TinkPhone: KDE Plasma Mobile on a Raspberry Pi
As part of my TinkPhone project (see: TinkPhone: Project Synopsis - Raspberry Pi Smart Phone)
As part of my TinkPhone project (see: TinkPhone: Project Synopsis - Raspberry Pi Smart Phone), I want to test out various mobile operating systems.
My current favorites are KDE Plasma Mobile and Ubuntu Touch. For this blog post, I'll focus on KDE Plasma Mobile.
KDE Plasma Mobile is a mobile operating system built on top of GNU/Linux, with privacy and open sourced technology in mind. Based on KDE, a desktop environment, it is configured and tailored for cell phones with touchscreens. It has a solid and dedicated community supporting it.
More information can be found on the main website (https://www.plasma-mobile.org) and in their documentation (https://docs.plasma-mobile.org/).
I followed the how-to posted at https://community.kde.org/Raspberry_Pi. It's fairly straightforward. I've tweaked the instructions a bit and posted what I did below. I've also pointed to a new PM Tools repo, as suggested by it's maintainer. Note: I'm using a Raspberry Pi 3 B+
~/$ sudo rpi-update
~/$ sudo reboot
~/$ sudo nano /boot/config.txt
dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d
~/$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y dirmngr
~/$ sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
#deb http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/ stretch main contrib non-free rpi
deb http://raspbian.raspberrypi.org/raspbian/ buster main contrib non-free rpi
deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ buster main contrib non-free
deb https://repo.kaidan.im/debpm buster main
~/$ sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 8B48AD6246925553 CF319275556E40EC
~/$ sudo apt update && sudo apt -y full-upgrade && sudo apt autoclean && sudo apt -y autoremove
~/$ sudo adduser phablet
~/$ sudo usermod -aG sudo phablet
~/$ su - phablet
Enter the user password for 'phablet'
~/$ sudo deluser pi
~/$ sudo apt -y install plasma-phone-components plasma-phone-settings plasma-settings kwin-wayland simplelogin dbus-x11
Once you reboot, it should load right up.
Orientation: As it is right now, it only loads in landscape mode. I'm working with one of the developers to troubleshoot this and will update this post if we sort it out.
Onscreen Keyboard: The developers recommend using 'qtvirtualkeyboard'. I haven't looked into this yet, but will check it and other onscreen keyboards.
I originally live posted this on Mastodon (Thread) and several folks reached out with support: