LINux on MOBile

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

Autofocus support, further Lomiri images and more. Commentary in italics.

Software releases and improvements

• megapixels 0.10.2 landed with autofocus support. You are going to need a proprietary firmware and kernel support to be able to take advantage of this. Danct12 made this work on Arch Linux ARM, but I am too bad at using darktable to judge the results. Still: This progress is amazing!
• Manjaro released further Alpha 1 builds of their Lomiri spin for the PinePhone. These include a different variant of the maliit keyboard, which supports GTK apps. This change broke my install, and on the new install my fix to remove the shadow that pushes GTK apps down and to the right refuses to work. Also, GDK_SCALE=2 still has no effect. Plasma Mobile apps still need individual launcher-file adjustment, because setting the Qt environment variables globally messes up the Lomiri parts which apparently work different – I wonder whether good Unity 8/Lomiri documentation regarding scaling exists somewhere.

Worth reading

• xnux.eu/log: New codec driver in my 5.9 kernel. Too many abbrevations for me, but: Progress is always great!
• Purism: Software Development Progress July and August 2020. If you have a PinePhone and use a distribution that uses Phosh, you should have received all these features a while ago. Also, Purism announced a privacy-focused US-only "Librem AweSIM service", but I don't know the US cellular market well enough to write anything meaningful.
• redfennec.dev: Exploring, Part 1: Firmware. Now that's really diving in.

Worth watching

• PizzaLovingNerd: The PinePhone Camera is ALMOST Usable!. Great video summing up camera progress across distributions.
• Privacy & Security Tips: Howto: USB-C Functionality Fix Pinephone Modification. Long time no USB-C mod video.
• Privacy & Security Tips: Zoom/Skype Alternatives? Try True E2E Encrypted Video Chat: QTox Pinephone/Desktop), Jitsi And Why. Nice video which shows QTox on the Pinephone.

Unboxing corner

• Liliputing: Unboxing & First Look: PinePhone postmarketOS Community Edition (Convergence Pack).
• LearnLinuxTV: Unboxing the Pine64 Pinephone (postmarketOS Edition).

Convergence Corner

• Purism: Desktop and Phone Convergence. Librem 5 flexing its GPU again.
• Avisando: PinePhone "Desktop Mode". I did not even know Plasma Mobile could do that.

Stuff I did

I had a lot on my list and did not get much done, aside from a video on Anbox on Manjaro Phosh. This drought in creativity and content creation may continue throughout the next two weeks.