LINux on MOBile

It's sunday, it's Linbits time!

This is some the best stuff that happened around the PinePhone this week. Commentary in italics.

Software: releases and improvements

• New Lune OS image that does boot. I tried the 107 build (image directory, video link below), and they released another image since.
• New PureOS images with rotation lock: announcement, image download. According to a short video review (see below), it is really fast.
• Webian Shell experiments. I was completely unaware that Webian exists. It is a "boot into a browser" thing, and is based on Mozilla's boot2gecko project. Interesting!
• @silver came up with a faster camera script.

Worth reading

• Pine64: Invitation to Play Along. Pine64 are looking forward to building hardware accessories, like a keyboard and a gamepad, for the PinePhone and are asking the community for input and suggestions for the design of these things. Huge news for me, as I always loved hardware keyboards on Smartphones!
• FreeTube: Pinephone Review: The State of the Linux Smartphone. Yet another review, long and thorough.
• basysKom: How to run Flutter on an Embedded Device. If you want to get Flutter apps on your Linux phone, this might be a good starting point.
• BrixIT blog: Making a backcover extension for the PinePhone. This is really cool. If you just want to watch the video, find it below.
• GTK Development Blog: GTK 3.99. GTK 4 is inching closer and closer.
• Purism: Dogwood Thermals and Battery Life. What will ship first? GTK 4 or the Evergreen batch of the Librem 5? Snarks aside, they made some important progress. Always remember: Hardware is hard.

Worth listening

Linux Unplugged: 346: Linux Arm Wrestling. Ever wondered why running Linux on ARM is so much more difficult than doing so on x86/amd64? This episode of the excellent 'Linux Unplugged' podcast has answers.

Worth watching__

• Martijn Braam: PinePhone postmarketOS CE: Factorytest and installer. Impressive work, great video.
• Martijn Braam: Connecting a thermal camera to the PinePhone pogopin expansion port. Blog post is linked above.
• Howto: Privacy and Infosec: Howto: Make PinePhone change WiFi MAC Adress at every boot. If you need more privacy, look at this.
• Howto: Privacy and Infosec: PureOS Is Snappy On Pinephone w/Podcast Player Demo. Looks like PureOS has developed nicely and I should take another look at it. He is using a ton of not quite optimized desktop applications there. Really, use Gnome Podcasts not GPodder on your PinePhone with Phosh. I bet most of these don't come preinstalled on PureOS.
• Marius Gripsgård: GPU accelerated morph browser on the PinePhone!. Looks nice, but when will it be available for everyone?
• UBports: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 81. Teleports, the UBports client works now with the PinePhone keyboard (8:38), PinePhone News (16:30), and the actual Q&A part is interesting, too.

Stuff I did

I shot a short video of LuneOS, showing off their build 107 and old my Palm Pre Plus. I later tried to change the Kernel (LuneOS is still on 5.5) to Megi's Kernel, but failed on my first attempt.

Three #DailyDriverChallenge posts were released and one related video on running Qt apps on Phosh. Also, I started playing with Ubuntu Touch again (from SD card), maybe more on that next week.