A rather boring week: People love handhelds with keyboards, an unofficial PinePhone battery case, a translucent backcover and a little bit of software news. Oh, and PINE64 shared another community update!

Commentary in italics.

Editorial: Inside baseball

This one landed early for RSS people (additions have been marked with a footnote). The big, hidden news with this update is that this blog is now hosted on a public code hosting repository again. You can now file issues if a post is outdated or easily prepare a merge request for an outdated page (I am also working on a way to enable this kind of easy editing for the posts that need it). I also plan to start future updates and lengthy posts in seperate branches going forward, hoping that they will then get published eventually and not rot in my private Nextcloud notes. Will this change anything? I doubt it, but I look forward to your contributions!

Hardware news

Hardware accessory news (PinePhone cases, mostly)

Software news

GNOME ecosystem

Plasma/Maui ecosystem

Ubuntu Touch

Sailfish OS

A new minor release, 4.3.0.15, was published, fixing that polkit vulnerability and preparing things for a seamless upgrade to the upcoming 4.4.0 release.1

Capyloon rising from Firefox OS's ruins

Just in case you don't use social media, these toots still contain everything I know.1

Rust-native UI

Slintcan apparently work on Linux Phones.1

Distro releases

Alternative Modem Firmware

Biktorgj released version 0.5.9 of his modem firmware. It's getting better and better, and you can call your modem now.

Cross-project Linux Mobile issue tracking

Tom wanted a cross-project, general issue tracker and set one up. I don't know how helpful this is to fix actual problems, but it might help with keeping track of overarching issues eventually getting fixed.

Worth reading

Megapixels improvements

PINE64 Community Update

  • PINE64: February update: chat with the machine. There's a lot in there, and as always all is news to readers of this Weekly Update. So make sure to watch the little video clips interspersed detailing Plasma Mobile, the interactions with Biktorgj's modem firmware and if you're in the EU, PINE64 EU sounds great (and more details were shared on Twitter since). Also, if eInk tablets excite you, that PineNote progress sure is something – the fact that I already have a 10,3" eInk device I don't use enough helps me be patient and keep holding off, as there are still some major issues to be solved.1

PinePhone Call Quality

PinePHone flashing

Software for ARM devices

Worth listening

Worth watching

PINE64 Community Update

PinePhone Keyboard

How's that Librem 5 doing?

  • Nat Tuck: How's the Librem 5 in Feb 2022?. Actually, you could update this like you do update your regular Debian by editing that sources.list, but then you would miss out on new features like full disk encryption. Also: The camera app works for me, you just need to move these sliders – it's all manual. Maybe setting gain to zero by default is not a good idea.

Sailfish OS corner

Nemo Mobile

Tablets

Minecraft on Waydroid on postmarketOS on the Pocofone F1

WayDroid on Ubuntu Touch on the Pocofone F1

Something missing?

If your projects' cool story (or your awesome video or nifty blog post or ...) is missing and you don't want that to happen again, please get in touch via social media or email!

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This post or comment was added after initial publication on February 18th, 2022.