[Gambas-user] Gambas on the PinePhone

[james at lixce.com]

I have 2 PinePhones, just got my PinePhone Pro today and have several Gambas programs running on the PinePhones.  I run Arch on the PinePhone instead of Manjaro. Arch still uses X11 but you SHOULD be able to run under Wayland on Manjaro

My Process:
1.) Code on my Desktop or PineBOOK Pro ( Desktop is X86_64, PBP is aarch64 doesn't matter for pure Gambas)

2.) 'Compile' and test on Desktop or PBP, much easier to troubleshoot

3.) rsync the 'compiled' Gambas executable to the PinePhone.  I have /usr/local/bin set to 0777 to make this easier.

4.) ssh into the PinePhone to start, stop kill etc until I get a reasonably well working app.
(Much easier than trying to type commands into the terminal on the PinePhone.)

5.) When you are satisfied with the app create an installation package, architecture doesn't matter for pure gambas and as long as dependencies are properly set and available on aarch64 then they will be resolved by pacman.

Another Option:
Buy the PinePhone dock and hook up an external monitor, keyboard and mouse.  Will be very slow. I will try this on the PinePhone Pro as soon as I get time, I have a couple of the docks.

Some other pointers for PinePhone:

-- By turning off JIT apps load and execute much faster on the Phone.  I think because the emmc is so slow and reading in gcc takes substantial time.
export GB_NO_JIT=1

-- Screen size is difficult (720x1440), I scale the QT_Font and set the app widow to "Scaled" to make it usable. There are other approaches but I get the clearest display this way.
export QT_FONT_DPI=204

-- qt5ct has some easily applied improvements for scrolbars, sliders etc.
export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt5ct

-- The only way I have found to intercept the phone ringing is to watch /dev/ttyUSB2
$hWatch = New Watch("/dev/ttyUSB2", True) As "WatchMdm"
mmcli has dBus hooks but I really don't want all of the baggage dBus requires

-- Double taps rarely register
I have been playing around with using MouseDrag instead or adding an apply button.

I do everything in Qt5 and know nothing about Gnome, as I never use it.  

Regards,
Jay