For some reason, despite the fact that our devices can seemingly do anything with an impressive level of polish, there are folks who want to learn from the tech they use.

They want a challenge—and an adventure. I think I’ve learned over the last year or two that I’m one of those people. I primarily like using Hackintoshes despite the fact that the machines are intended for Windows, and I will mess with old pieces of computing history just to see if they uncover new ways of thinking about things.

So when I heard about the Pinebook Pro, I was in. Here was a laptop built on the same ARM architecture primarily used for smartphones and internet-of-things devices, and designed to run Linux. Is it for everyone?

Maybe not. But, if you love an adventure, you should be excited about what it represents.

• Linux 5.7 To See USB Fast Charge Support For Apple iOS Devices

  The Linux 5.7 kernel that will be out in the late spring / early summer is poised to see support for USB fast charging support for Apple iOS devices.

  Currently if charging an Apple iPhone / iPad from a USB port by default it will not draw more than 500mA per specifications. However, iOS devices can draw more power when communicated to do so via Apple's protocol. With Linux 5.7 a new "apple-mfi-fastcharge" driver will allow this capability of up to 2500mA.

  The apple-mfi-fastcharge driver will allow setting the power supply property via sysfs to "fast" and in turn lets the iOS device draw more power from the USB port, similar to the behavior of MFi certified chargers.

• Apple Firmware Update For Magic Keyboards Decides To Change The Fn Key

  Linux has supported the Apple Magic Keyboards since 2018 handling the Bluetooth connectivity and also needing some special handling for the numeric keypad. While that normally would be the end of the story, recent firmware updates to the Apple Magic Keyboard have caused problems.

  Newer Apple firmware updates to the Magic Keyboards have caused the function (Fn) keys to be reported differently. So on current Linux kernels when running on an Apple keyboard with updated firmware, the Fn key may not behave correctly.

• Jonathan Carter: Initial experiments with the Loongson Pi 2K

  Recently, Loongson made some Pi 2K boards available to Debian developers and Aron Xu was kind enough to bring me one to FOSDEM earlier this month. It’s a MIPS64 based board with 2GB RAM, 2 gigabit ethernet cards, an m.2 (SATA) disk slot and a whole bunch more i/o.

• 10.3″ E-paper HDMI Display Connects to Raspberry Pi & Jetson Nano SBC’s, Computers

• Wind River Pioneers Continuous Delivery Subscription of Commercial Embedded Linux

  Wind River®, a leader in delivering software for the intelligent edge, today unveiled a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) model for Wind River Linux customers. Wind River Linux follows a CI/CD process that allows customers to access new releases every few weeks. With this new cadence, teams can begin to build their own continuous integration and delivery systems for their customers, get a head start on building new platforms sooner, and enjoy similar benefits of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) management, technical support, and quality typically found in annual and Long Term Support (LTS) releases.

• Raspberry Digital Signage plugins

  Web Kiosk plugin
  This plugin adds an address bar to Raspberry Digital Signage and tunes it in a system suitable for usage in web kiosks and multi-user web workstations environments (cafès, offices, schools, hotels, hospitals, libraries), where people can surf the web with a normal browser.
  It also adds a configurable whitelist of browsable websites.

• CNX Software is 10 Years Old – Top 10 Posts of the Last Decade

Unlike my usual Raspberry Pi hacks, the kiosk would need a monitor and a window system. So instead of my usual Raspbian Lite install, I opted for a full Raspbian desktop image.

Mistake. First, the Raspbian desktop is very slow. I intended to use a Pi Zero W for the kiosk, but even on a Pi 3 the desktop was sluggish.

More important, the desktop is difficult to configure. For instance, a kiosk needs to keep the screen on, so I needed to disable the automatic screen blanking. There are threads all over the web asking how to disable screen blanking, with lots of solutions that no longer apply because Raspbian keeps changing where desktop configuration files are stored.

Incredibly, the official Raspbian answer for how to disable screen blanking in the desktop — I can hardly type, I'm laughing so hard — is: install xscreensaver, which will then add a configuration option to turn off the screensaver. (I actually tried that just to see if it would work, but changed my mind when I saw the long list of dependencies xscreensaver was going to pull in.)

I never did find a way to disable screen blanking, and after a few hours of fighting with it, I decided it wasn't worth it. Setting up Raspbian Lite is so much easier and I already knew how to do it. If I didn't, Die Antwort has a nice guide, Setup a Raspberry Pi to run a Web Browser in Kiosk Mode, that uses my preferred window manager, Openbox. Here are my steps, starting with a freshly burned Raspbian Lite SD card.