LINux on MOBile

Also: The first PINE64 Community Update in a long time, new images of Sailfish OS for PinePhone (Pro), progress porting the Sailfish OS browser to a newer Firefox ESR base, speed improvements about to come to Ubuntu Touch and more!

Commentary in italics.

Hardware (enablement)

• StarLite Mk V is a Linux tablet with Intel N200, 16GB RAM and a keyboard cover - Liliputing _I won't buy one (at least until my Surface Go 2 breaks), but it certainly sounds interesting and good enough for many use cases. Coreboot is always nice to have. _
  • product page: StarLite 12.5-inch – Star Labs®
  • via hacker news.
  • A-wai: "Linux-first, Coreboot, EDK II... Looks like we'll soon have another lovely #LinuxMobile tablet and a perfect target for @mobian! I would love to see an LTE modem integrated in such a device though, so I could finally get rid of my SGo 2…" Lack of LTE and no pen technology seem to be the downsides of the StarLite.
• Neowin: Russians seemingly preparing to launch a MediaTek powered R-FON with custom ROSA OS inside. Just included this because it makes me wonder about AuroraOS and what happened to that.

Software

Gnome Ecosystem

• This Week in GNOME: #109 Managing Repositories Nice to see Fractal 5 beta 2!
• Planet GNOME: Status update, 17/08/2023
• mcantazaro: GNOME 45 Core Apps Update
• Phoronix: GNOME 45 Beta Released With Many Improvements

Phosh

• Guido Günther: There is a long standing issue in #phoc (the #wayland compositor used with #phosh (but as I recently learned also other projects like #bananui) that makes windows flip their size when crossing a screen edge (as tiling is (incorrectly) kicking in). This makes dragging windows around in docked mode harder than necessary. This is about to improve and (thanks to the ground work over the past months) we can also add some visual feedback:

Plasma Ecosystem

• KDE blogs: Are we transparent enough?
• Nate Graham: This week in KDE: Double-click by default
• Nate Graham: This week in KDE: Plasma 6 development continues
• Nate Graham: Bug tracking vs user support
• Nate Graham: How all this icon stuff is going to work in Plasma 6
• KDE Announcements: KDE Ships Frameworks 5.109.0
• Carl Schwan: Kirigami Addons 0.11.0 Nice widgets!
• Qt blog: Qt Creator 11.0.2 released
• dot.KDE.org: Calling All Artists! - The Plasma 6 Wallpaper Contest
• Volker Krause: OpenID Connect/OAuth2 with KDE’s Gitlab

Sailfish OS

• adampigg: #SailfishOS on the @PINE64 #PinePhone and #PinephonePro get a Mesa update to 23.1.6 and the pro gets a kernel update to 6.5rc1
• David Llewellyn-Jones: "Over the coming months (not sure how long it'll take!) I'll be upgrading the #SailfishOS #browser from #gecko ESR78 to ESR91.…", Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4

Ubuntu Touch

• fredldotme: Yeah drugs are cool but have you tried giving your software some Speed?From this to that, soon on a Halium-based device near you., This is with haliumqsgcontext uploading imagery to the GPU, plus some scheduling tweaks that are part of regular Android kernels and not fully taken advantage of in Ubuntu Touch, yet.
• fredldotme: Saving 1,2 seconds waiting for 50 high res images to be loaded into the GPU, thanks to haliumqsgcontext.
• Jozef Mlich on Fosstodon: I have managed to run Amazfish on @ubports on my Volla. Now I need to debug it with the device.
• Jozef Mlich on Fosstodon: Progress of Amazfish porting to @ubports looks promising. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyLfKOkJjZI

Maemo Leste

• Maemo Leste: Maemo Leste - Five year anniversary and Chimaera release. Impressive! Congratulations!

GloDroid

Distributions

• Justin: "Another Week - Another new image for PineTab V…"

Apps

• Schmiddi on Mobile: "A new release of Flare…". Great!
• postmarketOS: Apps by Category: Selfisekai: fluffychat: now available in aports
• postmarketOS: Apps by Category: Flixfunk: DieBahn now available in aports
• Release v3.0.0 · qutebrowser/qutebrowser · GitHub

Linux

• phone-devel: Re: gc2145 camera driver (front camera on PinePhone)
• phone-devel: [PATCH RESEND v3 1/2] dt-bindings: arm: qcom: Add BQ Aquaris M5
• phone-devel: [PATCH v6 1/4] dt-bindings: ufs: qcom: Add reg-names property for ICE
• phone-devel: Re: [PATCH v5 1/8] gpio: pxa: disable pinctrl calls for MMP_GPIO
• Phoronix: Linux DRM Firmware Repo Established For Queuing New GPU Firmware
• Phoronix: Linux 6.6 Etnaviv Driver Working On More NXP i.MX8MP Hardware
• Phoronix: Linux 6.5-rc7 Released: Stable Linux 6.5 Expected Next Week

Stack

• Phoronix: Mesa Adds GPUVis Integration - GPU Trace Visualizer
• Phoronix: Mesa 23.1.6 Released With Many Graphics Driver Fixes
• Phoronix: Box64 0.2.4 Released - Some x86-64 Games Now Playable On RISC-V

Matrix

• Matrix.org: This Week in Matrix 2023-08-18

Worth Noting

• Chris: "Some exciting news: With the help of a tester (thanks kyeh!), #mobilelinux though vvmd/vvmplayer ( https://gitlab.com/kop316/vvmplayer ) finally supports Visual Voicemail on all major US carriers!…". Great news for MMS Visual Voicemail addicts!
• Micah Ilbery: "🌶️ take - Linux and open source software in general doesn’t have a UX, or quality, or design, or fragmentation, or whatever other problem that constantly comes up.…"
• hamblingreen: "also i themed my #sxmo to what i call the Pine theme…"
• Sophie: "I've -finally- found the fix for telephony audio on the #librem5 runnig #nixos!…"
• Miss Behave: "Dear #Librem5 Community, i broke the screen…"
• Purism (Reddit): My Librem 5 pre-order is reached in the shipping queue and they STILL WON'T GIVE ME MY REFUND!
• Purism community: Is reading SMS via ssh possible?
• Purism community: Librem 5 "Batteryless" Dock Support
• Purism community: Librem 5 Not Receiving Texts
• @dos@librem.one: Home is where your phone instantly registers to a cellular network 🤪️ #cccamp23 #shotonlibrem5
• @dos@librem.one: Coming to #CCCamp23 🚂️🚃️🚃️🚃️ #shotonlibrem5
• Lemmy - linuxphones: August Update: Kept You Waiting, Huh? | PINE64
• Lemmy - linuxphones: Librem 5 Phone Review - August 2023
• Lemmy - postmarketOS: #32 podcast has the magic word 'immutable'
• megis PinePhone Development Log: QuartzPro 64

Worth Reading

• Maemo Leste: Maemo Leste - Five year anniversary and Chimaera release
• UCSD Today: UC San Diego Computer Scientists Tackle Annual Waste of 1.5 Billion Junked Smartphones
• PINE64: August Update: Kept You Waiting, Huh?. Glad that the Community Update is back!
  • PINE64official (Reddit): August Update: Kept You Waiting, Huh? | PINE64
  • PINE64: Quick update: What’s going on?. A longer lead time for the meetup would be great going forward!
• fossphones: Linux Phone News - August 18, 2023. Nice round-up!
• leetaur: Librem 5 Phone - Review, Gemini
  • c/linuxphones comments
  • c/linux comments
• kelbot: First Impressions of the Beepy Pocket Computer — gemini.cyberbot.space, Gemini native.
• LWN.net: Debian turns 30 Happy birthday, Debian!
• hadess: New responsibilities. Sad to see. I wonder if RedHat is actually struggling financially or whether it's just IBM-ish corporate greed that leads to changes like this one.
• Phoronix: StarFive VisionFive 2 Quad-Core RISC-V Performance Benchmarks. PineTab V performance is likely similar (same SoC).

Worth Watching

• Matthew Croughan: The Nix Phone and the end of Android, YouTube mirror Nice talk!
• Continuum Gaming: Continuum Gaming E377: Sailfish OS app – Stock Browser Tweak
• kerbstift: Librem 5 Unboxing, Boot and brief UI / PHOSH Performance August 2023
• Silent Coding Journey: HOW TO MAKE UBUNTU TOUCH CHECKBOX SNIPPET
• Scientific Perspective: Linux : Mainline Initialized | Mobian | PostmarketOS
• Brevere79: How To Install UBPORTS from UBUNTU SOFTWARE APP .
• Baonks 81: Debian Bookworm on samsung gt58lte with hkdm ttyescape buffyboard zram-init SM-T355Y aarch64
• Nguyen Bao An Bui: This is Firefox OS 2.5. Oh, the fond memories!
• Gott Modus: PinePhone Explorer Pro with External Wifi card .. wifite2 g0dm0de1337 #wifihack #pentesting #mobian
• Nicco Loves Linux: Rhino Linux Team Interview!

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!