As always it is amazing to meet up in person. The photo above was taken at FrOSCon last weekend, where postmarketOS folks took part in the FOSS on Mobile stand and devroom of the same name. A few weeks earlier something similar happened at FOSSY and at GUADEC. Shout out to everybody who was there, these events were just filled with great conversations, hacking sessions and making new friendships!
Organizational
After looking for a new home for the postmarketOS source code for a long time, we are happy to announce that we will move to a self-hosted GitLab instance! The migration is scheduled for Sunday, 2024-09-15. Read all about it in #77.
Related to our self-hosted GitLab: Caleb has some ideas for possibly moving device and/or SoC communities that are currently hosted on gitlab.com or github.com over to our shiny new instance to make it easier to collaborate across communities. If you have feedback, please reply in #78. "I'd like to get feedback from the team about this, as well as from device/SoC community maintainers, is this something you'd be interested in?"
The postmarketOS Core Contributors are now meeting bi-weekly on a fixed schedule (instead of monthly and having a date poll each time). This has improved our workflow, and we hope to be able to make decisions faster. If you have any idea or concern that you believe should be discussed, please open an issue in the postmarketos repository.
We are paying for development from OpenCollective donations for the first time! See our separate blog post for more information.
What's new?
We have 7 new device ports: F(x)tec Pro1X (qx1050), Samsung Galaxy Tab A 7.0 (2016), Lenovo Xiaoxin Pad Pro 12.6, Amazon Kindle Fire HD 7" (2nd Generation), Xiaomi Mi A2, Lenovo Yoga C630, and Xiaomi Mi 9T Pro / Redmi K20 Pro . Thanks to all our device porters!
The Google Pixel 3a has been promoted to community! The device features one of the most extensive hardware enablement from all modern Qualcomm devices, especially regarding camera, so the community category is right fit for it. Images are now being built for edge on all main UIs. Thanks Robert and Richard!
For the PinePhone, callaudiod (the daemon taking care of switching between call and regular audio profiles) has been replaced with a custom version. The replacement implements the same D-Bus API, but works with the new audio profiles generated by PulseAudio v17 and PipeWire v1.2. This was done after careful consideration through many discussions. Thanks Arnav for implementing this and for maintaining the PinePhone! (!5349)
Many kernels (14) received updates, including several to the last 6.10 release. Thanks to all our kernel and port contributors!
SDM845 devices with good audio support have been ported to use the new Wireplumber config format. Thanks Richard!
Booting on many Samsung testing devices has been fixed after big initramfs changes. Thanks Henrik!
Samsung devices with touch keys no longer wake up the screen on touch. Thanks Raymond!
There is now generic device support for MSM8909 and similar ARMv7 chips. Together with lk2nd support and extlinux, it allows to reduce the number of builds. Thanks Raymond!
boot-deploy 0.17 and 0.18 have been released and integrated with several new features and bug fixes. Thanks Clayton and all boot-deploy contributors!
Firmware compression using ZSTD has been enabled in Alpine and in all postmarketOS kernels that use linux-firmware. This included a great amount of work in many different projects. The whole process lasted for many months, but is a good improvement for every user of linux-firmware. Thanks Stefan!
The generic x86_64 device now also supports Nouveau for NVIDIA GPUs. Thanks Clayton!
The libcamera stack has continued receiving improvements in the form of forward-porting patches and enabling configs. Thanks Robert and Alistair!
GNOME Mobile UI has been upgraded to the latest version 46.0. Thanks Jane!
The postmarketos.org website saw fixes for multiple paper cuts and small fixes after the rework last month. Thanks Markus!
Our amazing recurring artwork contributor Dikasp continued making amazing artwork in August! Thanks Dikasp!
PAM is now properly set up for SSH sessions. This allows e.g. running
pw-dumpproperly from SSH to help with PipeWire debugging when working on cameras, and also to just run graphical applications via SSH that will then appear on your phone as you would expect. Thanks, Newbyte! (!5483)The proof of concept of VoLTE (4G calls) for SDM845 based devices is now packaged. At the same time, the grant regarding VoLTE that we helped two community members to apply to is moving forward, though not yet approved. We hope to be able to share good news at some point! Thanks Alistair and Richard!
Misc
Rob spent quite some time going through all issues and closing those that seemed inactive or no longer relevant. As with any triaging work, there is always the chance of some small mistakes. If you identify that any of the closed issues are still important and should remain open, feel free to comment on them or re-open them yourself. Keeping the list of issues relevant greatly helps the community and the maintainers work together efficiently. Thanks, Rob!
Many small fixes and improvements for pmbootstrap v3, thanks to everybody who contributed!
build.postmarketos.org has seen some more work towards building the split systemd repository (#140). Thanks, Oliver!
If you are curious about the story behind GNOME Shell on Mobile: we talked to main developer Jonas in the last episode of the podcast about its origin, how it relates to Phosh, running SailfishOS Aliendalvik on other Linux Mobile distros and how he found an important security vulnerability in Apple's AirPods.
And what's next?
Rob and Masanori are organizing a postmarketOS booth at Open Source Conference 2024 Tokyo/Fall (2024-10-26, Tokyo, Japan). If you are in the area, consider coming over! If you feel like you can't keep track of all the postmarketOS related events, we now have a separate events page to help you out. It has a little FAQ section covering "Can I represent postmarketOS at an event?" in case you were thinking about doing that at some point.
After some fruitful discussions with Alpine developers, the TSC gave green light to implementing "/usr merge" in Alpine. The work has already started and we are excited that everyone will be able to benefit from this work — it won't be just a downstream hack in postmarketOS as it is currently the case!
Camera work is proceeding at great pace, and seems like more Android devices will have working cameras soon!
If you appreciate the work we're doing on postmarketOS, and want to support us, consider joining our OpenCollective.