The artwork above is a variation of a rollup banner for the upcoming FrOSCon event that Ranny has been working on. He shared a behind the scenes screenshot on Mastodon . Unless you are very familiar with the graphite graphics toolbox, you probably cannot imagine how complicated it looks. We are at DEFCON and FOSSY right now and will soon be at FrOSCon as well as our very own postmarketOS and Alpine Linux Conference. More on that as usual in the and what's next? section further below.
Organizational
- Alicja is now a trusted contributor in postmarketOS!
Libcamera 0.7.2 and video calls
One of the most noticeable things that happened last month is the libcamera 0.7.2 release. Robert M. upgraded the postmarketOS edge package in !8991, dropping 11 (!) patches that he managed to upstream in the process. "The release notably includes fixes that allow us to start shipping color correction matrices in tuning files. This commit includes the current tuning iterations for the imx363 (used e.g. as Pixel 3a rear camera) and the s5kjn1 (used on e.g. as FairPhone 5 front camera). The later is also used for the other corresponding cameras on the mentioned devices, as they improve the quality over the default. This is, of course, planned to change in the future. The GPU-ISP also received major performance improvements, in particular if the dmabuf direct import path can be used. If that's not the case some INFO logs are printed, giving hints what needs to be improved in the V4L2 or GPU drivers."
He also fixed camera selection for pipewire/libcamera in mobile-config-firefox 5.4.1 (!138) and wrote: "So on devices with working cameras you should be able to do video calls now OOTB. Some sites might run into a remaining webrtc issue though (the camera freezing after a short time) - I have some pending patches for that, with a FF test build at aports!105606 (mrtest add -a 105605). With that all major video chat sides should work."
Thanks to Robert M. and the libcamera developers!
Duranium
The bug that Phosh would prompt to open sysext and confext loopback devices on boot via udiskie was fixed (#4767). Thanks Clayton!
Cups not starting was also fixed (#4649). Thanks Clayton!
phosh-os-updater was added and can now show duranium update notifications. Thanks Achill!
pmaports
linux-postmarketos-qcom-sdm670 was upgraded to 7.1.3 in !8940, fixing among other things audio for the Pixel 3a. See the sdm670-v7.1.3 tag for the full changelog. Thanks, Richard Ac. and everybody who tested!
The Librem 5 kernel was upgraded from 6.6 to 6.12 in !8959, importing fixes from upstream so that freezes on wakeup from suspend (#4207) no longer happen. Thanks Daniel K., dos and people who tested and helped finishing this up!
For systemd installs, sleep-inhibitor has been replaced in !8672. We now use systemd unit files and a small script to inhibit sleep when apk is running, as well as a pam config that uses systemd_pam (with upstreamed patches in !42275) to inhibit sleep when a session is open over ssh. Thanks, Clayton!
Non-adaptive apps are now hidden by default in Phosh, see the edge post and !8954. Thanks Achill!
The pinephone has been moved from the community category to testing (!9248): "The kernel version of linux-postmarketos-allwinner is older than six months. It has been a month since the warning issue was made, so this device must be demoted." If you use the pinephone and want it to be better supported in postmarketOS, consider helping out with getting the kernel upgraded. Thanks, Aster!
Misc
Victoria made Valve's Steam run really well on postmarketOS with the Ayaneo Pocket S2. She wrote a great blog post Taming the Steam arm64 client (on pmOS) that goes deep into how exactly it works and concludes with: "But the end result is beautiful. The device behaves like a little Steam Deck and you wouldn't notice, that it runs on a completely different processor architecture." Given that steam is proprietary software, we still need to discuss if and how we would make this available to users officially in postmarketOS. The full blog post is definitely worth reading, thank you very much Victoria!
Ranny and Antoine were interviewed about all things postmarketOS on the French podcast Projets Libres. If you understand French, you can give it a listen here: #70 – [Smartphone] postmarketOS : Linux pour faire durer votre smartphone pendant 10 ans ! — and if you don't, you can read the English transcript. This is one of several episodes that Projets Libres did on the Linux Mobile topic, there is e.g. #66 with Mobian founder Arnaud as well. Thanks Ranny, Antoine and Projets Libres team!
Powered by
The following people wrote patches that have been merged since the last monthly blog post. Thank you very much for improving postmarketOS!
Aster, Aelin, Clayton, Stefan, Oliver, Bart, Rob, Pablo, Achill, Ferass, Panagiotis, Barnabás, Nikita, Rudraksha, Daniel K., Sicelo, Dylan, Eric, Dawid, Robert M., Xelef2000, Luca, Alexey M., Fauzan, Ranny, Hugo P., Vladimir S., Henrik, Xu, Antoine, Jianhua, Nicola, erikas9987, Diego, ABOOTHAHIR, vognev, Kidd, Danila, Anton, Moritz, Lycheer, Zachariah, chiffa, Paul, MariooB, DrRac27, Raymond, Alicja, Richard Ac., Arnav, Alexandre, Duje, Federico, Wren, Eisenbahnfan, bluebunny, Ingo, Victoria, knuxify, Radnos, dikasp, Stanley
Furthermore we thank everybody who has been contributing to any of the numerous upstream projects we use (Alpine Linux, Linux kernel, Phosh, Plasma (Mobile), GNOME (Mobile), Sxmo, ModemManager, and so many more!). And of course everybody who has helped out in other ways, such as helping others to run postmarketOS (e.g. in chats or IRL), improving documentation in the wiki, doing infrastructure and organizational work, or donating to postmarketOS.
You are the people who make this possible!
And what's next?
We are attending quite a few events in August:
- 2026-08-06 to 09: DEFCON 34 (Las Vegas, NV)
- Ranny is looking for table volunteers. If you happen to be there and are willing to help with the table for a short period of time, reach out e.g. via #20!
- 2026-08-06 to 09: FOSSY 2026 (Vancouver, CA)
- 2026-08-15 to 17: FrOSCon 2026 (Sankt Augustin, DE)
- 2026-08-06 to 09: DEFCON 34 (Las Vegas, NV)
And of course there is our very own postmarketOS and Alpine Linux Conference from 2026-09-25 to 27 in Aachen, DE. The Call for Proposals has just ended on the 31st of June, and we are happy to say that we have gotten many exciting talk proposals! Behind the scenes we are working on a schedule, as well as everything else that needs to be done to make the conference happen, organizing food, video recordings, lanyards and much more. Thanks to Aelin, Luca, Pablo, Ranny, Achill and Oliver!
Help wanted
"If you've ever wanted to give #postmarketOS device development a try, we're looking for help saving quite a few device ports from being archived" as Clayton writes on Fedi. "I have mad respect for folks who maintain and test device ports in pmOS, they're soo important to the continued development of #postmarketOS. For example, I rely on my Pixel 3a to help develop and test #duranium and other (hopefully) neat OS things, but I can't do those things if the device is not maintained and gets archived."
You can send us topics to include in the next blog post by commenting in: #235
If you appreciate the work we're doing with postmarketOS and want to support us, consider contributing financially via OpenCollective.