LINux on MOBile

It's sunday. Now what happened since last sunday?

libhandy 1.0, MMS, a new camera app, new Manjaro images and much more. Commentary in italics.

Software releases and improvements

• libhandy 1.0.0 has been released.
• libhandy-rs 0.7, targetting libhandy 1.0, has also been released. libhandy-rs are the Rust-bindings for libhandy.
• Alexander Mikhaylenko has been working on libhandy-fying Epiphany/GNOME Web and Nautilus.
• vgmms is an SMS and MMS client build atop ofono and MMSd with VGTK and Rust. The news item here is MMS, which apparently is still being used in some parts of planet earth.
• Martijn Braam has worked on his camera app, Megapixels. It can be installed on postmarketOS from his repository. I tested it, and it works — it even felt a bit nicer than Gnome Camera/Pinhole. Please keep in mind that you do need a patched kernel for the front camera currently.
• Calindori, the calendar app for Plasma Mobile, has been released in its first "stable" version 1.2.
• Nemo Mobile are making progess with their move to a Fedora base.
• Manjaro have published further PinePhone images, including a third alpha release of their Phosh image today. The Lomiri situation has already improved quite a bit since their first published image.

Other hardware

• The YARH.IO MKI, a "fully hackable and custamizable Raspberry Pi based handheld, running Raspberry Pi OS and supporting all other Operating Systems available for Raspberry Pi" has been announced. It is a little 'meh', but then I don't think it's aiming at the same niche the PinePhone does. If you want a handheld with ports, and love the Raspberry Pi platform, this might be for you.

Worth reading

• Liliputing: Mobian Linux is now available for the PineTab (as well as the PinePhone). Mobian on the PineTab!
• eighty-twenty: Squeak-on-a-cellphone update: touchscreen working!.
• Purism: Your Phone Is Your Castle. Purism CSO Kyle Rankin rambles once more about phone security and privacy and why it matters. It's worth a read, but please consider that there are voices that don't agree that Purism's security story is all that convincing because of issues like non-upgradable firmware.
• HackersGame: Robocalls: Fight Bots with Bots. This is a great idea.

Worth watching

• Purism: Librem 5 Emulators and Controllers. One for the gamers.
• Roboron: Trying Simutrans on a Pinephone. Another one! (I always loved playing simutrans. The main reason I stopped was that would just eat hours without me even noticing.)
• Howto: Digital Privacy & Infosec: Pinephone Linux Smartphone: Sailfish OS Demo. A short demo of Sailfish OS. Unfortunately, shortly after this video was made, support for the modem and all it adds was enabled about a day later.
• Howto: Digital Privacy & Infosec: SXMO (Simple X Mobile) On Pinephone Uses Only 329mb RAM!.
• Martijn Braam: In depth tutorial: inserting an SD card in a PinePhone. 24 seconds. The first thing he puts into the device is called a "microSIM card". It is for telephony.
• Martijn Braam: Quick overview of application development on the PinePhone
• @maeda_: make sound on #PinePhone #Clojure #Overtone #emacs_pgtk #lispymode #Squeekboard. This uses Jack, btw.
• UBports: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 84. Topics include the PineTab, OTA 13 (which is for the other devices, not the PinePhone), Qt 5.12, why Marius Gripsgard likes working with Manjaro and more.
• jacky.wtf: Talking all things PinePhone and open source hardware/software! !kde !blm. A twitch steam, a first in this list!

What did I do?

I played with a few things:

• I uploaded another video showing Anbox, this time on Arch Linux ARM on sunday evening,
• and tried a few more Android apps later (Slide would run fine later this week),
• I tried the 20200909 Manjaro Lomiri image and was quite impressed with their progress,
• I liked Megis p-boot image,
• I tried to build Quickddit, a reddit client for Ubuntu Touch, on Arch Linux ARM and made it almost work (I did not manage to login into my Reddit account. I also looked into building other software created for Ubuntu Touch, namely KeePit, uNav and Dekko, but these either failed for reasons I could not figure out or have a different build process and require more dependencies. Especially Dekko seems likely to be a tough nut to build. Just check the "clickable.json" files in the project repos to get an idea how the software is actually built.

I also spent some time on web development. This blog is going to move to different hosting (suggestions still welcome) in the next two weeks and will switch from Jekyll to Hugo. With that switch, the LINMOBapps app list, which now lists 165 apps, will have it's item in the navbar. The App Directory is also still in its planning phase, and I hope to apply the learnings of moving this website over to Hugo to the process.