Postmarket OS on Lenovo Duet

Motivation

I started working on an old Android tablet and missed especially a good offline-first experience. Luckily I had a Lenovo IdeaPad Duet lying around catching dust because the user experience with the installed ChromeOS was not good. So by checking the latest news about PostmarketOS and their supported devices, I stumbled across that this Lenovo device is actually supported by PostmarketOS. On my way to get a Linux tablet at my fingertips I started to follow the specific wiki page for ChromeOS Kukui but I couldn't find the install steps to flash the stable image on the internal storage of the Lenovo device. I documented the required steps hereby.

Flashing

Let's start by downloading the current stable image of PostmarketOS (which is at the time of writing v24.12) on our host. For my first test I selected the gnome desktop[0].

curl -O https://images.postmarketos.org/bpo/v24.12/google-kukui/gnome/20241226-0349/20241226-0349-postmarketOS-v24.12-gnome-3-google-kukui.img.xz

Extract the image file from the archive and copy it to an usb stick/hdd/ssd.

xz -d 20241226-0349-postmarketOS-v24.12-gnome-3-google-kukui.img.xz
cp 20241226-0349-postmarketOS-v24.12-gnome-3-google-kukui.img /path/to/usb-stick/pm.img

In a next step, we need to get access to the full screen terminal on the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet. Which is described in the wiki[1]. To shortly recap the process here with an attached keyboard.

• Plugin the prepared usb stick
• Boot ChromeOS
• Start Chrome
• Switch to Developer shell with Ctrl+Alt+T
• Switch to full screen terminal with Ctrl+Alt+Reload (Key above the 3 and 4 Key)
• Login as chronos

As a last step, we can flash PostmarketOS to the internal storage.

sudo dd if=/media/usb-stick/20241226-0349-postmarketOS-v24.12-gnome-3-google-kukui.img of=/dev/mmcblk0 bs=4M status=progress

For booting PostmarketOS from usb stick or sd card please refer to the wiki[1]. Also using alternative installation to the stable image via pmbootstrap please refere to the wiki[1].

Post Install

The system is working quite well from the very first boot. The two things that needs adaptation are

• Adapt rotation like described in the lenovo specific wiki[2]
• Set rendering in case Gnome applications are not rendering text or icons correctly [3]

For the latter issue the following setting fixes the rendering issue.

# /etc/environment

GSK_RENDERER=gl

Summary

After some days working with PostmarketOS on the Lenovo IdeaPad Duet, I need to admit that I'm really happy with this setup. It feels and works like a "regular" Linux on tablet hardware. My common used applications are just an apk away. The battery run-time is solid and the performance is more than enough for my use-cases. Plus, my demanded features (ie. multi tasking and offline-first) are there which makes research, writing and coding even better. So, the bundle containing of a Lenovo Duet with PostmarketOS forms a linux tablet with an entry level price tag. And with thus it closes a long running task on my todo list finding a linux tablet for an effortable price.

Links

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