How can I change scaling on 20.04. (focal) without UT Tweak Tool and without reboot?

muskist

I refer to this thread:
https://forums.ubports.com/topic/9249/command-to-restart-lomiri-on-focal

I'm running a Fairphone 3 and a Lenovo tablet. These devices (and maybe other devices) set the scaling in /etc/deviceinfo/devices/halium.yaml.

In this file I changed "GridUnit" to a more convenient value (i.e. 28 on FP3 and 18 on Lenovo).

To make these changes take effect it is not sufficient to just restart Lomiri with systemctl --user restart lomiri-full-greeter.service. You'll have to reboot the device (as opposed to 16.04 (xenial) with UTTT where restarting Unity8 did the trick).

Restarting the FP3 is no problem but restarting the Lenovo tablet is. It takes many tries and you never can tell why you succeeded in the end .

Therefore my question (finally): Is there any way to make Lomiri change the scaling without rebooting the device?

TIA!

MrT10001

@muskist Restarting the Lenovo tablet is a pain, but boot it to fastboot mode (volume down and power at the same time). When in fastboot mode, in terminal fastboot reboot works sometimes.

Or

Boot into recovery from power off(volume up +volume down +power, when the tablet vibrates, release the power button, but keep volume up+volume down pressed until you boot into recovery) and then reboot from there.

I have had success with both, as I get concerned about screenburn courtesy of the stupid Lenovo logo.

Apologies for not answering the scaling issue without a reboot...

muskist

@MrT10001 Thanks, I've been there (everywhere ).
Device has made its own decision and crashed this morning. Therefore I'll have better scaling after managing to get it booted again (hopefully).

muskist

Not really a solution:

I found that the image to flash to the system partition (i.e. "ubuntu.img") is a usual ext4-partition as opposed to the former "system.img" which is an Android sparse image.

So I mounted it, made it writeable, changed "GridUnit" in /etc/deviceinfo/devices/halium.yaml, saved it and flashed it via fastboot. (I don't know how to do it if you're unlucky to run a windows machine).

After rebooting*) the scaling was altered as intended.

So this is a way to change settings until the Tweak Tool for Lomiri arrives.

*)Fortunately the Lenovo tablet took only a few efforts to make it

Luksus

In case somebody arrives here with not changeable scaling issues, I want to add another solution:

If you have the file ~/.config/systemd/user/lomiri-full-greeter.service.d/override.conf, it may look like this:

[Service]
ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/dbus-update-activation-environment --systemd GRID_UNIT_PX=21

It overrides the deviceinfo value of GRID_UNIT_PX.
You could remove the override or adjust it to your needs.