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Bedrock Panel on Linux

Everything a Linux machine needs to run Bedrock Panel: installing it, the one udev rule the console needs, and what works today versus what Linux cannot do. Verified on Ubuntu 26.04 with KDE Plasma 6.6 on Wayland and PipeWire.

Requirements: a 64-bit x86 desktop with GTK 3, and a keyring (KWallet or GNOME Keyring) if you want to save passwords or tokens. Software mode, the tile grids, the editor, dashboards, and every platform-neutral app work. The knob and touchscreen work once the udev rule is in place.

1. Install

Two artifacts are published:

  • bedrock-panel_amd64.deb — the normal choice on Debian and Ubuntu. Installs a desktop entry, pulls its own dependencies, and updates through your package manager. sudo apt install ./bedrock-panel_amd64.deb
  • bedrock-panel-x86_64.AppImage — a single portable file for everything else. chmod +x it and run it.

AppImage on Ubuntu 24.04 and newer needs FUSE 2, which those releases no longer ship. If the AppImage exits with "dlopen(): error loading libfuse.so.2", install libfuse2t64 or use the .deb instead. This is an AppImage limitation, not a Bedrock Panel one.

Or build from source.

2. Device access (only if you have the hardware)

Linux keeps raw HID devices root-only, so the knob and touchscreen are invisible to any ordinary program until a udev rule grants your user access. What you do about it depends on how you installed.

If you installed the .deb, nothing. The package installs the rule for you, because apt already runs as root. Plug the console in and it works.

If you run the AppImage or a source checkout, there is no installer, so it is one command. Open Settings → Hardware → Device access in the editor: it shows whether the rule is active and, if not, the exact command for your install, with a Copy command button. The path differs between an AppImage and a checkout, which is why the editor prints it rather than this page.

The command looks like this:

sudo install -Dm644 <path the editor shows> /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/70-bedrock-panel.rules
sudo udevadm control --reload-rules && sudo udevadm trigger

Afterwards, unplug the console and plug it back in — the permission is applied when the device connects. Bedrock Panel picks it up on its next rescan, with no restart. Until then, Device Diagnostics shows the Knob and Touchscreen rows as refused and names this as the cause.

Removing the .deb takes the rule back out again.

If you would rather write the file by hand, this is what it contains:

# DK-QUAKE control interface (knob, mic/state, firmware, keep-alive)
SUBSYSTEM=="hidraw", ATTRS{idVendor}=="4158", ATTRS{idProduct}=="514b", TAG+="uaccess", MODE="0660", GROUP="plugdev"
# ARIS-68 control interface
SUBSYSTEM=="hidraw", ATTRS{idVendor}=="5012", ATTRS{idProduct}=="6817", TAG+="uaccess", MODE="0660", GROUP="plugdev"
# "hotlotus" multi-touch digitizer — the console's touch cable, a separate USB device
SUBSYSTEM=="hidraw", ATTRS{idVendor}=="0712", ATTRS{idProduct}=="0010", TAG+="uaccess", MODE="0660", GROUP="plugdev"
# open Bedrock RP2040 knob
SUBSYSTEM=="hidraw", ATTRS{idVendor}=="1209", ATTRS{idProduct}=="bed0", TAG+="uaccess", MODE="0660", GROUP="plugdev"
# uinput — the virtual keyboard behind macros, media keys and the paste shortcut, and the
# virtual pointer behind Monitor mode
KERNEL=="uinput", SUBSYSTEM=="misc", TAG+="uaccess", MODE="0660", GROUP="input", OPTIONS+="static_node=uinput"

TAG+="uaccess" hands the device to whoever is logged in at the seat, which is the right grant for a desktop app: no group membership, no logout, and it follows fast user switching. The MODE/GROUP fallbacks only matter on systems without systemd-logind.

3. Display setup

The DK-QUAKE is an ordinary external monitor. It reports itself as a 480×1920 portrait display; set it to landscape in your display settings so the desktop treats it as 1920×480 and the pointer lines up with what you see. Bedrock Panel finds the panel by its resolution, so either orientation is detected.

Set the panel to landscape. It reports itself as a 480x1920 portrait display, so rotate it in your display settings until the desktop sees 1920x480. On KDE that is kscreen-doctor output.DP-1.rotation.right, or Display Configuration in System Settings. Bedrock Panel detects the panel in either orientation, but only landscape lines the pointer up with what you see.

Panel mode places a borderless window on that display. In a Wayland session Bedrock Panel restarts itself once at launch to run through XWayland, because a native Wayland client is not allowed to place itself on a chosen screen — it lands slightly off the panel and slightly too large. You will see one line about this in the log. Set BEDROCK_LINUX_OZONE=wayland to skip the restart and run natively, for example for fractional scaling, and expect Panel mode to be misplaced if you do.

4. Macros, media keys, and typed text

These work through a virtual keyboard. Bedrock Panel creates one at startup through /dev/uinput, so the kernel presents it as an ordinary keyboard and the compositor routes its keystrokes like any other — the same on X11 and Wayland, with nothing to approve.

Two consequences worth knowing:

  • It needs write access to /dev/uinput, which the udev rule from section 2 grants. The .deb installs that rule for you.

    If macros stop working and the log says permission denied on /dev/uinput, add yourself to the input group and log out and back in:

    sudo usermod -aG input $USER

    The rule asks for access two ways, and the group is the dependable one. The modern uaccess mechanism hands a device to whoever is logged in, but the desktop applies it when a device is added to your session, and /dev/uinput is created once at boot — so that grant can be applied and then quietly lost. Group membership does not come and go.

  • Key combos are layout-independent, typed text is not. A virtual keyboard sends key codes and your layout decides what they print, exactly as for real hardware. Ctrl+C is Ctrl+C everywhere; a macro that types literal text assumes US QWERTY, and characters with no key on your layout are skipped with a line in the log rather than failing the whole macro.

python3 is required, and the .deb depends on it. Creating a uinput device needs ioctl, which Node cannot do, so a small bundled Python script owns the device and nothing else. It exits with the app.

Monitor mode adds a virtual pointer alongside the keyboard, covered in the next section.

5. Monitor mode

Monitor mode hands the QUAKE to your desktop: the panel hides, the display becomes an ordinary screen, touch moves the cursor, and the knob scrolls or clicks. On Linux the cursor is driven by a second virtual device, an absolute pointer, created the moment you enter the mode rather than at startup — most sessions never need one.

It needs the same /dev/uinput access as the keyboard, so if macros work, this works.

One consequence worth knowing: the pointer is positioned across your whole desktop, because that is the area the compositor gives an absolute device. Bedrock Panel therefore re-reads your display arrangement on every move, and a screen you plug in mid-session is accounted for immediately. Nothing to configure.

If the cursor does not move, the log says why. cannot create pointer is a permissions problem and section 4 has the fix; the mode is otherwise unaffected, and macros and media keys keep working even when the pointer cannot be made.

6. Global hotkeys

Hotkeys work, with one consent step the other platforms do not have. The first time Bedrock Panel registers them, KDE shows a Global Shortcuts Requested dialog listing each one with the key you chose already filled in. Click OK and they are live. You can change a key in that dialog before accepting, or later in System Settings → Shortcuts under Bedrock Panel.

This is Wayland's design, not a Bedrock Panel limitation: no application is allowed to take a key combination for itself, so it asks the desktop and the desktop asks you. Chromium and Electron's own hotkey support goes through the same portal and needs the same consent.

Two things follow from it:

  • If you dismiss the dialog, the hotkeys are registered with no key. Nothing breaks and nothing fires. Assign them in System Settings → Shortcuts, or restart Bedrock Panel to be asked again.
  • The editor shows what the desktop actually granted, not what you typed, so an unbound hotkey is visible rather than silently dead.

7. Speech

Bedrock Panel can speak and listen on this computer with nothing to install and no GPU. In the editor, open Settings → TTS/STT, pick a voice and a listening language, and press Set up on each. Together they download about 140 MB the first time and work from then on, offline.

That is the whole setup. There is no server to run, no port to enter, and no account.

  • The two halves are separate. Take speaking, listening, or both. Neither needs the other, and each can be replaced by your own server independently — your own Whisper for listening with the built-in voice for speaking is a perfectly normal arrangement.

  • 90 voices across 36 languages, picked by language first so the list is a choice rather than a wall. Preview speaks a line in a voice you have downloaded; to compare voices before downloading, the hint links to upstream samples of every one of them.

  • Everything offered is free of restrictions. Piper's voices inherit their training data's licence and many of the good-sounding ones are non-commercial or share-alike, so this list is only the ones that are public domain, CC BY, Apache or MIT. The licence is shown next to each voice.

  • Listening offers a ladder of models, because accuracy and speed pull opposite ways and only you know which matters:

    model download on a 2019 laptop
    English only 28 MB fastest; English dictation and English meetings
    Many languages, fastest 111 MB rough: loses a word here and there, mangles compound words
    Many languages, a step up 198 MB better
    Many languages, most accurate 610 MB word-perfect, around 0.7× real time

    Anything but English needs a "many languages" model, Live Translate above all. An English-only model does not fail on foreign speech, it invents English out of the sounds, and whatever translates that downstream faithfully translates the nonsense.

    If captions or transcripts read as fluent-but-wrong, that is the model being too small: move up the ladder. The largest is the accuracy answer and is still comfortable for meetings and dictation; for live captions it will run a beat behind on a modest CPU.

  • They are real speech servers. Speaking answers on 127.0.0.1:10200 and listening on 127.0.0.1:10300, both speaking the Wyoming protocol, so anything else on this machine that speaks Wyoming — Home Assistant, for one — can use them too. Same arrangement as the macOS build and the Windows helper.

  • If you already run your own Piper or Whisper on those ports, yours wins. Bedrock Panel notices a port is taken, leaves it alone, and uses what is already there.

  • Listening is built for short speech — dictation and voice commands — rather than transcribing long recordings. It is quick about it: a few seconds of speech comes back in well under a second on an ordinary laptop.

Once listening is set up, two other things start working on this machine with no server at all:

  • LucidType dictation uses it automatically.

  • Meeting transcription can too. In Settings → Meetings, set Engine to Built-in speech on this computer. Your lines are labelled with Your name, and everyone on the call is separated into Speaker 1, Speaker 2 and so on, numbered in the order they first talk.

    It works two ways at once, because a meeting has two different problems in it. You are separated from the call by audio channel — recordings are stereo with your microphone on one side and the call on the other — so that half can never be got wrong. The people on the call are separated by voice, which is what tells two remote participants apart.

    Enroll someone and their name replaces "Speaker A" in every later transcript. In Settings → Meetings, under Known voices, choose a WAV of that person talking — 45 seconds or more, recorded the way your meetings actually are. Profiles are ordinary .npy files named after the person, exactly what the Windows helper and the Python diarizer write, so the folder copies between machines and nothing has to be enrolled twice. Enrolling is optional: unenrolled voices are still told apart, just numbered.

Both live in ~/.config/bedrock-panel/speech and upgrading Bedrock Panel never touches them. Removing either is a button in the same tab.

8. Music, volume and call detection

These work through the interfaces the Linux desktop already publishes, so there is nothing to install and nothing to configure.

  • The Music page shows whatever is playing, with album art, and its buttons control that player. It reads MPRIS over D-Bus — the same thing your desktop's own media applet reads — so Firefox, Chromium, VLC, Spotify, Elisa and anything else that publishes a player all appear. With two players open, the panel follows the one actually playing and its buttons drive that one rather than whichever application happens to own the media keys.
  • The meeting console's output rail shows the real system volume, following whichever output you have selected.
  • Auto-record and the busy light know when an application is holding the microphone, which is how a call starts a recording on its own. Set the app names under Settings → Meetings; on Linux these are program names like zoom or chromium rather than Windows .exe names, and the panel matches an application's name, its binary and its process name, so a short obvious entry works.

9. Secrets

Saved passwords and tokens are encrypted with Electron safeStorage, backed by KWallet or GNOME Keyring.

If no keyring is reachable, Chromium falls back to a backend that encrypts with a hardcoded key and still reports encryption as available. Bedrock Panel refuses that backend on purpose: it would store your tokens in something that only looks like ciphertext. You will see "secret storage unavailable: this session has no keyring" in the log, and saving a config that contains a secret will fail until a keyring is installed and unlocked. Secrets saved earlier still decrypt normally, so nothing is lost in the meantime.

A config.json copied from Windows keeps its DPAPI-encrypted secrets, which Linux cannot read. Re-enter those in the editor.

10. Starter pages

A fresh install starts with the Linux starter pages — Default, Media, and Dev — mirroring the Windows and macOS ones page for page.

Linux has no single calculator, file manager, or terminal, so those tiles name the job ("files", "editor", "calculator", "terminal", "monitor", "settings") and Bedrock Panel launches whichever program your machine actually has, checking a candidate list against PATH. A tile that names a real binary is used exactly as typed, so dolphin or firefox keeps working.

A config copied from Windows or a Mac is translated the same way: Windows program names map to their Linux equivalents, and start <url> becomes xdg-open.

11. What is not available on Linux

These features report themselves unavailable rather than failing quietly:

These three are greyed out in the editor with the reason beside them, rather than accepting a setting and quietly doing nothing with it.

  • Reserved Display. Moving another application's window off the panel display requires enumerating and repositioning foreign windows, which Wayland deliberately does not allow.
  • Follow the focused app. Same reason: there is no cross-desktop way to be told which application is in front.
  • Teams window control. The meeting tiles that focus the Teams window first cannot work. Zoom is unaffected, because its shortcuts need no focus.
  • Touchscreen setup wizard. A Windows-only fix for a Windows-only problem. Linux binds a digitizer to the output its USB device reports, and Bedrock Panel reads the panel's touch reports over HID itself.
  • Meeting info from a calendar on this computer. Windows reads classic Outlook and macOS reads Calendar; Linux has no single desktop calendar to read. The Microsoft 365 source works everywhere and is preselected here, with the local option greyed out.
  • A voice has to be enrolled before it can be named. Until then participants are told apart and numbered. Enrollment is on the Meetings tab and takes one recording per person.

12. Troubleshooting

The knob and touchscreen are not detected. Install the udev rule above and replug. Device Diagnostics names the cause on the Touchscreen and Knob rows.

Device Diagnostics says the HID module did not load. Running from source, the node-hid binding has to match Electron's ABI rather than your system Node: npm run rebuild. The app still starts and Software mode is unaffected.

Saving a secret fails. See section 9. Install and unlock a keyring, then restart.

Tiles launch nothing. The program is not installed under any of the names Bedrock Panel tries. The log says which candidates it looked for.

Macros or media keys do nothing. The log says why. permission denied on /dev/uinput is the group problem in section 4. cannot start python3 means python3 is missing, which the .deb depends on but a source checkout does not enforce.

Nothing speaks, or nothing is heard. Settings → TTS/STT says what the built-in engine is doing, and names which halves are running. Not installed means press Set up. Using the Wyoming server already running on this computer means something else holds port 10200 or 10300 and Bedrock Panel is using it rather than fighting it. If that server is not actually working, stop it and restart Bedrock Panel.

A global hotkey never fires. The consent dialog in section 6 was probably dismissed, which registers the hotkeys with no key attached. Restart Bedrock Panel to be asked again, or open System Settings → Shortcuts, find Bedrock Panel, and give the action a key. The log says how many of the app's shortcuts the desktop actually bound.