My new laptop is here! It’s lovely! But this page is about how I got Debian on it.

What Works

Everything works!

• Memory, NVMe, BIOS, display
• All the inputs: media buttons, power button, fn button, trackpad
• Tablet mode: KDE rearranges some stuff, shows a virtual keyboard, responds to rotation
• Speakers, microphone, headphone jack, camera
• WiFi, Bluetooth

Okay, okay, it wasn’t perfect: the accelerometer (tablet mode rotation) needed me to edit a file in /etc, which took maybe 45 seconds. The Framework people have filed bugs with all the big distros, and it’s fixed upstream too, so this will be remedied soon.

Installing

The “netinst” iso kept breaking for me, so I set up a “KDE live boot” debian image, and told it to install.

If I had the option to set up encrypted swap, I must have missed it. Same for an encrypted home directory.

Otherwise, I needed no special drivers, no firmware, nothing.

If I did this again, I would install the following packages up front, so I wouldn’t have to type my password as often:

• fscrypt
• libpam-fscrypt
• iio-sensor-proxy
• maliit-keyboard

Encryption

Do this before you log in!

Can you set these up from the Debian installer? Maybe I missed it.

Encrypted home directory

I wanted an encrypted home directory, so I did an apt install fscrypt libpam-fscrypt, then fscrypt setup, tune2fs -O encrypt /dev/nvme0n1p2, and finally fscrypt encrypt --user=neale /home/neale. Tell it to use “pam_passphrase”. It will se up encryption and “unlock” your home directory; then you can use it like normal.

It will only encrypt an empty directory, so if there’s anything in there (like .bashrc), you can rename the home directory and then make a new empty one to encrypt. Encrypt the new directory, then move all your stuff into it.

Encrypted swap

Setting up encrypted swap is a good idea, too. There are hundreds of guides elsewhere about how to do this.

Fixing rotation

First I had to apt install iio-sensor-proxy. Then I followed the instructions in a Framework document:

sed 's/.*iio-buffer-accel/#&/' /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/80-iio-sensor-proxy.rules | sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/80-iio-sensor-proxy.rules
sudo udevadm trigger --settle
sudo systemctl restart iio-sensor-proxy

I had to exit KDE, I think. No reboot required, though. Logging back in, tablet mode rotation worked.

Virtual keyboard

I had to apt install maliit-keyboard, and maybe restart KDE again, but then it worked exactly as expected.

Cleanup

Debian installed some alternate input things I will never use.

apt remove --auto-remove ibus

Pen

In the BIOS, I switched the pen type from MPP to USI, and then my Chromebook pen worked.