make gparted livecd bootup tablet friendly by using volume and power buttons
I have a surface pro 3 tablet that lets me use the vol-up/vol-down/power keys until the grub menus.
But once gparted-livecd-OS is bootloaded and the Linux kernel comes up, they are useless.
I usually do not use a keyboard connected to it, but can do so if one absolutely needed to.
Presently the bootup sequence requires connecting a keyboard and typing in answers to prompts
Some ways to try get past this other than connecting a physical USB keyboard:
- Option 1: Create a grub boot menu line that boots without prompting for any questions to EN/US-kb-layout/video-mode. This is basically a pre-configured menu-item of Option-3.
- Option 2: convert the readline menu system for which numbers have to be typed into a some kind of scroll-able menu like grub, and grab the buttons. In the case of Microsoft surface pro, the UEFI provides its own overlay onscreen keyboard. If a software as limited as a UEFI can do it, it should be even easier with a already booted kernel. Presently the vol-up sends a ASCII-keycode, the power-button shuts down the tablet, and the vol-down does nothing. There is also a Win-key on the on the surface-pro-3. which grub does nothing with.
- maybe grab-able events
- vol-up : short-click, long-press, double-click
- vol-down: short-click, long-press, double-click
- win-key: short-click, long-press, double-click
- power-key: short-click, double-click (I suspect long press would be reserved for hardware-intercepted-manual-override-forced-immediate-shutdown)
- and their simultaneous key-combos
- Perhaps use
- up one item: vol-up short-click
- down one item: vol-down short-click
- select: key-combo simultaneous vol-up + vol-down short-click. This is as opposed to using power button short-click, to avoid surprise shutdown.
- shutdown: power-key-double-click. This is better than using ordinary short-click which powers down right away, which eliminates surprises due to accidental presses.
- maybe grab-able events
- Option 3: This option might not be useful for tablets without this UEFI overlay onscreen keyboard. For some tablets, like the surface pro-3, the UEFI provides an overlay onscreen keyboard while EFI programs run. Grub did not heed to volume buttons. So one could use the overlay onscreen keyboard to get to the grub menu edit mode and edit the kernel command line to provide answers to the three prompts. When those kernel command line options are provided, the bootup could thus skip the prompts.
I am booting via ventoy-grub [4] on a USB-stick which I use to chainload the grub-iso. I tried appending argumentslocales=en_US.UTF-8 keyboard-layouts=en gl_batch
suggested in [2] expecting it to do as above, but it returns to grub menu with errorbooting a command list application failed, r=5 error:image not loaded
. I need correct arguments.
[UPDATE] Using the workaround documented in comment on corresponding ventoy issue [5], this boots normally as expected. Apparently it has something to do with grub version mismatch between ventoy-s grub and the grub inside the gparted-livecd-iso. Typing the command line argument is a bit of work but do-able. Option-1 and Option-2 are still better because it's much easier to select from a scroll-able menu than remember the above command-line argument and type it all without mistakes, especially given that gparted-livecd is not something one boots into frequently.
Additionally
- Include an on-screen-keyboard utility app suitable for the gparted-liveCD-desktop, which I think is X-windows. ex: [6]
Even more additionally,
- Being able to pair a bluetooth keyboard would be even nicer. I have bluetooth keyboard close at hand. But, I guess that's asking too much.
To summarize: 2 action items
-
- make it possible to do the bootup selections and boot the livecd without a keyboard.
-
- include an on screen keyboard after desktop is loaded
The above might eliminate the need for a keyboard on tablet devices.
Alternately, let know if is there a different Linux bootable livecd distribution you recommend with the gparted GUI application included.
Ref:
- [1] https://gparted.org/display-doc.php%3Fname%3Dgparted-live-manual
- [2] https://gparted.org/gparted-live-boot-param.php
- [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/ytgdgi/dual_boot_gparted_no_physical_keyboard_how_to/
- [4] Ventoy
https://www.ventoy.net/ - [5] Corresponding issue in Ventoy project
https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/issues/2848#issuecomment-2129246081 - [6] svkbd: suckless on screen virtual keyboard (MIT)
https://tools.suckless.org/x/svkbd/
https://git.suckless.org/svkbd/ - Youtube 2022 Yes you Can - Microsoft Surface Pro 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 ~ Enter BIOS / UEFI & Boot From USB
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cS4mbKPj1M
Edited by G K