armbian-desktop: LibreOffice screen artifact fix & additional tips

[Willy Moto]

Hi all,

 

First afore, allow me to express my gratitude to all developers working on Armbian tirelessly.

It is amazing how much I can achieve nowadays on these little Arm-based boxes, either SBC or repurposed Android TV box.

 

This in my first tutorial submitted on Armbian forum, as I would like to contribute something back.

I will update this post further when I am getting more familiar w/ Armbian & running LibreOffice on it.

 

 

===========

Platform running:

 

SOC:         Allwinner H6

Device:      Tanix TX6 compatible TV box - UPDATE Apr 2022

                  ( Please check out the Allwinner H6 build by @awawa )

                    https://www.hyperhdr.eu/2022/02/tv-box-mania-ii-part-tanix-tx6.html )

 

See also discussion:

 

 

 

                  Ubuntu Hirsute XFCE Desktop 22.02.00 trunk build for Tanix TX6     

                  ( No End-user support ) 

 

===========

 

With the Panfrost GPU driver getting mainlined & become more and more mature ( eg, see this Collabora blog ),  my interest in using Armbian as my daily desktop driver has increased.   

 

So I would like to use this thread to post some tips I found related to desktop use on Armbian.

 

 

1.  Checking opensource panfrost driver is loaded:

See:  http://docs.linuxfactory.or.kr/guides/gpu_panfrost.html

 

 

lsmod | grep panfrost

 

panfrost               69632  3
gpu_sched          32768  1 panfrost
 

 

If you see "panfrost" as in above, then the opensource GPU driver is already loaded

 

 

 

2. LibreOffice screen artifact & fix

 

I discovered that on default setting:  LibreOffice on Armbian would exhibit screen overlay artifact, for instance, when another display window was in front of LibreOffice UI window (for example: a Terminal window displaying  htop ).  

 

Solution:    Enable Skia rendering support in LibreOffice

 

Tools > Options  ||  LibreOffice > View

      Check the box "Use Skia for all rendering".   

 

 

Click OK and relaunch LibreOffice.   Now all screen overlay artifact on LibreOffice would disappear.  This always makes LibreOffice usable under RDP connection [ see point 3 below ]

 

PS:   This tip probably would work on multiple SOC using Mali GPU chipset

         (See GPU with Panfrost support:  https://docs.mesa3d.org/drivers/panfrost.html )

 

 

 

3.  You can use armbian-config to enable RDP access from Windows or another Linux PC (running XRDP client).

      Just select

 

      Software > RDP

             (Enable remote desktop access from Windows)

 

     See more from this discussion thread:

 

    

 

I will update this post further if I find any additional tips, while playing with LibreOffice on Armbian.

Any advice and feedback is appreciated.

 

 

Edited April 23, 2022 by Willy Moto
Suggesting new Allwinner H6 build by awawa