On December 9th, 2020, I created a new GitHub repository and pushed the first commit of my “I hate creating Vagrantfiles by hand” tool. It could create Vagrantfile and Ansible inventory from a (very rudimentary) network topology and deploy handcrafted device configurations on Cisco IOS and Arista EOS.

Highlights this week: Progress reports on Sailfish OS and postmarketOS, a Phosh bug fix release, news on a bunch of apps, and more!

Commentary in italics.

Worth Reading

• postmarketOS blog: postmarketOS in 2024-11: pmbootstrap v3, RFC process and Seattle
• Install Docker natively on Android Phone and use it as a Home Server | CrackOverflow
• Turn Android Phone to Batteryless Home Server | CrackOverflow
  • r/linux: What do you think about my new Home Server?
• Samuel: DTB loading for Linux is harder than it looks

Worth Watching

• Linux Stuff: Webapps - Juno Tab 3 (Mobian Phosh)
• Continuum Gaming: Continuum Gaming E446: SFOS – Space Inspector
• CompTester: PostmarketOS edge 6.12 Linux на Xiaomi Redmi 4 Prime
• PC-FREEDOM＠なんちゃってエンジニアリング: Waydroid のその後と、Ubuntu Touch
• David Bombal: Hack WiFi with a phone? (Kali Linux Nethunter Pro)
• Данис Палютин: NFS Shift and GT Racing on Maemo (Nokia N9) Is this retro gaming at this point?
• Equareo: How to install Ubuntu Touch on the Fairphone 4
• OrangUtanTech: "Installing Ubuntu Touch, LineageOS, and crDroid on the Samsung Galaxy A70 Using TWRP"a
• Johannes Näder Tackling Openwashers, Freeloaders and Cuckoos - SFSCON / FSFE-Tube

Worth Noting

• @luigi311: @gnome looks like they know and will hopefully get it fixed at some point today https://discourse.gnome.org/t/scheduled-maintenance-gitlab-gitlab-pages-04th-of-december-2024-at-2-pm-utc/25271
• @luigi311: Whats going on with all the constant issues over at @gnome gitlab instance? I saw a month ago they were moving over to AWS is that still a WIP or is there something else causing all the issues?#gnome #gitlab
• kop316: "With the help of @beacondb , I was able to fix geoclue not being able to submit new locations to beaconDB! The MR is here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/geoclue/geoclue/-/merge_requests/192 With that fixed, I made a Linux mobile stumbler that works with geoclue to submit data! You can find it here: https://gitlab.com/kop316/geoclue-stumbler (Note that you'll need that patch for the stumbler to actually submit data)."
• r/MobileLinux: an arm build of spotify
• JF: "#InfiniTime 1.15.0 is out! It brings a new Always-On-Display mode, a weather forecast app, a dice rolling app, persistent alarm and many other features, improvements and bug fixes!It's time to upgrade your #pinetime !https://github.com/InfiniTimeOrg/InfiniTime/releases/tag/1.15.0@PINE64"

Hardware

• cnxsoft: Allwinner A733 octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 AI SoC supports up to 16GB RAM for Android 15 tablets and laptopsAllwinner A733 is an octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 processor with an optional 3 TOPS NPU and support for up to 16GB RAM designed for Android 15 tablets and laptops such as the Teclast P50Ai with a 10.92-inch touchscreen display. With two Cortex-A76 …https://www.cnx-software.com/2024/12/06/allwinner-a733-octa-core-cortex-a76-a55-ai-soc-supports-up-to-16gb-ram-for-android-15-tablets-and-laptops/
• mntmn: status of MNT Reform Next trackpad: getting there! it has a very nice glass surface (we tried 3 different glass manufacturers and this one is the best) and mechanical cherry mx ulp switches
• T313C0mun1s7: "@postmarketOS Got this running on my ClockworkPi uConsole with LTE modem today. I am running the XFCE4 desktop and spent the entire day customizing. I got a lot done. Really excited to use it as an always online administrative console (I am a SysAdmin by trade)If anyone would like to follow suit getting 4G working on one of these, a lot of people have put a lot of work into this and share it on the forums. Here is my little bit: https://forum.clockworkpi.com/t/postmarketos-uconsole-cm4/12458/65?u=t313c0mun1s7"

More Software News

Gnome Ecosystem

• This Week in GNOME: #177 Scrolling Performance
• chergert: Ptyxis Progress Support

Phosh

• phosh: phosh 0.43.1 is out 🚀📱🎅 :This is a small bug fix release addressing two important issues in #phosh and #squeekboard that shouldn't wait 'til 0.44.0. Check out the release notes at https://phosh.mobi/releases/rel-0.43.1/.🙏 to everyone who contributed to this release.#phosh #librem5 #pinephone #gtk #wlroots #gnome #linux #mobile #LinuxMobile
• Phosh.mobi: Phosh 0.43.1
• phosh: @agx The initial #Cellbroadcast implementation for #ModemManager just landed. Thanks to the MM maintainers for the review and @NGIZero for supporting this project. #phosh bits (and polishing the MM side) will follow soon.

Plasma Ecosystem

• Nate Graham: This Week in Plasma: Oodles of features!
• Carl Schwan et al.: This Week in KDE Apps: OptiImage first release, Itinerary redesign and more
• Planet KDE: Plasma Wayland Protocols 1.15.0
• Phoronix: KDE Starts December By Landing A Number Of New Features

Sxmo

• #sxmo: And now I can also enable hotspot from the watch ;)Everything can be configured through one liners in a json dictionary ... #linuxmobile and #sxmo makes this so easy ;)
• #sxmo: I now can check and access #sxmo notifications from my #gshock watch ;)https://git.sr.ht/~fdlamotte/sxmo_gshockIt conveniently replaces the notification led I don't have on p3a ...

Sailfish OS

• Community News - Sailfish OS Forum: Sailfish Community News, 5th December 2024 - The next C2 batch
• #sailfishOS: Size matters.Why do most manufacturers think Pro Max Plus Ultra XL is the best? Do most users think the same?Why do I drop my phone so much? Yes I'm clumsy, but when I can't even reach the middle of the phone, there's no way I can properly balance it. #SailfishOS gestures help but only up to a point.If only the #JollaC2 was the size of #JollaC...
• cybette: "There are problems with calls/texts but that should be fixed with the VoLTE update. Some people have already started using #JollaC2 as their daily driver: https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/feedback-on-jolla-c2/20462/680 ^ Long thread in the forum, but good read if you are interested in the device. And a new batch of C2 is supposed to be available soon! https://forum.sailfishos.org/t/sailfish-community-news-5th-december-2024-the-next-c2-batch/21310"
• piggz: "#SailfishOS on the @PINE64 #pinephone and #pinephonepro have had a kernel bump to 6.12. Was a frustrating few days as I figured out a particular failure, 6.12 deprecated memory cgroup v1 which we require, so that had to be adding into the defconfig, but all is good now. zypper ref && zypper dup"
• flypig: Thanks to @hut23 for letting me present at #TheAlanTuringInstitute on Tuesday on the "Anatomy of a Browser" covering embedding browser frameworks. A first for me: presented from my #Linux phone using an embedded #WebView streamed using ScreenCast. View the slides online: https://www.flypig.co.uk/presentations/techtalk-gecko-dev-20241203/Slide/notes source/ PDFs on GitHub: https://github.com/llewelld/techtalk-gecko-devCode for the WebView presentation app: https://github.com/llewelld/harbour-present #Browser #Gecko #Blink #WebKit #CEF #Qt #SailfishOS

Ubuntu Touch

• fredldotme: Fixed up Wireless Desktop Mode and Screen recording on the Fairphone 5.
• jmlich: "I've created a simple call-blocking app for Ubuntu Touch! 🚫📞 It's currently under review, and I hope it will be live on the open-store soon.Check out the source code on GitHub: https://github.com/jmlich/exphone#CallBlocking #UbuntuTouch #Contribute"

Hardware (by an anonymous contributor)

• Oem Smartphone Ubuntu Linux Touch Os 4g Mobile Phone With Open Source Turnkey Mode - Buy Ubuntu Smartphone linux Touch Smartphone oem 4g Smartphone Product on Alibaba.com
• QCOM U6701 GPS Navigation Ubuntu Linux Touch Screen 4G Phone with Open Source - UNIWA

Kernel

• phone-devel: [PATCH v3 00/12] media: i2c: imx214: Miscellaneous cleanups and improvements
• phone-devel: [PATCH] dt-bindings: power: rpmpd: Fix comment for SM6375
• Phoronix: Linux 6.12 Officially Promoted To Being An LTS Kernel
• Phoronix: Imagination PowerVR Driver Being Extended To Work On RISC-V

Distributions

• FuriLabs: Update 13.0.5
  • furilabs: "The FuriOS 13.0.5 monthly update is here!This release includes GNOME and Debian updates, as well as a whole lot of other goodies and fixes from us. Some of the notable ones include: battery management improvements, modem data and call fixes plus more!https://furilabs.com/update-13-0-5/#mobilelinux #furios #linux #furilabs #flx1"
• postmarketOS blog: postmarketOS in 2024-11: pmbootstrap v3, RFC process and Seattle
• Breaking updates in pmOS edge: Polkit conflict when installing GNOME or Phosh
• postmarketOS (Mastodon): Happy to announce that Barnabás is now a trusted contributor in postmarketOS! He is maintaining multiple Qualcomm SoC kernels in pmOS, as well as related device ports and does important mainlining work!📜 TC page:https://postmarketos.org/trusted-contributors/#barnabas-czeman-barni2000
• postmarketOS pmaports issues: Minimum brightness is fully black [affects multiple devices]
• Phoronix: Fedora 42 Eyes Replacing SDL2 With sdl2-compat To Leverage SDL3
• Phoronix: Alpine Linux 3.21 Released With Linux 6.12 & GCC 14, LoongArch CPU Support

Apps

• LinuxPhoneApps.org: Apps: Kumo
• #plasmamobile: So i managed to get #merkurocontacts and -calendar to actually connect to #nextcloud. The trick was to zoom the screen out, from 300 to 200%. Itty-bitty-tiny fonts, but then I could see the actual buttons I needed to press to save the config. The developers over at #plasmamobile has a few things to do before all of those apps are really usable ... However, This was a good progress for me since I heavily rely on nextcloud.#linuxphone #postmarketos #fossphone #kde #linux #plasma
• tbernard: "Update from the Aardvark hackfest with @p2panda yesterday and today!So far we managed to get a GTK Rust test project going with a simple TextView, and we're converting text changes into Automerge CRDT operations. We also have the p2panda local-first sync backend running in a separate thread.Currently we're working on connecting both worlds to sync data across devices. Hopefully we'll have an actual demo of synced editing by the end of the day (no pressure).https://github.com/p2panda/aardvark"
• tbernard: It (somewhat) works!!!#aardvark #p2panda
• @luigi311: Incase anyones curious the immich mobile app seems to run ok on linux/mobile linux. I was able to compile it and get it running on my desktop and FLX1. You can view your photos and thats about it lol everything else would need to be adjusted to enable linux based solutions to their android/ios specific solutions. Its still neat to see it run. On my FLX1 the colors are messed up but look fine on my desktop.
• braid: "1500 lines of code later ... and #PolyculeClient now finally has support for #OIDC using MSC3861 "Next-generation auth for #Matrix, based on OAuth 2.0/OIDC" 🎉 !Let's get it wrapped up and published soon !"
• kop316: "Hi all,Some fun news on the geoclue-stumber and meshtastic side!I released gtk-meshtastic-client 0.3.0: https://gitlab.com/kop316/gtk-meshtastic-client/-/tags/0.3.0I also made an initial release for geoclue-stumbler: https://gitlab.com/kop316/geoclue-stumbler Now you can record your path that you took, and it will show you various statistics (how fast are you going, how fast you were on average). You can even export the path into a GPX file! (The MR for geoclue was also merged!)"
• schmiddionmobile: "Pipeline 2.1.0 is now out! It comes with major UI improvements to the video page, channel page, and duration indicators, thanks to @loAn issue with long video and channel names breaking the app on small screen screens was also fixed.A lot of small issues have also been fixed since our last post about version 2.0.0.As always, you can download Pipeline from Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/details/de.schmidhuberj.tubefeeder and see the releases notes here: https://gitlab.com/schmiddi-on-mobile/pipeline/-/releases/v2.1.0"
• alice: "Ok, now I'm happy with the overlays. Here are 2 phones with different screens and it runs fine on both... well, to a point. Phosh doesn't have a way to unfullscreen the app so you softlock it by fullscreening, and it also lags like hell in landscape for some reason. This is also using an older runtime as with the newer one GL doesn't work. However, on OP6 it runs well, and rn I only care about the layout."
• alice: "2 more features for overlays:- analog stick control type (WIP, I may want to tweak the hitbox)- decorations (stick base octagon and the C buttons label)The layout will need to be tweaked a lot (I mean I had a design for N64 which was completely different) but I wanted to try this one first just to check how it would work (answer - badly, the stick and A/B buttons are too low)"

Stack

• Phoronix: Box64 v0.3.2 Emulator Adds Box32 Option, Introduces Native Flags & More
• Phoronix: Fwupd 2.0.3 Delivers Latest Firmware Updating Capabilities For Linux Systems
• Phoronix: COSMIC Alpha 4 Released For System76's Rust-Based Desktop
• TheEvilSkeleton: "At last, the USB portal originally authored by @refi64 in 2021 , later continued by Georges Stavracas in 2023 , and finalized by @hub and @swick, has been merged !The USB portal allows sandboxed formats like Flatpak to access USB devices without poking holes in the sandbox. This is great for security, as accessing USB devices will now need to be explicitly granted by the user.Now we just need to wait for implementers to implement them in their respective portal implementations, starting with GNOME: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/xdg-desktop-portal-gnome/-/merge_requests/159 The documentation for the USB portal is available on the xdg-desktop-portal website: https://flatpak.github.io/xdg-desktop-portal/docs/doc-org.freedesktop.portal.Usb.html #Flatpak #Security #GNOME"
• Michael Larabel: Ubuntu flash-kernel Package Looks To Drop Support For Old ARM Hardware Anonymous Commenter explains: This article highlights certain smartphone models and Exynos chips: Google Nexus 4 (Mako), Google Nexus 7 (Grouper), Samsung SD5v1 (Exynos 5440), Samsung SSDK5440 (Exynos 5440).

Matrix

• Matrix.org: This Week in Matrix 2024-12-06
• Matrix.org: An unrelated cybercriminal network named MATRIX was taken down

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!