Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (06/2025): Videos about Phones and (mainline) Phones taking Photos
Table of Contents
As reviews and reports about the Furilabs FLX1 come out and FOSDEM 2025 talk recordings have been published, all is overshadowed by awesome mainline Photography news: The OnePlus 6(t), a popular device for running postmarketOS or Mobian, can take pictures now (if you are willing to experiment). Also: A Ubuntu Touch Q&A and a collection of Sailfish Community News. Enjoy!
Commentary in italics.
Worth Reading
- Velvet Reindeer: SailfishOS on OnePlus One
- Velvet Reindeer: PostmarketOS on Nexus 5
- Flathub: On the Go: Making it Easier to Find Linux Apps for Phones & Tablets
- FuriLabs: Fantastic Feb News
- Liam Proven for The Register: FuriPhone FLX1: A Debian-powered smartphone
- Arun Raghavan: PipeWire ♥ Sovereign Tech Agency
- LINux on MOBile: Using Phrog 🐸 with Phosh on postmarketOS (openrc)
Worth Watching
- UBports: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 158
- Anino Ni Kugi: Early Preview of Ubuntu Touch on Fairphone 5 #ubuntutouch #fairphone5
- LuxPCGamerNews: Volla Phone Quintus privacy focused smartphone ditches Google and runs on Ubuntu Touch or Android
- mobileinsidehub: Jolla C2 Review: The Giant Linux Phone You’ve NEVER Seen Before! Comprehensive!
- Luca Berton: Sailfish OS & AI-Powered Privacy: Yolla’s Open-Source Mobile Innovation | Raine Mäkeläinen Interview
- Continuum Gaming: Continuum Gaming E454: Sailfish OS – Banking Apps
- 9to5Linux: FuriPhone FLX1: Linux Power Meets Android Apps - Full Review
- TuxWiz: FuriPhone FLX1 Unboxing German.
- TuxWiz: FuriPhone FLX1 - das Linux-Phone vorgestellt German.
- veggero: GNOME 48: All About Digital Wellbeing!
- Furi Labs: FuriPhone FLX1 Promo 2025
FOSDEM 2025 Corner
- Luca Weiss: FOSDEM 2025 - Kernel support for Mobile Linux: The missing 20% YouTube, with Subtitles!
- Alfred Neumayer - Mainline vs libhybris: Technicalities, down to the buffer
- Volker Krause and Nucleus - Weather and emergency alerts
- Francesco Pham - Bringing Oniro to Mobile: Challenges in Hardware Enablement
- Maarten van Gompel - Sxmo: A mobile UI for hackers
- Raffaele Tranquillini - Mirror Hall: Building virtual network displays to bridge mobile and desktop
- David Llewellyn-Jones - Mobile Browsers: the Best of Times, the Worst of Times
- dcz - libobscura: Cameras are STILL difficult
- Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras - phosh: Yet another year around the sun!
- Oliver Smith - postmarketOS: what is it and what's new?
- Anjan Momi - Introduction to pmbootstrap Sadly, the very interesting OpenAGPS talk is still missing; I hope it will land soon!
Worth Noting
- fossdd: "You always wanted to contribute to #postmarketos but didn't know where to start? Take a nice look at https://postmarketos.org/contribute/ and pick something up. Your help is really appreciated! :3(My personal favorite is the testing team, which is a easy way for newcomers to contribute something really meaningful & important: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Testing_Team)"
- anjan: My talk: Introduction to pmbootstrap at #fosdem is up! https://video.fosdem.org/2025/h1302/fosdem-2025-6187-introduction-to-pmbootstrap.av1.webm
- erebion: "BTW, if anyone wants to build a Pebble app for #LinuxOnMobile (or add support to an exisiting smartwatch app or port an app from UBPorts/Android/whatever), I'll make sure there'll be a Pebble for that. Contact me."
- PINE64: Shipping to USA/America suspended until further notice.All the shipment to US will also be subject to the tariff tax. The discussions with the PineStore shipping team will begin tomorrow.More information: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/usps-suspends-packages-china-hong-kong/
- barthalion: Fresh off the press: what's next for Flathub build infrastructure https://docs.flathub.org/blog/flathub-build-infrastructure-revamp/#flathub #flatpak
- PINE64official (Reddit): Pine64's PineNote Community Edition is in a really good state
Camera frenzy
- cas: morning from @ollieparanoid @newbyte and myself
- cas: OnePlus 6 camera support MR openededit2: fixed the MR!edit: forgot to enable the drivers so this doesn't actually work yet mrtest it yourself once CI finishes and reply with your own totally epic and cool OnePlus 6 selfies :3https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/merge_requests/6148
- pocketvj: @matthewcroughan @ollieparanoid @newbyte @cas love the style too.... should we start a #linuxmobile fotochallenge?shot on #pocof1 with #megapixels
- rmader: "@Blort @CalcProgrammer1 It's the job of the ISP to do so. We can't use the hardware-ISP on QCom devices, thus using the libcamera software ISP, which is still missing the relevant features. The biggest one - color correction - is close to landing though: https://patchwork.libcamera.org/cover/22762/Edit: CCM will allow us to get rid of the green tint visible on the images - and should bring things much closer to what you get on Android."
- peja: Captured with the front and rear cameras of a OnePlus 6t powered by postmarketOS Edge.#postmarketos #mobilelinux #op6t
- CalcProgrammer1: Some new closeup shots with the #oneplus #op6t camera on #postmarketOS! I installed the Snapshot 1440p patch (sudo mrtest add -a 79523) and took these. I did some closeup shots because that's where the camera seems to be focusing without the autofocus driver.
- pavel: "So everyone is taking pictures with #oneplus6 #mobilelinux #postmarketos . Can you get me some metadata? Which sensor works, resolution, what format does it use? (BGGR8? BGGR10? Something better?) I am using Librem 5, but that only has 8-bit bayer working (and many other problems)."
- pocketvj: am i the only one using #inkscape on #pmos #linuxmobile ?we desperately need scrollbars (it was a huge pain to modify the #posmarketos logo for the docs).see: https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/-/issues/4987#note_2327178365andhttps://gitlab.com/inkscape/ux/-/issues/296#note_2314525807
- netroy: OMG the cameras work on #op6. Thanks #postmarketos ♥️
- fell: @cas It's even doing video! I don't know why it has been compressed this badly. The compression artifacts certainly weren't there in the view finder.#postmarketOS
- CalcProgrammer1: "Let's compare! OnePlus 6 (stock Android) vs OnePlus 6T (postmarketOS). Both phones have the exact same dual camera module it seems. The rear camera supported in postmarketOS now is actually the secondary sensor, so I took a picture with the secondary sensor on Android using the "secret" camera debug mode by dialing ##1597##.#postmarketOS #oneplus #oneplus6 #camera #mobilelinux"
- CalcProgrammer1: "@cas According to QCam, it is the imx519 sensor that does not work. The imx371 and imx376 do work."
- CalcProgrammer1: "@cas It works on 6T!!!! Well, 2 of 3 work, one of the Back Cameras did not show anything when selected in Snapshot. For some reason, the front camera is very zoomed in and I couldn't get my whole face in frame. The rear camera is very blurry (guessing due to the lack of focus coil driver) but got the colors of my keyboard a lot better.Also, on reopening Snapshot, the front camera is now just black and purple with no in between..."
- cas: Soooo one of the rear cameras and the front camera now work (for some definition of work) on the OnePlus 6?!!fwiw this was taken in low lightThanks to the mysterious DrGit who showed up with the patches. Seriously awesome!
More Software News
Kernel
- phone-devel: [PATCH v5 0/8] iio: light: stk3310: support powering off during suspend
- phone-devel: [PATCH v2] media: dw9719: Add of_match table
- phone-devel: [PATCH] power: supply: bq27xxx: do not report bogus zero values
- phone-devel: [PATCH] power: supply: bq27xxx: Add voltage_max_design property for bq270x0 and bq27x10
- phone-devel: [PATCH v2 0/2] Support single-PD in wcnss driver
- phone-devel: [PATCH 0/2] Add Goodix Berlin-A series support
Distributions
- postmarketOS pmaports issues: GTK4.17 has removed the legacy gl renderer, which breaks all Adreno 3xx devices
- postmarketOS pmaports Merge Requests: Draft: linux-postmarketos-qcom-sdm845: upgrade to 6.13.0 and add cameras for op6
- postmarketOS: "our first PostmarketOS Change Request (PMCR) has been submitted since we finished formally defining the process earlier this week.Implement hermetic /usr by @justsoup and @cashttps://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmcr/-/merge_requests/2Feedback is welcome, but we ask that you avoid commenting unless you have relevant technical input. Questions may be better asked in response to this mastodon post or over on Matrix."
- Mobian mobian-recipes Merge Requests: rockchip: add dkms and gcc for installing PineTab2 Wi-Fi driver
- #LinuxMobile: The year 2024 was a year full of achievements and progress for the #Parch project…
- GloDroid for PinePhone: 2025w06
Gnome Ecosystem
- This Week in GNOME: #186 Media Parsing
- Phoronix: GNU G-Golf v0.8 Released For Writing GTK Apps In Guile/Scheme
- Phoronix: GNOME's LocalSearch Metadata Extractor Ditches GStreamer For FFmpeg
- GTK: "It seems that a few people are being misinformed about the deprecation of the X11 backend, usually because they read screeds from well-known bad faith actors.The X11 backend being deprecated mainly means that we're not going to spend time implementing new features, like dmabuf, graphics offloading, or Vulkan support. X11 support will still exist until GTK4 is EOL, which will happen once GTK 6 is released. We're talking about a 20 years horizon, at this point…"
Phosh
- phosh: Dear distro maintainers and "i build my own stuff" people: In case you want to check out 0.45 relesae upfront: we've tagged the first releases candidates (0.45~rc1) of #phosh and related components today. 🎉 Release is planned 2025-02-15 (https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Phosh/phosh/-/wikis/Releases)The bulk of the changes landed already so hopefully it's only bugfixes from here on.
- phosh: We've also tagged 0.45~beta1 of #phosh and #phoc. Note that #phoc needs https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wlroots/wlroots/-/merge_requests/4973 which isn't in a wlroots release yet.
Plasma Ecosystem
- Nate Graham: This Week in Plasma: Final Plasma 6.3 Polishing
- KDE Announcements: KDE Gear 24.12.2
- Volker Krause: FOSDEM 2025
- Planet KDE: Local authentication hub
- DrewNaylor: So a fun little #PlasmaMobile bug I found that may or may not have been patched (my postmarketOS install isn't up to date), the status bar time isn't always the system time. I know this because I ran my status bar on it and at each minute I calculate how long since the last minute to know when I need to get the current time next so it's always accurate to the system time (except for leap seconds). This was verified by checking the time stamp on a screenshot and it was correct to mine.1/2
Sxmo
Sailfish OS
- Jolla Blog: Sailfish Community News – FOSDEM 2025 Recap
- Community News - Sailfish OS Forum: Sailfish Community News, 6th February - FOSDEM '25
- flypig: @deepbluev7 Haha. Thanks! If I get the chance I'll turn it into a proper and configurable presentation tool.Here's the code as it is now: https://github.com/llewelld/harbour-present
Ubuntu Touch
- Ubuntu Touch Forums News: Ubuntu Touch Q&A 158 Call for Questions
- UBports - Development - Issues: Tracking issue for minor release: 20.04 OTA-8
- #UbuntuTouch: I have had my Volla Phone for exactly one year now. I bought it with Ubuntu Touch, then switched to Volla OS, a Google-free Android, and now back to Ubuntu Touch. I am very happy with it.#googlefree #holzdiebimeinsatz #ubuntutouch #vollaphone
- os_sci: FossFEST 2025 the open source full #foss online / location hybrid Hackathon is nearing. You can still register and sponsor the event. We have two Masterclass positions left. Currently 318 participants have registered, who are going to work on #UbuntuTouch and #Odoo #oca apps. Registration is FREE. https://os-sci.com/event/foss-fest-2025-international-hackathon-14/register
Nemo Mobile
- Jozef Mlich on Fosstodon: First steps with Kospet DK08 and #Amazfish.
Apps
- krafting: All of my Apps on #Flathub seems to work really well on #LinuxMobile 😄️I'm updating most of them to also be in the Mobile category on Flathub! #PedantiK #SemantiK #HexColordle
- Flathub: On the Go: Making it Easier to Find Linux Apps for Phones & Tablets
- jmlich: I have created proof of concept of new #Amazfish pairing process.Previously you had to select what device class you have and then search returned just devices of that type. Now search automatically shows all known types.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzTsGeilM4k
- CalcProgrammer1: Added a script to the TouchpadEmulator repo to build Alpine/postmarketOS packages from the git repo. Touchpad Emulator is a utility I made that allows the touchscreen of a Linux phone or tablet to act like a trackpads mouse. Run build-alpine.sh after installing abuild and running abuild-keygen -a and it will spit out a .apk package in ~/packages. I think Touchpad Emulator should be usable on most postmarketOS devices without tweaking now. https://gitlab.com/CalcProgrammer1/TouchpadEmulator#postmarketOS #linuxmobile
- haeckerfelix: Shortwave 5.0
- FuriLabs: Gallery App
Stack
- collabora: "The first release candidate of Mesa 25.0 has recently shipped, bringing with it multiple updates to #Panfrost, and most notably to #PanVK, the #opensource @vulkan driver for Arm Mali GPUs: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/mesa-25-panvk-moves-towards-production-quality.html"
- Phoronix: PipeWire Is Doing An Excellent Job Handling Audio/Video Streams On The Linux Desktop
- Phoronix: Mesa 25.0 Is Trending Well For Release Later This Month
Matrix
- Matrix.org: This Week in Matrix 2025-02-07
- Matrix.org: This Week in Matrix 2025-02-03
- Phoronix: Vulkan Cooperative Matrix Merged For RDNA4 GPUs With RADV, DCC Support Inches Closer
Thanks
Huge thanks to Plata for the nifty set of Python scripts that speed up collecting links from feeds by a lot.
Something missing? Want to contribute?
If your project's cool story (or your awesome video or nifty blog post or ...) is missing and you don't want that to happen again, please just put it into the hedgedoc pad for the next one! Since I am collecting many things there, this get's you early access if you will ;-) If you just stumble on a thing, please put it in there too - all help is appreciated!