DeltaChat running on mobian (PineTab, PinePhone)

81

I’m using Mobian (which is really very functional now). Are you suggesting reporting the QT5 & killswitch incompatibility to QT? I think this may be a broader problem, since I have to boot with the camera deairgapped to see an image (even when not using Deltatouch).

I suspect my camera might also have some hardware damage.

Honestly, I think my chances of writing a productive report of this issue, given QT’s culture and my ignorance, are minimal. I agree that it needs doing, though, and I’ll try to do something useful once I have a clearer characterization of the issue.

82

If you’re ready to go, these are the steps:

Due to some internal changes, the .desktop file and the startup script that you have in /usr/ will not work anymore. It was a bad idea by me to instruct folks to put them in /usr/ anyway. If you want to be able to go back, you can rename them (otherwise just remove them, it’s solved differently now, see at the bottom of this post for details):

sudo mv /usr/share/applications/deltatouch.desktop /usr/share/applications/deltatouch.desktop--old

sudo mv /usr/local/bin/dt.sh /usr/local/bin/dt.sh--old

Then update the desktop database (do this in any case, whether you renamed or removed the two files above):

sudo update-desktop-database

Download the new installation script (which will take care of most steps currently listed in the wiki):

Also download the adapted click file:
https://codeberg.org/lk108/-/packages/generic/deltatouch/pr53/files/3163967

Assuming that you downloaded both files to the same directory and you are in this directory, make the script executable, and then call it with the downloaded click file as parameter (without sudo):

chmod u+x install-deltatouch.sh
./install-deltatouch.sh deltatouch.lotharketterer_1.16.4_arm64.click

Read the disclaimer :slight_smile: If you agree with it, then make sure to answer “n” to Enable camera? [Y/n], but “y” to everything else. It should work then.

The script will generate a .desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications/ and call update-desktop-dabase. Everything else is in ~/bin/deltatouch.

It’s fine to re-run the script as often as you like, but note that it is not suited for versions lower than 1.16.4. If you want to go back to an older version, you have to

  • remove the .desktop file in ~/.local/share/applications rm ~/.local/share/applications/deltatouch.desktop
  • run (as user) update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications/
  • Put the two files in /usr/ back into place
  • Run sudo update-desktop-database
  • Run rm -rf ~/bin/deltatouch
  • and extract an older click file again: dpkg -x <path/to/click-package> ~/bin/deltatouch
83

Speedbump; when I ran the
./install-deltatouch.sh, I got the error:

./install-deltatouch.sh: 38: 
dpkg-architecture: not found

“dpkg-architecture” was not a command on my machine (Pinephone).

I had to run
sudo apt install dpkg-dev
to get it.

84

Works; it says “Camera unavailable”, for both server and contact scans. Putting that message in a box, maybe padded or color-filled, might make it matche the search image in the user’s head when they are looking for the camera image. Maybe even an icon of a camera in the box? But then it’s permanently off, so there’s little point.

I’m overthinking this. It works.

85

I see you now also have a .deb, let me know if you want me to test it.

86

Great!

Ok, I’ll adapt the script so it doesn’t use dpkg-architecture.

I agree that it would be better, but not sure when (and if) I’ll get to that.

Thanks for the offer. Right now, it’s in an early state and doesn’t work out of the box. I’ve disabled the package unit on the repo now so people don’t get wrong impressions.

87

Thank you! Good luck with it all.

Doing Debian development actually through a mobile interface seems like it would be slow, though I’m sure someone has done it. :slightly_smiling_face:

I don’t think message shape really matters. It’s only going to be seen by people who know that they disabled the camera because of the upstream problems of Mobian on their specific architecture. Confusion seems unlikely.

Perhaps a mobile with a camera killswitch ought to provide an error image when the camera is offline, to save coding it into every convergent app.

88

The proverbial reward for a job well done… two new reports.

Firstly, if I turn off my internet connection, any popup inside DeltaTouch (like the emoji picker) causes the display image to flip. The control areas remain in the correct position: the button seen at the bottom right can be used by tapping the top left. Restarting DeltTouch fixes.

This could be what caused some of my earlier, less-replicable inversion problems; an intermittent internet connection.

Secondly, an error message: when I have click-to-dismissed any notification while DeltaTouch is running, then when I next switch to DeltaTouch, I get a pop-up that says:

Error
Unknown
OK

The “OK” is a big red button, which dismisses the popup.

This happens with a notification of a new Deltachat message, but also a notification that my “sleep 1” command has completed, or, as far as I can tell, any other notification.

If I do not click on the notification, but let it fade on its own, I do not see the “Error” popup. So this is not all that annoying, just a papercut.

89

I created an issue for that. Note that clicking a notification does not dismiss it in Phosh. Instead, it triggers a default action which is not handled well in DeltaTouch (because there’s no default action defined). Swipe the notification sideways to actually dismiss it.

This “default action” is somewhat unexpected to me because DeltaTouch does provide a specific action that should be executed when clicking the notification, but it looks like Phosh’s notification stack only triggers it when you click the small “View” area on the bottom of the notification. And this area is not even part of the notification on the lock screen. Maybe I need to check the Freedesktop notification specification again. In any case, I’ll take care of it so this unspecific error popup does not appear when clicking a notification.

To be honest, I don’t know how to tackle all these rotation issues. Rotation of UI elements is not controlled by DeltaTouch code (with the exception of components related to video), but handled automatically by Qt and Lomiri UI Toolkit. I suspect that there’s some problem in Lomiri UI Toolkit, but even if we report this, I doubt that it will be looked into now because afaik the team that takes care of Lomiri UI Tk is busy with the transition to Qt6.

I’ll put it on my todo list to investigate and potentially open an issue against Lomiri UI Tk, but probably won’t be able to take care of this anytime soon.

90

No worries, these are easy to avoid. Honestly most of the problems I have with DeltaTouch seem to be upstream, which is to your credit. Swiping the notifications rather than dabbing at them eliminates the error message and is very easy to do; thank you, I hadn’t tried that. Thank you for making an issue, but I think this is very minor indeed for me now; swiping, I’m unlikely to trigger it even by accident.

I suspect that the overcropping of the browse-files dialog when attaching is also upstream. There is also the odd thing that in 1.10 all the emojis render (and there is no inline emoji-adding menu), while in 1.16 many do not render, in the menu or in the chat, but show as rectangles. I’m not sure if these two are replicable.

None of these are important. Thank you very much for making this client, which works very reliably and is useful. Have a good weekend!

1 Like
91

One more error message:
I get a red banner that says “Error: failed to set draft: no file stored in params” in DeltaTouch, which persists until I click on it (I can still use the client behind it), then vanishes. This happens whenever I try to create a VCard using @r10’s useful
“.asc to VCard” app. It happens as I attempt to send the new card to a chat.

This is not important or urgent, and I hope neither of you will stress over fixing it.

92

Oh, that’s a bad one, thank you very much for reporting! Fix is on the way. You can already test a new version that contains the fix.

93

I have the new version running and I can send VCards to chats! Thank you for figuring and sorting that one out.

94

I recently realized that this perhaps wasn’t intentional: I only get message notifications when DT is running.

I wouldn’t choose to configure it to notify at all times, given the choice.

95

The notifications are currently generated by the app, so if it’s not running, there’s no process that will create them.

Are you aware of any general notification system that supports mobian? Is Unified Push available?