It is always fascinating to learn where postmarketOS ends up being used. This month we learned how one does various cool things with their Sxmo powered phone while travelling around the world on bike! Listen to the interview with magdesign in the latest podcast episode if you are curious. Now let's get to all the other amazing things that happened since the last blog post.
Pablo now works part-time on postmarketOS!
As it might be known to the reader, since December 2023 Clayton has been devoting 100% of his work time to postmarketOS. And since the beginning of this month Pablo is now also able to invest a big chunk of his work time into doing postmarketOS development!
This is of course incredible for the project - more people working on it means getting more things done faster. We still need to reach a sustainable strategy for financing this work though. Right now it works by "setting personal savings on fire" in combination to applying for grants, none of which are approved yet (more on that below). Long term we would ideally be able to cover their costs to work on postmarketOS from donations, but there is still a long path ahead! Thanks to all the amazing people who are donating via our OpenCollective we are already able cover important costs, e.g: the post-FOSDEM hackathon and all of our infrastructure costs, which is amazing!
On that note, we are also considering to free up more time for postmarketOS development by paying a professional podcast editor instead of doing the editing ourselves. (If you have feedback whether we should do this or not, let us know!)
Grant applications
We have collaborated on sending out four grant applications in total, on which various members of the wider Linux Mobile community with the right expertise can work on, as well as members of the Core Team (as mentioned above). These are the topics of the grants:
- Maintenance, CI, and testing, since these are in big need.
- VoLTE, so we can all enjoy phone calls, regardless of the country we live in.
- Building an optional, immutable/composable version of postmarketOS, that rules out a whole class of errors that can happen while upgrading postmarketOS on your phone. This is important, so postmarketOS is not only usable by hackers who know how to fix their system if an upgrade goes wrong.
- Upstreaming the hacks from mobile-config-firefox to Firefox proper.
We hope to see some of these projects approved, and start to pay some of our developers and community members so they can spend more time on things we need. If you are a member of the community, with the will and ability (skills and time) to work on relevant things in our ecosystem, feel free to contact Pablo, he will be happy to help with grant applications. Our current main missing priorities are related to HW testing and phone cameras, but there are always other things that might be possible and interesting to get funded for.
So what's new?
Raymond Hackley and Henrik Grimler became Trusted Contributors! Now there are more Trusted Contributors than people in the Core Team, which is great news. Welcome to the team and thanks to everybody who applied!
We have 11 new device ports: PocketBook 614 Plus, Xiamomi Redmi 10C, Lenovo P2 and K6 Note, Powkiddy X55, BQ Aquaris U Plus, Samsung Galaxy A2 Core, Ayn Odin, LG Stylo 3 Plus, ZTE ZXV10 B860HV5, and Asus Max M1. With the Chinese variants of Samsung Galaxy S5 now also being ported. It is remarkable, that some of those are very recent devices with the Xiaomi Redmi 10C hitting the market just two years ago! Thanks to all our device porters!
Samsung Galaxy J7 Prime and Tab 3.8.0 and HTC One M8 devices gained mainline support, potentially extending the lifetime of those devices. Thanks methanal, knuxify, and Alexandre!
Multiple kernels were updated to the latest stable release, 6.8. Thanks a lot to all our kernel maintainers!
Since we allowed official images for testing devices to be created, we now also build images for generic x86_64, Fairphone 5, Microsoft Surface RT (before it moved was to community), and multiple Chromebooks! These are also available in the download page. Thanks Clayton and Jenneron!
There is a new UI: Cage! It allows to boot postmarketOS in Kiosk mode with Wayland for use in single-application mode. Thanks Vognev!
Add extlinux configs to msm8226 and msm8953, which allows booting them with lk2nd (now that these SoCs are supported in lk2nd). Thanks André and Barnabás!
There is now generic device support for both sdm845 and msm8916 devices that benefit from using close-to-mainline U-Boot. Full integration is still work in progress, and the device transitions are not ready, but this is a huge step in the right direction. Thanks Caleb and Nikita!
The Nokia N900 continues to get improvements and support, including integration of some modern tools like feedbackd. Thanks Sicelo for their continued work on this device!
msm-firmware-loader was upgraded to 1.5.0, to provide more firmware from existing partitions. Thanks Alexey!
There was a new mobile-config-firefox 4.3.0 release with lots of improvements, and a follow-up 4.3.1 release-fix. Thanks to Peter for all the contributions in these two releases, and for writing a very nice blog post series!
The Microsoft Surface RT was moved to community! Users can now expect better support for it. Thanks Jenneron!
unl0kr 3.1.0 is now in postmarketOS edge. This release handles input device connection/disconnection at runtime among other things. Since 3.0.0, unl0kr is now being developed in the BuffyBox repository, now part of a suite of graphical applications for the terminal. Thanks Johannes!
More artwork and wallpapers are now available, including a style guide for everybody that might want to contribute to it. We decided to set Dikasp's beautiful meadow wallpaper as default for postmarketOS edge and the upcoming v24.06 release, and that is now done for most UIs in edge (!4805, !5015). Thanks Dikasp, Bart and Oliver!
We released version 2.4.0 of mkinitfs, in preparation for compressed firmware support. Thanks Newbyte and Clayton!
The GTK 4.14 release came with the new ngl renderer, which handles fractional scaling much better than the old gl renderer. We had already merged a release candidate of it earlier and wrote an edge blog post about the possible breakage that comes with the new renderer. Nobody caught the regression with msm8916 and msm8953 in time, so as workaround the old renderer was re-enabled for these shortly after GTK 4.14 was merged (!4958, !4961). Thanks Nikita and Andrea!
The original PinePhone has now a workaround to recover the modem when it crashes. Thanks Arnav!
gnss-share now supports providing location when there is no SIM installed. Thanks Teemu!
msm8953 devices now use more upstream firmware instead of carrying their own copies. Thanks Barnabás!
Phosh was upgraded to 0.38.0 in Alpine edge. Thanks fossdd!
After adding systemd to postmarketOS was announced, it was only possible to build your own systemd-based postmarketOS images if you check out a branch in pmbootstrap and build everything from scratch. The related pmbootstrap patches for bootstrapping systemd from plain Alpine (!2273) have been merged. Our package build server bpo has been adjusted to make use of it (#133), and a full staging repository has been built for x86_64, aarch64 and armv7. Developers who want to hack on systemd in postmarketOS can now use this temporary binary package repository. While working on this, two bugs in "pmbootstrap build" were fixed (!2291, !2292). Thanks Oliver!
pmbootstrap's bootimg_analyze feature can now detect QCDT types (!2276) and it no longer logs a python trace on build failures (!2288). Thanks Methanal and Newbyte!
And what's next?
A bleeding edge generic ARM64 EFI port is being worked on. It is called trailblazer and will show how far device porting has come regarding pure upstream Linux. The goal is to give another incentive to just upstream everything - would it not be amazing if your particular device would work with the upstream Linux kernel, boot from upstream U-Boot, without any patching whatsoever?
pmbootstrap and bpo will be further adjusted until it is possible to integrate systemd into pmaports.git master. The plan is to have the packages in an
extra-repos/systemddirectory. All packages from there will, as the name indicates, end up in a separate binary repository that will be used to extend the regular binary package repository if systemd is enabled (#2328). This has the advantage, that packages from this directory cannot be installed by accident on an OpenRC based installation."pmbootstrap status" is getting a rewrite, to get rid the of more-or-less always failing checks it previously had, and to just have a minimal display of important information such as the currently checked out channel, branch, device, UI and whether systemd is enabled or not (!2294).
If you appreciate the work we're doing on postmarketOS, and want to support us, consider joining our OpenCollective.