GPD MicroPC 2 Arch Linux Setup

Since I was a child, small computers fascinated me. I remember playing with my dads Psion Revo. It fascinated me how much you could do with such a small device. A whole ecosystem of apps to explore, as well as programming it yourself or using the office tools that came with it.

About ten years later ultra mobile PCs (UMPCs) became a thing. I remember reading about one made by a company called OQO. It had a slide-out keyboard, ran Windows and was about 5 inch small. It looked cool, when McGee in the tv show NCIS used one. Oh, I wished to have one of those, but they were expensive and had to be imported from the US.

Fast forward another five ten years, I finally got my hands on an UMPC. A GPD MicroPC 2 arrived last week.

Preparation

Of course I wanted to try it out as quickly as possible, so I start up the pre installed Windows 11. It was useful to update the firmware of the device. After extracting the product key, I plugged in my USB stick with Ventoy and a Arch Linux ISO. I booted into the Arch Linux live system by pressing (FN +) F7 and started the installation.

The product key can be found in the registry at Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\SoftwareProtectionPlatform in the BackupProductKeyDefault entry.

Installation

I followed more or less my notes from my previous installations. Accessing the installation via SSH was very handy, because the device is really quite small and typing so many commands on the tiny keyboard is not very comfortable.

Rotated display

Also it displayed everything 90 degrees rotated, which can be fixed with some kernel parameters. In my GRUB configuration I set GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="loglevel=3 quiet fbcon=rotate:1 video=DSI-1:panel_orientation=right_side_up" to rotate the display to the correct orientation.

Unfortunately GRUB doesn’t support rotating the display, but at least the rest is displayed correctly.

Touchscreen

Unfortunately the Touchscreen doesn’t work after sleep. The Arch Wiki provides a fix:

BIOS 2.16 or later is needed for it to work on Linux.

Currently the touchscreen will turn off when you wake the laptop from sleep, but not turn back on when awaken. This can be fixed by running the following:

echo -n "i2c-ILTP7807:00" > /sys/bus/i2c/drivers/i2c_hid_acpi/unbind
echo -n "i2c-ILTP7807:00" > /sys/bus/i2c/drivers/i2c_hid_acpi/bind

As this needs to be exectued after every resume, I created a systemd service /etc/systemd/system/touchscreen-resume.service:

[Unit]
Description=Rebind i2c_hid device after resume
After=suspend.target
After=hibernate.target
After=hybrid-sleep.target

[Service]
Type=oneshot
ExecStart=/bin/sh -c 'echo -n "i2c-ILTP7807:00" > /sys/bus/i2c/drivers/i2c_hid_acpi/unbind && echo -n "i2c-ILTP7807:00" > /sys/bus/i2c/drivers/i2c_hid_acpi/bind'

[Install]
WantedBy=suspend.target
WantedBy=hibernate.target
WantedBy=hybrid-sleep.target

Then you need to enable it with by running:

systemctl daemon-reexec
systemctl enable touchscreen-resume.service

Right button

There is a quirk needed to make the right button of the touchpad get to work. As the Arch Wiki states:

The right mouse button can be fixed by adding a quirk to libinput in /etc/libinput/local-overrides.quirks:

[ALPS touchpad with external buttons]
    MatchName=ALPS0001:00 36B6:C001 Touchpad
    MatchUdevType=touchpad
    MatchDMIModalias=dmi:*svnGPD:pnG1688-08:*
    # Drop the "buttonpad" property so libinput treats it as a normal touchpad
    AttrInputProp=-INPUT_PROP_BUTTONPAD

More information

If you want to get your own GPD MicroPC 2, you can currently order it from Indiegogo. For everybody planing to install Arch Linux on it, the great Arch Wiki already has a dedicated page.