The Librem 5 (and mobile GNU/Linux in general) has matured a lot over the years, but there are still some areas where the software stack is behind the hardware capabilities. Some of them are often talked about, such as camera quality or GPU (GLES3/Vulkan/OpenCL), but there are also lesser known ones in need of some plumbing and middleware infrastructure. Maybe you'll find something interesting to hack on there?

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The good: It seems like recent updates in the libraries it is based on have enabled #Flare (the #Signal client) to successfully register as a "Primary Device" again. I can use it as a standalone client to talk to other Signal accounts.

The not so good: It only works for direct chats, not groups. Flare has no UI logic to create groups, and it also doesn't handle invites to groups yet.

There are also other minor weirdnesses, but it looks quite promising.

Weekly GNU-like #MobileLinux Update (15/2025): Boot your phone from USB

https://linmob.net/weekly-update-15-2025/

Save the Date

We're having another edition of #BoilingTheOcean on May 24th and 25th!

Join us for two days of hacking on low-level emancipatory tech in Berlin. Agenda, location, etc. TBA :)

The arguments brought forward by people saying #LinuxMobile can't be a thing sound about the same as why Linux on servers couldn't become a success back then.

"Only for enthusiasts/hobbyists", "Look at the security/usability/[whatever]", "Google is the thing" (formerly Microsoft or proprietary Unix).

This (as back then) fails to see already present upsides of the project and the enthusiasm of people willing to make it a success (independent from corporate money and product life cycles).

is it too late to join the #pipewire party? i hope not, or else my #flx1 will be sad

all applications that use pipewire can finally utilize the camera (adding to our list of v4l, qtmultimedia and android apps)

one issue we are facing is that aperture is not very happy with the back cameras, so applications like #GNOME snapshot or authenticator will have the preview flipped. captured frames are surprisingly not flipped tho:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/snapshot/-/issues/261

Version 0.2 of my eSIM Manager app is out!

We've got significant UI improvements alongside many other additions such as an app icon, providing environment variables for lpac via the command line, error handling, eUICC 'notification' handling, viewing of eUICC chip info and appstream metainfo data!

https://codeberg.org/lucaweiss/lpa-gtk/releases/tag/0.2

postmarketOS in 2025-03

* GNOME (Mobile) 48
* Camera enablement for OnePlus 6, Motorola Moto E5 Plus, Motorola Moto G5s, Xiaomi Redmi (3S, 4 Standard, 4A)
* Generic SM7150 packaging
* @nlnet @NGIZero grant for Collation + i18n support in @musl libc got accepted!
* COSMIC desktop
* systemd service reloading/restarting on upgrade
* Lots of events coming up around the world
* A highly entertaining podcast episode

https://postmarketos.org/blog/2025/04/09/pmOS-update-2025-03/

After many months, we finally have an upstreamable path for merging /usr in postmarketOS and hence Alpine! Still lots of work to be done, I just ruined one of my test installations LOL. But it's so cool to see it become real: https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/merge_requests/6389

As part of or work on #Cellbroadcast we've documented our current test setup: https://codeberg.org/Phosh/gsm-cell-testing using #osmocom for the mobile network parts and #ansible for deploying #ModemManager on the devices, performing the tests and checking the results.

Thanks to @NGIZero for supporting our work on this.

Weekly GNU-like #MobileLinux Update (14/2025): Wallpapered Lockscreens

https://linmob.net/weekly-update-14-2025/

I'd like to understand how Android handles some QMI bits and found tooling by @joelselvaraj for that on the @postmarketOS wiki (https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Qualcomm_Modem_Debugging). That needs a patched Android kernel, so I took some notes how I got that to work on a Pixel 3a. Just in case this is useful to others: https://honk.sigxcpu.org/con/Booting_an_Android_custom_kernel_on_a_Pixel_3a_for_QMI_debugging.html

for this months updates, we are reworking our fingerprint setup entirely. the daemon (Biomd) is now written from scratch and no longer links against QT or libhybris.
while at it, i ended up writing a PAM module and a provider for #Fprintd which means all existing applications that use Fprintd will now work with our service.

one thing i wanted to experiment with was parallel PAM instances for stuff like sudo, so here is how far i got in about an hour

phosh 0.46.0 is out :

There's fixes and improvements, check out the full release notes at https://phosh.mobi/releases/rel-0.46.0/ for details or see for a short

to everyone who contributed to this release.

#phosh #librem5 #pinephone #gtk #wlroots #gnome #linux #mobile #LinuxMobile

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