LINux on MOBile

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

PineTime, Maui and Geary hit milestones, a first PinePhone Beta Edition Unboxing and more! Commentary in italics.

Software development and releases

• Geary 40 has been released. Among the new features is added support for half-screen, portrait and small displays. I tested the flatpak, and yes: Seperate Geary packaging for mobile seems to be no longer necessary. Awesome!

Worth noting

• Joao: Megapixels running on the Librem 5. I tried this on my Librem 5 and wasn't successful on PureOS Byzantium.
• Luke: PinePhone Keyboard update [April 24/04]. I am really looking forward to this!

Worth reading

• Maemo Leste: Funding from NGI EU. Great to see them receiving funding for their quite ambitious plans!
• NxOS: Maui Weekly Report 10. Great updates!

Software corner

• Julian's Code Corner: Getting Fractal up to speed. Looking forward for the next release of Fractal.
• Martín Abente Lahaye: Flatseal 1.7.0. Flatseal is a great tool, and this is a massive update!
• Purism: Purism and Linux 5.12. I love upstream work!
• kath-leinir: Peruse 2.0 Beta 1 "The Long Awaited Beta". If you are into comic books, check this one out!
• Gamey: Best web browsers for the Pinephone!. If you are new to the PinePhone, this should be really helpful!

Hardware corner

• PINE64: It's Time: InfiniTime 1.0. The PineTime is getting there, and I am getting one or three.
• Linux Smartphones: PinePhone keyboard prototype transforms the Linux phone into a tiny Linux laptop. While the design introduces tradeoffs regarding e.g. telephony, I am very much looking forward to it!
• Linux Smartphones: Sony Xperia 10 II will be able to run Sailfish OS soon. Noteworthy: It's the first phone to run the 64-bit version of SailfishOS.

Tutorial corner

• Danct12: VNC on PinePhone. Nice WayVNC tutorial.
• PINE64 Wiki: PinePhone MMS with Matrix. This explains how to get MMS working over a local Matrix server. See this as a stop-gap solution, with Chatty getting better Matrix support soon this will at least get a bit more simple.
• beltrandroid: Tutorial: Full disk encryption on Librem5

Worth listening

• PineTalk 007: My Name is 64 ... PINE64. The second interview, this time with Danct12! Give it a listen!

Worth watching

• mutantC: CoreStuff in postmarketOS LG Nexus 5X. These core apps are interesting, sadly they are not optimized on 1440x720px screens at 2x scaling.
• Privacy & Tech Tips: Privacy: Tor Browser On Pinephone/Pinetab (Arch + Mobian Linux), and Howto: Tor Browser + Icon On Desktop Pinephone/Pinetab (2/2). I am really happy to see the proper Tor Browser on the PinePhone, although, dear Tor Project, official ports for ARM64 are well overdue!
• Sk4zZi0uS: PinePhone Challenge 3 week Update (With More Chess) - 2021-04-22. This week it's about running Phosh!
• Manjaro Linux: A new Dock for the PinePhone - Expand-X by Beelink!. Fancy!
• Camden Bruce: Performance of Gentoo Plasma Mobile on the pinephone using SkiffOS. This is seriously fast, which likely is due to this running a highly optimized Gentoo build.
• Polymath Programming: PinePhone with Allegro5/LitheFX Demo. Seems to run well.
• Glenn Hancock: Replacing Motherboard in the PinePhone Part 2.
• PINE64: It's Time: InfiniTime 1.0. BTW: A fellow site, FOSSphones.com is doing a PineTime giveaway if you want one.
• Geotechland: Pinephone BETA Unboxing. I bet we will have more of these next week!
• UBports: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 99. Another great Q&A! They promised something great for Q&A 100, so stay tuned for that. News: Fixes to the UBports installer, OTA 17 being delayed from it's May 5th date because of an issue in the Nexus 4 GPU driver, progress reports for Focal (20.04) migration, Debian packaging and Miroil (abstraction layer that allows QtMir and Lomiri to run on Mir 2.0). Also, at 45:20 there is valuable information on the differences between 'kernelupgrade' and 'development' channels on the PinePhone.

Jing corner

• Niccolò Ve: JingPad A1 News - What and When. News about the upcoming crowd-funder.
• JingOS: Developer Update | VS Code, ThunderBird Mail ARM test on JingOS ARM. Just because you can, does not mean you should. I must admit that it's kind of fun to see thunderbird on a phone though.

Stuff I did

Content

• OpenSUSE Plasma Mobile on the PinePhone (April 21st, 2021): DevTube, Odysee, YouTube. I am glad that I managed to make another video. Also: Next week this blog is going to look differently (hopefully better). There's still a lot to do.

LINMOBapps

I added three apps to LINMOBapps, so that we have a total of 255 apps right now: Added Khronos (time tracker), Birdie (alarm clock) and PineBattery (battery status utility). See here what (else) happened. Please do contribute!