Any owners of a #CutiePi tablet out there?
I was one of their earliest supporters and got my device in 2020. In hindsight it seems that I’ve been quite lucky, as I’ve read of people who ordered it later and still haven’t received it 1-2 years down the line.
Back in the day I contributed to the cutiepi-middleware package (namely for the battery indicators and on-screen keyboard), but then I left my device to gather dust in a drawer, as the support for RaspberryPi OS seemed very primitive, the default UI (CutiePi Shell) very limited and buggy, and I didn’t have much time to invest in making the experience better.
Fast forward a couple of years, I’ve decided to pick it up again and give Manjaro a try. Another important upgrade has been to replace the default CM4 chipset onboard with 2GB of RAM with a more beefy one with 8GB (2GB aren’t enough for any GUI anymore). The beauty of a tablet based on a RPi CM4 module is that you can upgrade its specs simply by replacing the module.
Some things required some tweaking to work, in particular some /boot customizations, but most of the things work by now. This 2022 article has been very helpful. By the way, I’ve been quite surprised that screen auto-rotation didn’t work out of the box in GNOME and required to install an extra extension. Also, the default on-screen keyboard required some tinkering to work.
What I still need to get to work:
MCU drivers: for some reason the MCU interface doesn’t communicate the battery/power button state over
/sys, but it has it own custom serial protocol overttyS0and the messages are then exposed over DBus. I don’t know why this decision was taken, but of course nobody among kernel developers and distro maintainers wants to maintain a custom protocol that only works on one device. It means that battery indicator support and power button aren’t currently working outside of the official CutiePi Shell. The article on NemoMobile seems to hint at some progress in migrating to/sys, but more than 2 years later I don’t seem to see much movement. It also doesn’t help that the last update to the CutiePi website was in 2021, and that I wrote an email a month ago to the main developer of the project and I haven’t yet received a response.This is probably a GNOME issue, but I’ve noticed that the on-screen keyboard flag in accessibility gets reset when the screen rotates. So if I change the orientation of the display I have to manually re-enable the on-screen keyboard.
Besides that, once the hardware is upgraded and things are configured it seems a quite solid device, and it’s sad that it seems that the startup backing it is now gone.
