This post goes out in the middle of the Boiling The Ocean hackfest currently taking place in Berlin. People are hacking on Mobile Linux, local-first ideas, GNOME app design, and everything in between. Also image-based/immutable OSes, which we want to do optionally with postmarketOS (#62) to rule out a whole class of bugs that are pretty inconvenient when you are for example cycling around the world and just want to upgrade your phone OS without finding it in a broken state afterwards. Thanks to Tobias for organizing this and for the photos!
Some people have been wondering about the name of the event - it is of course not about literally boiling the ocean, but rather taking up impossible-seeming tasks and making them a reality.
The phones on top do not only run postmarketOS, but also show postmarketOS talks from the systemd conference All Systems Go!, which also took place in Berlin a few days beforehand, as well as KDE Akademy from the beginning of the month in Würzburg.
Organizational
In order to make postmarketOS more stable and reliable, we want to do automated testing with actual hardware. We need a PCB to do that. After a long discussion on the requirements (#63), and search for a skilled person, we are happy to announce that this is moving forward and Jonathan Bruce will implement it. We have pre-approved the expense of the design. The total cost will be of 2000EUR and billed to our Open Collective upon completion, unless there are big unexpected issues, since some iteration rounds are covered by that budget. As with everything we do, the KiCAD files will be under a Free License and published in our gitlab! Thanks to Pablo for pushing this forward, and to everybody who took part in the requirements discussions.
Federico is now a new Trusted Contributor! He has been consistently contributing to postmarketOS for years, and brings our current count of TCs to 12!
As part of some improvement in our governance processes, we have started to update meeting minutes from postmarketOS Core Contributors (former Core Team) meetings after each meeting (instead of sometimes only several months afterwards). You can now expect any decisions taken to show up there bi-weekly. If you have any issue that you believe should be raised to our attention, please open an issue in the postmarketOS repository.
Masanori has done an extraordinary amount of work improving the device categorization in the wiki by contributing more than 300 changes. Thanks a lot!
systemd related
There's been great improvements towards having systemd in postmarketOS. We've now finalised (after a long discussion) a design of how to enable services in systemd. We've also improved our management of apk patches due to /usr merge in Alpine, and were allowed to drop some patches. There's also been a lot of work to put openrc service enablement properly into subpackages. Thanks Jane, Clayton, Casey!
pmbootstrap v3 staging branch is now being tested in pmaports CI, and also used by build.postmarketos.org (bpo). This warranties we won't regress, gives the new branch more testing, and is a pre-requisite for systemd builds. Thanks Clayton and Oliver!
The work to implement the "/usr merge" in Alpine is moving forward at great pace, with more than 10 Merge Requests having been merged in the last month. Most of the work so far has consisted in moving libraries and files that were directly installed under
/libor other places in the root, but had no specific reason to be there, to the/usrhierarchy. Progress is being tracked through a milestone, and is open for anybody to contribute! If you want to help move it forward, grab any of the issues and start hacking on them! Thanks Pablo and Clayton for the work so far, and Natanael for all the reviews!A lot of progress has been made in bpo building the split systemd repository (#140). Thanks, Oliver!
Linux kernel related
Many kernels (11) received updates, including several to the last 6.11 release. Thanks to all our kernel and port contributors!
Last month, the kernel configuration was moved from pmbootstrap to pmaports repository. Now, there is also a process in place to request and apply changes that affect multiple kernels! We hope this will be a great improvement to keep consistency in features, and simplify updates in the future! Thanks Oliver and Luca!
Many new options were added to community kernels, which helped inform the new process. Thanks Luca!
Old downstream kernels that need an outdated make, can now make use of the make3.81 package. Thanks Masanori!
pmaports + aports
GNOME 47 has been released! Among all the changes that you can read in the release notes, we can highlight that the File Chooser dialog in sandboxed or GTK4 apps is now provided by Nautilus, which is now mostly ready for mobile. Therefore, Nautilus is now installed by default instead of Portfolio (thanks Pan!). Upstream is still aware of some issues with the list view and batch renaming, so hold your bug reports some months if you can! There are also important improvements in the Calendar app, in addition to the amazing accent colors! Some updates might still be pending. You can follow the aports' tracking issue for more details. Thank you everybody making this possible, from the whole of the community upstream, to people doing packaging (mostly fossdd and Krassy) and merges in alpine!
Following the GNOME 47 update, the GNOME Software apk plugin has also been updated. As usual, we encountered some small bugs upstream, but this time it also required changes to the APK polkit service. Thanks Pablo!
Speaking of apk plugins for graphical package manager frontends: the apk plugin for Discover from Plasma has been merged upstream! Thanks, Alexey, Devin, and all the reviewers!
Along with that, people are working on adding Alpine/musl CI for the entire KDE software stack. For a bunch of repositories it has already been enabled. Thanks Bart and everybody who helped!
Most intel GPU firmware is now included in the initramfs for generic x86_64 devices. This allows to support a wider array of hardware. Thanks Clayton!
Buffyboard and unl0kr can now load the configuration from
/usrin addition to/etc, allowing distributions to better comply with the FHS standard. Thanks fossdd, Johannes and Pablo!We have 1 new device port: Samsung Galaxy Tab S5e Wi-Fi. Thanks Usia!
One more device, the Lenovo Xiaoxin Pad Pro 12.6 (Lenovo Tab P12 Pro) gained sensor support. Thanks chalkin!
Default postmarketOS installations now includes fonts for non-latin languages, without a great growth in font size. This was possible fine-tunning the fonts included, and after a lengthy discussion on the best approach to make it both flexible and resilient. It's good not all changes require that much back and forth! Thanks Masanori!
New installations now use
doasinstead ofsudoby default. This was complemented with further work to not have root user be asked for the password For more details on how to switch from one to the other please see the edge blog post. Thanks Aster and fossdd!Upgrade GNOME Shell Mobile to the latest patches which includes a lot of papercut improvements. Thanks Angelo!
BTRFS installations now boot faster, after we removed the check on boot-time, that can take a very long time. Thanks Jane!
The N900 continues receiving maintenance after a keymap update broke its functionality. Thanks Sicelo!
The generic aarch64 port, named Trailblazer, now supports X1 Elite laptops. Thanks Minecrell!
Artwork and homepage
The postmarketos.org website saw multiple improvements to reduce the time to load and improve the visual consistency (check out the new footer at the bottom of this page!), and dark mode. Thanks Markus and knuxify!
A postmarketOS leaflet to hand out at events was created! It turned out beautifully and was translated from the initial English version to a Japanese version, and a German version is in progress. Thanks Masanori, Lioh, Oliver, Rob, Ranny, Jens, Markus.
Also for events, a A5 sheet to show basic info about a device presented at a booth/table !49. Thanks, Rob!
Event recordings
All Systems Go: systemd-ifying postmarketOS, our immutable future, and why Alpine is cooler than you thought with Casey and Clayton
KDE Akademy: Daily driving Plasma Mobile and what's still lacking with Bart (slides, blog post)
FrOSCon: postmarketOS podcast Live with @Adrianyyy, @ollieparanoid, @1peter10, @devrtz, @kcxt, @Fellintr, @agx, @kuleszdl, @z3ntu, @erebion
Behind the scenes
Writing these blog posts is a looot of effort. Over the past months, we have established the workflow of Pablo going through all merge requests since the month before and preparing a draft based on that — a huge tasks that keeps growing with each month! Oliver then finalizes the blog post by adding an image at the top, categorizing the bullet points, writing an introduction and adding some additional bullet points, etc. This takes each of us roughly a full day (!) - we have made a lot of optimizations compared to the very long early days blog posts, such as having only one image, and using bullet points. But still, it would be fantastic (and at some point required) to optimize this further.
Therefore the idea is that if you enjoy reading these blog posts, and you are either sending postmarketOS patches yourself, or follow development closely, then from now on you can send us a list of topics to include in the next blog post by commenting here!
And what's next?
The migration to our selfhosted gitlab has been postponed to 2024-10-06 (next Sunday!), as the direct transfer feature could not be enabled by gitlab.com folks in time for the previously planned date. With that being said, we have gotten a great amount of help from their team so far, and from Lance at OSUOSL. Read the details and the answer to the popular question "Why not SourceHut/Forgejo/...?" in #77.
Moving on with systemd and the /usr merge. With current planning, we expect the systemd branch to be merged into pmaports master within the next 3 weeks (so after the gitlab migration, doing both in parallel would be too much). When this is done, we will be able to have the first automatic images generated!
Initial support for Google Pixel 3 is coming soon (!5514), together with speaker support that Joel recently got working!
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 appreciate the work we're doing with postmarketOS and want to support us, consider contributing financially via OpenCollective.