LINux on MOBile

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

Manjaro Lomiri Alpha 1, GloDroid 0.4.0, more camera improvements and a ton of videos. Commentary in italics.

Software releases and improvements

• GloDroid 0.4.0. The Android port is progressing. They have also released an early build of Android 11, and bauner in the Pine64 forums is working on enabling GSM and GPS.
• megapixels has seen a lot of progress and now has a really fast viewfinder, takes pictures at 5 megapixels, rendering the PinePhone back camera a lot more usable. The front camera also works in postmarketOS now, but it is very dim currently and only usable in daylight.
• Manjaro Lomiri Alpha 1 has been released. I have made a little video demoing the release. ¹

Other Hardware ¹

• bunnie:studios, run by the famous bunny who created awesome hardware like the open source Novena laptop, have announced a new handheld device. It's called "Precursor" and is going to be sold on Crowdsupply. If you are looking for a faster device than the PinePhone, this FPGA-based device likely is not for you. But it should be more secure.

Worth reading

• CNX-Software: Pinephone Multiboot Image Boots 13 Different Linux Distributions. This image is really something. I managed to break it though...
• Pine64: September Update: Let it sink in…. _
• Purism: Adventures of porting postmarketOS to the Librem 5. A great read!
• Koen Vervloesem: Exploring the PinePhone with the multi-distro demo image. This is a little review of Megi's p_boot image, which takes a very different perspective than I would have taken: E.g. I like it when there is not too much software pre-installed, because I know how to install software on pretty much every one of these distros. PSA: Don't report bugs experienced with this image to the respective distro maintainers, as this image uses a very different kernel. Also: Screenshots on Phosh based distros can be created via a little command line utilty called 'grim'. ¹

Worth watching

• Matthew Higgins: Running OpenSUSE Linux on the Pinephone (Braveheart). I still did not try OpenSUSE myself, but it does not seem to bad.
• Howto: Digital Privacy & Infosec: Pinephone (Mobian Linux) Video/Audio Proof Phone Calls Do Work Both Incoming/Outgoing. This video may seem strange, but maybe it helps some people believing me that this stuff is incredibly hard to demo while maintaining privacy.
• Howto: Digital Privacy & Infosec: Pinephone Mobian Inkscape + Camera + Firefox, Gpodder, SMS/Phone/Cell Data/Wifi/Hotspot All Working
• sadwesv: Accelerated video decoding on Pinephone using gstreamer 0.18 and cedrus, Pinephone playing 1440p h264 encoded video to external display, Pinephone: 1080p@60 video playback scaled to 1440p@60 display. Megi published a couple of video showing promising progress with regard to video acceleration on the PinePhone. Looks great!
• Josh Moore: Pine64 PinePhone: Linux Users Remain a Persecuted Minority (For Now). The video title is weird, this is just a negative review.

Android Corner

• HomebrewXS: How to install Android 11 on PinePhone
• HomebrewXS: Android 11 on PinePhone, customizing and installing apps
• Purism: Anbox on the Librem 5. This is a great demo of Anbox, not showing all the pain I showed in my videos. Please note that they are usinghttps://forum.manjaro.org/t/manjaro-arm-alpha1-with-lomiri-pinephone/26454 virtboard here, which is a terrible method of text input even on the slightly larger PinePhone.

Dev streaming corner

• Marius Gripsgård: Hacking on Lomiri: Overview. A longer stream for people who want to help the development of Lomiri (a.k.a. Unity 8)
• Bits inside by René Rebe: t2 ARM64 Linux on a Pine64 Pinephone.

Gaming corner

• Doctor Cranium: Quake on Pinephone
• Iron Oxidizer: PinePhone playing Super Mario 64 natively at 30fps
• Danct12: Undertale on the PinePhone

Privacy corner

• Rob Braxman Tech: Privacy. That's LinuxPhone. True? False?

Stuff I did

• I finally migrated my blog over to different hosting. It still uses Jekyll, but should be GDPR compliant now. Sadly, this will negatively impact my GitHub activity statistics. ;-)
• On friday I received my postmarketOS CE convergence package PinePhone and made an unboxing video.
• I tried to build some more software. Social took long to build, but I could not authorize it to use it with my Mastodon account. Also, I build GNOME Maps 3.38, which works a lot better on the PinePhone than the previous version. What's notable: The new PinePhone ran a lot cooler than my UBports CE while building these apps.