Good morning!
I wanted to thank everyone involved at mntre (esp Plom) for getting me my order on time. I’m about to go (tomorrow) on a family trip to celebrate my daughter’s Med school graduation, and since we’re traveling light, this Pocket Reform was very much needed.
So, since I have so very little time left before leaving, I just wanted to make sure I don’t mess up the initial setup. I’m very familiar with UNIX, esp FreeBSD, but have just a little experience with Linux (mostly SuSE/ OpenSuSE). This will be my first time using and setting up Debian.
So my questions (after doing some research):
After initial config (with GNOME), I assume the first steps should be to run, as root: apt update apt upgrade
Correct? No need to do anything with the firmware? Is this step really necessary?
Then, since the Pocket came with an nVME SSD, I should run, also as root:
reform-setup-encrypted-disk – or maybe this step should be performed before (1) ?
Then install a (real) editor, ie EMACS
I’m more familiar with KDE/Plasma than with gnome, although don’t mind giving gnome a try. Would it be too risky (since I’m about to travel) to install Plasma?
I love the Debian concept of metapackages. So if I wanted to install Plasma, I would just need to apt install kde-full
Correct?
If I wanted to do a little C/C++ programming on the Pocket, the right metapackage is apt build-essential
This will install gcc correct? So if I wanted clang, that would be a separate install? I already found the Lisp and the Julia I also use.
The default fs on Debian appears to be ext4. I assume that given the hardware constraints of such a small platform, it would completely ridiculous to even try some other fs (ie, ZFS or even XFS)? Just want confirmation.
Thanks for reading, and sorry for taking your time with such basic questions! Any comments are more than welcome.
Connect to the internet and then run apt update && apt full-upgrade. Just running apt upgrade instead of apt full-upgrade will not upgrade everything but prevent upgrading packages which require removal of other packages to upgrade and it will not autoremove, for example (and most importantly) old kernel packages.
Depends on your firmware version. The quickest way to not only get your firmware version but also other information about your system status is to run sudo reform-check
This only matters if there were improvements to reform-setup-encrypted-disk recently and while there were some improvements, they probably do not affect you.
It would be more risky but it should work fine, especially since recent reform-tools installs the workaround for the cursor rendering.
I’m not sure, sorry. Though I thought the right meta package would be plasma-desktop.
The build-essential package gives you a C/C++ compiler (gcc), yes. But the package is intended as the absolute minimal requirements to build Debian packages, so you get a bit more than the compiler. You can also just install gcc to get a compiler only.
Yes.
I have not heard of somebody using ZFS on the Pocket but with RK3588 and 32 GB of RAM it might not be too terrible?
As you’re on a tight timeframe, and we just shipped this device to you, I’d recommend not to update anything except reform-tools at this point, to get reform-power-daemon which will help against brownouts.
As the device has 256GB fast eMMC you don’t need to migrate to encrypted NVMe right now, you can do it later when you’re not in a hurry.
For Plasma, I would strongly recommend against it in your situationn because there’s too much risk of messing up your system. Do this later when you have time and another computer for recovery and research of any small issues etc.
I would recommend to take a MicroSD card with a copy of a System Image from mnt.re/system-image dd’ed to it with you in case you run into some untested situation on the go (for example, trouble with the login manager, KDE plasma deciding to use an overlay plane for the cursor and crashing, etc), so you can boot and fix things from that if needed.
