Technology

Welcome to my ongoing saga of trying to use linux on an x86 tablet. Shouldn't be too hard, you say? One does not simply ride into Mordor.

The oddball tablet I purchased used on eBay (for $50 USD) is an AAVA Inari 10 (model: INARI10-WLAN-1 QC). This is a 10.1" tablet with an Intel Atom Z3795 @ 1.59GHz, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD, and no operating system. Not too shabby for fifty bucks, including shipping.

I've been using Linux Mint since 2016 because it just works. I'm not one of those people who gets moist doing crazy cowboy shit with their linux installation, or customizing everything after the fact. So, while I've been using linux for a long time, I'm not a pro at anything. Knowing that Mint on a tablet was probably going to be a bad time, I installed it anyway because it just works, and you go with what you know.

Unsurprisingly, with a keyboard and mouse hooked up to the tablet, I was left squinting at a very tiny and very familiar desktop. It was time to see what I had purchased. Wifi worked, no problem. The touchscreen was recognized as a generic two-button mouse. I'm fine with that, as long as I don't need multi-touch for anything. The sound and camera hardware do not appear to be recongized. Again, no problem. I'm planning on only using this for web browsing. Bluetooth was working so if I really needed sound, I could get it that way.

I knew I wasn't keeping Mint on this tablet, so it was time to search for some new distros that might be better suited to a touchscreen device. Asking in this community gave me a few good starting points. Here's how that went...

Android x86: This would have been perfect for my use case, and it looked great right up until it got to the screen where we were going to connect to a wifi network. Froze solid. This issue is repeatable. I tried it three times with the same result, and decided to move on.

Debian 12 with Gnome: I took various flavors of this for a spin several times before realizing I had to install an on-screen keyboard or I simply wouldn't have one, in spite of the fact that when you log in, there's an on-screen keyboard. I don't know how that works.

KDE Neon: Had a desktop user interface, not mobile, and couldn't connect to wifi. I fought a few rounds with this, mostly the UI, before giving up.

It was at this point that I thought I should go for something that was specifically made for mobile.

Mangaro with Plasma Mobile: This was the most promising. It was almost usable. Almost. I was able to boot up into a graphical user interface that had an on-screen keyboard that could log me into an actual mobile UI. Not only that, but the login screen UI matched the mobile UI. That was farther than I had gotten with anything else thus far. Unfortunately, I don't think the wifi was working well. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to change the background, which was blindingly bright, and all the app icons were truncated. Like, in half. Very tiny. With no text beneath them. So using apps was practically impossible.

But Plasma Mobile itself was promising, and this is one of the reasons why I like linux; It forces you to learn some shit. What if I could have a nice clean install of Debian 12 with Plasma Mobie on top of that? That would be great. So I did a clean install of Debian and booted to the command line. Then I sudo apt-get -y install plasma-mobile. Excellent. When I rebooted, the tablet went right back to the command line.

That's when I learned what a display manager was, and apparently I had to install one. I installed LightDM, don't know why, but I did. Awesome. Now I can boot up to a GUI, but I need a keyboard to log in.

I lost track of what happened here, but there were many different install combos happening. I learned a few things. Here's how it's going...

I'm running Debian 12 with SDDM and Plasma Mobile.
SDDM, for some reason I cannot fathom, in spite of being recommended for use with Plasma Mobile, does not have an on-screen keyboard. This forced me to set it up so I'm automatically logged in every time. Problem solved? Mostly. If I put the tablet to sleep, even though I've set it up NOT TO LOCK THE SCREEN, it locks the screen anyway. But no worries, when I go to unlock the screen, I'm shown an on-screen keypad. When I type in my password, it... Goes to a text screen that says "The screen locker is broken and unlocking is not possible anymore. In order to unlock it, switch to a virtual terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F2)..." yadda yadda yadda, as if I have a physical keyboard connected to the tablet.

When I try to get out of this by pressing the power button, I'm taken to something that looks different than SDDM, which requires an on-screen keyboard to log in, BUT DOESN'T HAVE ONE.

My only option is to reboot at this point by tapping the power icon.

So currently, this tablet is mostly useable and I learned a few things. One of the things I learned is that linux can still be difficult to use outside the comfy confines of a great distro like Mint. But this is not an insurmountable problem.

I'd love to get the stupid screen locking issue fixed and/or get a virtual keyboard working in SDDM.

After that, my next steps may be trying to figure out what the non-working audio & camera hardware is, and seeing if there are linux drivers for any of it.