Linux on A Higole 2 Pro

Installing Linux on a Higole 2 Pro Mini PC

I was looking for a small computer with display (not a laptop, something smaller) for amateur radio applications such as driving my FA-NWT. The conditions I had for it was that it's display is built-in, that it runs on 12 volts nominal, and that it is frugal with power. I found the Higole 2 Pro, which was reasonably priced at Amazon (about three hundred US dollars for the lowest configuration - it doesn't have to do much). You can find a good review here. This thing comes with Windows 11, which, given Microsoft's current antics, is absolutely not going to stay on my device. Hey Higole, consider selling your device without an operating system installed, I'm not happy having paid money for Windows 11 just to scrub it!

I've tried Linux Mint Cinnamon, which was not a good experience on this device (I like it otherwise). But I didn't try hard. I might try again though because it would tax the CPU less than my current KDE installation (see below) does and thus save battery power and make the device less hot. But that's really not urgent for me.

I also tried my current favorite, Fedora 44 KDE Plasma, which mostly works out of the box. This article describes what one has to do to make it work.

Prepare a USB keyboard and mouse, connect them to the Higole. See "Periphery" below.
On another computer, download Fedora 44 Workstation KDE Plasma and create a bootable USB stick from it using the usual means (e.g. Balena Etcher under Windows).
Insert it into the Higole, press the On button for a second, and then hit repeatedly F7 until you enter the BIOS.
Select "Install Fedora" from the opening GRUB menu. Follow installation instructions until you can reboot.

I used the entire disk, completely wiping Windows 11. You probably could set up a dual-boot environment in case you want to preserve the Microsoft operating system. I haven't pursued that, I'm simply not interested in it.

Once you reboot, you have a working computer, it even pops up an on-screen keyboard. However...

The touch screen works, but the input seems to be rotated 180 degrees.
Screen doesn't rotate when you rotate the device (but see below!).
The speaker doesn't work.

Here are a few things which made it work for me. I found many of these tricks here: https://github.com/GuardianLiarus/HIGOLE_Linux. Thank you Liarus!

General notes

Important: KDE behavior depends on whether a keyboard is connected or not.

If there is a keyboard connected, auto rotate will not work, the display is locked into portrait mode, and there's no on-screen keyboard.
When there's no keyboard connected, then the rotation is 180 degrees off if you didn't follow the step above.

I didn't find this behavior useful (the lack of auto-rotation, not the missing on-screen keyboard), but it's actually configurable. Turn it off by doing these steps:

Go to KDE system settings and select "Display & Monitor"
Look for the setting "Auto-rotate"
Uncheck "Only when in Tablet Mode"
Click "Apply".

Perform a full Fedora update

This step is really important, or some of the subsequent steps will fail: update the Fedora installation.

Doing the update with Discover failed for me ("Failed to download"), so I did it on the Konsole using the command

sudo dnf update

This takes a while, in my case more than 1000 packages had to be updated and installed. - Reboot system.

Fix for the inverted Touchscreen input (broken in KDE versions older than 6.7.3, see Bug 521464 - this is why you must update first!)

Create a new udev rule entering this command into your Konsole:

echo $'ENV{LIBINPUT_CALIBRATION_MATRIX}="-1 0 1 0 -1 1"' | \
sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/99-gole2pro-touch.rules

Thanks once again Liarus for reporting that bug to the KDE team, and to the KDE team for fixing it so quickly!

Go to next step.

Fix for the inverted accelerometer (inverted screen rotation)

Create a new udev rule by entering this command into your Konsole:

echo $'ENV{ACCEL_MOUNT_MATRIX}="0, -1, 0; -1, 0, 0; 0, 0, 1"' | \
sudo tee /etc/udev/rules.d/99-gole2pro-accel.rules

Go to next step.

Fix to get the internal speaker working

Edit the file /usr/share/alsa-card-profile/mixer/paths/analog-output-speaker.conf and add these lines:

[Element Headphone]
switch = mute
volume = merge

While this works, there's an annoying drawback: when you plug in your headphones now, then the speaker doesn't turn off. Headphones and speaker are running parallel.

In my case, there was no speaker shown in the KDE Settings > Sound (in Portrait display mode, or you won't see it). I had to select Profile "Pro Audio" which confusingly is in the "Internal Microphone" section. Once that's done, make sure the "Built-in Audio Pro" radio button is checked under "Playback devices".

After all this, a small but important note: the audio output level to the speaker and especially to the headphones is atrocious. It can't be used for serious purposes such as driving an alarm speaker or saturating the input of an audio amplifier (meaning that you will have to turn volume really high to hear at least some output). If audio is important for the tasks you have in mind with your Higole 2 Pro, then it's not the device for you. I solved this by using a pre-amp, that obviously adds to the bulk of my setup - but now I can use that device to listen to podcasts while working on something else.

Go to next step.

Reboot computer

After you rebooted your Higole 2 Pro, the observed problems should now all be gone and your device should run Linux without any issues (apart from the audio limitations described above).

Other Distros - not tested by me!

X11 Setup, e.g., for Linux Mint: You will need to do the same steps as for the Wayland setup described above . Also, in Mint, you will need to disable automatic screen rotation in the display settings, people say somehow that makes it work.

You also might need to do these, but do some research first:

Install iio-sensors-proxy with your package manager
Install screenrotator-git (available in the AUR, package is deprecated, and PKGBUILD might need manual editing)
Add Screen Rotator to startup programs, and reboot.

If you are on an immutable distribution such as Fedora Silverblue or Bazzite, you can copy analog-output-speaker.conf to ~/.config/alsa-card-profile/mixer/paths/analog-output-speaker.conf and edit it there.

Periphery

I wanted a 12 volt device and got one - but the DC-in connector is a USB-C socket. I sourced an adapter at Amazon which can be connected to a 12V power supply and which provides 12V on a USB-C plug.

Oh - turns out the device I bought has a battery. Nifty! Lasts a few hours.

For keyboard and mouse I used a wireless combo by Rapoo which I also got on Amazon. It works very well.

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