obviously the apps themselves should like ask for different refresh rates depending on the use cases of those applications so it's a bit of a balance then obviously we've got the application so what applications could be used in this device so for note-taking my first guess would be external plus plus I don't know if you know the application it is a very good note-taking application for linux it's the one that I use to take notes actually and it already supports like everything so there's nothing we should do to do that of course you still have to see if you can make sure that external works nicely on a ink device which is not obvious but it's something that could be done alternatively and this is also very interesting there is a minimal proof of concept I think application to note to take done with koregami for kd plasma so that is also very much an option and you know the fact that you have an application made by kd plasma developers color lighting makes sure that you can actually change it and adapt it to the device for drawing I think a super nice thing would be to have krita because I mean why not I mean kd as krita why shouldn't we put krita on a device with a pen I don't see any reason not to of course krita is not made for a ink devices so I should probably look for you know ways to integrate krita into this functionality I'll probably I don't know ask for advice to the krita developers this kind of things but it's more later on my to-do list regarding pdf reading again I do want to make a distinction between pdf and e-pabs they work very differently with pdfs there's ocular which I think works very nicely again you do have to adapt it in certain ways as an example a single tap should be enough to switch to the next page but it already works rather well and it supports annotations so it's a great starting point and then finally there are e-pabs which again super important for a ink reader I do expect people to read books on this kind of devices I did so how's the e-pabs situation in kd so there is ocular which has optional support for e-pabs but it uses a very hot library and it's not very good at all and even if it used a better library ocular is not made to read e-pabs like you do need a different concept because again there are very different things you can as an example change the style the font size those kind of things so I started an application called arianna to read e-pabs and it uses the e-pab js library and then nicely enough Carl helped me out on porting like help me out he has quite the understatement I don't think there's any line of code that I wrote and is still there so but but still still I came up with the name so I've done a video about the development of arianna but from then the application changed completely now it's much better again thanks Carl and it should be able to cover most e-pab use cases it still needs some stuff as an example you still don't have the ability to change text and themes I talked about this many times and touch support should be improved as well and then you have the whole note taking part which isn't which isn't implemented yet but you know those things can be implemented now there's a good pace to start working on and that's what I'm going to do I'm going to make sure that arianna runs on these things and runs well so yeah my current goal is make sure that arianna works nicely adapted to the ink devices see how plasma mobile works and maybe do like a shell for this kind of device implement some nice things for the ink as an example the ability to change the brightness that's pretty important and then start see how various different applications could benefit like could be ported to work on such a device something that I completely forgot to do before I usually do it me through the videos is to remind all you people that I am not hired by kitty actually I do these things on my free time you could say but mostly I you know consider this my part-time job thanks to the donation that I received through the channel so my goal is to reach 700 euros a month and thanks to the donation in the previous days we're getting closer and closer so if you're able to chip in something it would be awesome if we managed to reach the goal even this month I do have like patreon paypal kofi libra payy youtube memberships anything anything is awesome so if you can help me out that be awesome if you cannot don't worry I'm just you know trying my best here and see how it goes so thanks everybody for following and as always in a couple of days you'll get a new video from me bye