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Plasma Mobile

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Revision as of 17:04, 31 March 2018 by Sagethesagesage (talk | contribs) (Add a small description and link to the user interfaces page)
Plasma Mobile
Plasma Mobile running on LG Nexus 5 (hammerhead)
Plasma Mobile running on LG Nexus 5 (hammerhead)
Name Plasma Mobile
Graphics stack KWin on Wayland or Xorg
Toolkit Qt 5
In postmarketOS
Package postmarketos-ui-plasma-mobile
Status Available

A mobile variant of the KDE Plasma user interface, optimized for touchscreen.

Status

The basic shell has been ported to postmarketOS, and can now be tested in Qemu. It also works on most devices with a working display, both with hardware acceleration and software rendering.

Installation

Run pmbootstrap init and choose plasma-mobile in the interface section. The binary repo provided by the project already contains KDE builds for x86_64, armhf and aarch64 (compiling takes a long time). Nothing has to be done to enable it.

After installation, the shell will automatically launch upon boot. If it doesn't, have a look at /etc/profile.d/start_plasma.sh and /usr/bin/plasma-phone.

For the official KDE instructions on running Plasma Mobile, see their website.

Troubleshooting

Software rendering

Plasma can also be used if your device doesn't support hardware acceleration yet by using software rendering. Please note that the interface will be slow, and it might not be usable for the average user.

To enable software rendering edit /etc/profile.d/start_plasma.sh. Add export KWIN_COMPOSE=Q before the ck-launch-session command, and replace --drm with --framebufferon the same line.

Also make sure mesa-dri-swrast is installed.

Log output

You can read the log output with logread -f. Anything related to Plasma and KDE will have a username:plasma-mobile prefix.

Logging isn't verbose

One needs to enable debug logging for certain components in ~/.config/QtProject/qtlogging.ini. Without that, you barely see any log output. We ship such a qtlogging.ini file in postmarketos-ui-plasma-mobile because Plasma Mobile is relatively new and we want to be able to debug it properly.

If the file did not get installed for you, please double check if it is there and report in #1038.

KWin doesn't work

Note Plasma Mobile shell uses some Wayland protocols, so you can't run it on X11 in case you tried to do that.

Please follow these instructions for debugging.

See also