First off, there are slightly different versions of this thing around (albeit with identical outer shell it seems). Mine came with a Celeron N4000 and a nearly completely locked down bios.
I removed the two empty partitions and installed Manjaro XFCE as dual boot. Installation went without any issues. After the installation I had a working system (including screen, sound and network), but a) the screen was rotated, b) the touch screen didn't work and c) the two mouse buttons registered as regular keyboard keys.
screen rotation
Adding fbcon=rotate:1 solved some of it and having a monitor XOrg conf section with Option "Rotate" "right" in it some more. Now grub itself still starts up rotated, but from what I've read that's not trivial to solve. So I simply disabled the splash screen and called it a day.
touch screen
I did two things here. First I created a simple service that unloads the goodix_ts module before entering suspend and then reloads it on wake up. With this the touch screen appears to work fine. The axes are still wrong though, but that's easy to fix by setting "SwapAxes", "InvertX" and "InvertY" to true in the touch screen InputClass section in the xorg conf.
mouse buttons
There seem to be several different ways to solve this to some degree, but I wanted specifically a solution that would make it possible to hold a mouse button (e.g. for dragging). So press and release events need to be mapped separately. The way I did it was by using xmodmap to disable the two keys (keycodes 84 and 135), and then actkbd (keycodes 76 and 128 and device /dev/input/event2) together with xdotool to map key presses and releases to the respective mouse button events.
At this point I have a fully functioning and surprisingly capable system. Sure, the hardware does feel cheap (in particular the keyboard responsiveness issues are quite annoying (I'm writing this on the mini laptop)), but for the price I'm actually positively surprised. Thinking back to the EeePC which did cost about the same IIRC (and that's even before inflation), this thing is vastly superior in basically every aspect I can think of.
I think I managed to get everything working now.
First off, there are slightly different versions of this thing around (albeit with identical outer shell it seems). Mine came with a Celeron N4000 and a nearly completely locked down bios.
I removed the two empty partitions and installed Manjaro XFCE as dual boot. Installation went without any issues. After the installation I had a working system (including screen, sound and network), but a) the screen was rotated, b) the touch screen didn't work and c) the two mouse buttons registered as regular keyboard keys.
screen rotation
Adding fbcon=rotate:1 solved some of it and having a monitor XOrg conf section with Option "Rotate" "right" in it some more. Now grub itself still starts up rotated, but from what I've read that's not trivial to solve. So I simply disabled the splash screen and called it a day.
touch screen
I did two things here. First I created a simple service that unloads the goodix_ts module before entering suspend and then reloads it on wake up. With this the touch screen appears to work fine. The axes are still wrong though, but that's easy to fix by setting "SwapAxes", "InvertX" and "InvertY" to true in the touch screen InputClass section in the xorg conf.
mouse buttons
There seem to be several different ways to solve this to some degree, but I wanted specifically a solution that would make it possible to hold a mouse button (e.g. for dragging). So press and release events need to be mapped separately. The way I did it was by using xmodmap to disable the two keys (keycodes 84 and 135), and then actkbd (keycodes 76 and 128 and device /dev/input/event2) together with xdotool to map key presses and releases to the respective mouse button events.
At this point I have a fully functioning and surprisingly capable system. Sure, the hardware does feel cheap (in particular the keyboard responsiveness issues are quite annoying (I'm writing this on the mini laptop)), but for the price I'm actually positively surprised. Thinking back to the EeePC which did cost about the same IIRC (and that's even before inflation), this thing is vastly superior in basically every aspect I can think of.