Linux Phones

I have an unused Windows tablet from 2021 running some Core M processor or other that I want to put Linux on and start using again. It doesn't have a keyboard so I would have to actually use it as a tablet and not a laptop. Is there a distro built around one of the mobile desktop environments that also runs well on x86? (Last time I tried Linux mobile it was pretty much only for ARM and I never got it to work well on even an x86 virtual machine.) Or is regular GNOME deskrop still my best bet for a tablet?

Hey everyone, I'm going insane due to a lack of creative project. I've written an app already but I haven't gotten around to publishing it yet. I'd like to know what kind of apps you'd like to see created for mobile Linux. I prefer easier, bite-sized projects over particularly large ones, but I'd love to hear your ideas nevertheless.

My current rig:

• old android phone with GPS disabled
• external GPS device (NMEA over bluetooth)
• OSMand from f-droid for offline maps and navigation
• BlueGPS to connect to the bluetooth GPS device, grab the NMEA signal, and feed it as a mock location
• developer options » mock locations enabled

The idea is to save on phone battery so I can navigate more than an hour. The phone’s internal GPS is energy intensive because of all the GPS calculations. By offloading the GPS work to an external bluetooth GPS, the phone’s battery can be somewhat devoted to the screen because bluetooth uses much less energy than GPS. And NMEA carries lat/long so the phone need not do the calculations.

Not sure it actually works though.. been waiting for satellites for a while now. Anyway, I would like to know if this config can work on any FOSS platforms, like pmOS. Can OSMand run on pmOS or is there a better option? IIUC, Android apps are a huge CPU hog on pmOS because of emulation.

Ideally I would like to buy something 2nd-hand like a BQ Aquaris X5 and put pmOS on it. I’ll need a quite lean mapping and nav app that runs on pmOS, and also has the ability to use an external GPS.

For the first 15 minutes when satellites are taking forever to appear, I would like to use something like WiGLE WiFi Wardriving which makes use of wifi APs and cell towers the same way Google location does, but without feeding Google. Is there anything like that on pmOS, or any other FOSS phone platform?

Updates

Every mobile FOSS platform listed by the OSM project have been abandoned as far as I can tell. But perhaps OSM is just poorly tracking this because osmin and pure maps apparently both run on Postmarket OS:

• https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Osmin
• https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Pure_Maps

There is a network-dependent nav app called Mepo, but that would not interest me.

There is also Organic Maps which comes as a flatpak for aarch64. It requires the whole KDE framework which is fat in terms of size but probably not relying on emulation so it could perform well enough.

• 2 Linux Mobile grants we applied for at the amazing @nlnet @NGIZero fund have been accepted: OpenIMSd and Enhanching Firefox for Linux on Mobile! 🎉
• Libcamera progress
• Trailblazer now supports the PinePhone
• A generic (!!) qcom-msm8953 port
• Progress for pmb v3
• systemd progress, new timeline
• Many mobile-config-firefox improvements, some features now optional via about:config
• and much more!

Summery via https://fosstodon.org/@postmarketOS/113421664736742629

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.kde.social/post/2232894

Since https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1gdhy7u/experimental_flathub_release_of_newpipe_on_linux/ got a bit of traction yesterday, this is WhatsApp straight from Meta running on Linux desktop using android-translation-layer.

android-translation-layer (ATL) is a Wine-like approach to run Android applications on Linux. Rather than running an Android container like for example Waydroid does this instead implements the Android API. Note that right now it's very much work in progress and almost no app will work yet, but the fact that they have apps like Newpipe and WhatsApp running already is very promising!

Join the Matrix chat at #android-translation-layer:matrix.org and follow along!

A new community update! New hardware to announced and previous hardware to return!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20851873

This is a follow-up to my earlier posts:

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/12809764 https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/19600671

We're Getting Closer.

It's just small stuff left that needs a bit of piecing together, though I've now been daily driving my port for the past two weeks already.

This Works

• booting
• display
• touch
• modem <- You might have to switch to the other slot if it does not work: mmcli -m 0 --set-primary-sim-slot=1, options are 1 or 2. Note that the modem could also be a different number, maybe try -m 1 if it is not found as the command will reboot the modem and then it changes.
• plymouth
• battery/charging
• mobile data
• wifi
• torch
• suspend
• call audio
• vibration
• Bluetooth™
• full disk encryption
• eSIM (I'm working on the packaging for the tool you need to provision it)
• SMS
• audio (ALSA config not packaged, but can be added manually)
• camera (have taken a few photos, but the kernel driver is still work in progress and sometimes it just does not work)

This Has An Unknown Status

• Fingerprint Sensor
• NFC (should work, does so on pmOS)

This Does Not Work Yet (Soon™)

• GPS
• USB host mode (no Kernel support yet, but apparently this is being worked on)
• Verified Boot (first need to do research whether this is actually feasible)

This Is Missing And Will Come Later

• accelerometer
• magnetometer
• ambient light sensor
• barometer

Project Status

To Do List

• Make installer images work on this device
• Have droid-juicer run on installer images
• Get into the repos: tinyalsa and q6voiced (I've already packaged both)
  • ITP for Tinyalsa: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1079473
  • ITP for q6voiced: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1080483
• Combine SDM670 kernel patches with those in the Mobian qcom kernel

Done List

• New release of qcom-phone-utils required so that my patches are available from the repo
  • https://salsa.debian.org/DebianOnMobile-team/qcom-phone-utils/-/commit/4f77281197c6ba1cfc1a82596157d00e8a7e014b (firmware folders)
  • https://salsa.debian.org/DebianOnMobile-team/qcom-phone-utils/-/commit/9aa29a1d0bd2327e9c74317d516a8aeecf820304 (fixes bootimg generation with LUKS)
  • https://salsa.debian.org/DebianOnMobile-team/qcom-phone-utils/-/commit/3ddb192b5c78b444065f23647b373ad66ce3617d (fixes on-screen keyboard for LUKS passphrase)
• Remove hard-coded value in the droid-juicer systemd unit
  • https://gitlab.com/mobian1/droid-juicer/-/issues/4
• Make sure my q6voiced package no longer includes a hard-coded config for this device (known solution, need to implement)
• add udev rule for the vibration motor to the right package
  • https://salsa.debian.org/Mobian-team/devices/kernels/qcom-linux/-/issues/3
  • upstream: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/feedbackd/-/merge_requests/139

Misc Issues

• ALSA config for the device has not been upstreamed yet
• Issues with 5 GHz wifi
  • Can be worked around by forcing the phone to only use the 2.4 GHz band, for example using nmtui, the network settings of GNOME/Phosh are bit too simplistic for that
• No idea how to get the call audio on Bluetooth, meaning you will have to hold the phone or use a cable, for now

(This is a non-exhaustive list)

Low Priority

• create/find script/tool that brings up Bluetooth & then package it
  • https://salsa.debian.org/Mobian-team/devices/kernels/qcom-linux/-/issues/5

Other than that... Everything should be there. It's definitely usable already.

Just a few smaller quirks to iron out and two packages to get into the repo.

The Sources (Use The Source, Luke)

• My efforts of packaging a device-specific kernel: https://salsa.debian.org/erebion/sdm-670-linux (which will be used until all patches are part of upstream Linux and we can finally use a regular mainline kernel)
• mobian-recipes, which is used to build images: https://salsa.debian.org/Mobian-team/mobian-recipes
• droid-juicer, which retrieves some important files from some partitions: https://gitlab.com/mobian1/droid-juicer
• https://wiki.postmarketos.org/ (lovely folks, thanks for sharing everything you found out the hard way :D)

Thanks For All The Fish

Huge thanks to be sdm670-linux project and flamingradian who runs the project (just one person!) to make sure the Kernel works on those devices! :)

I don’t know how Kernel development works, so I would have never started porting without this project.

Find that here: https://gitlab.com/sdm670-mainline/linux

Questions Accepted / Ask Me Anything About The Project

I will gladly answer all questions, I hope that more people will start porting if it becomes clear that this is not arcane magic. It’s mostly just arcane. And a community of friendly people that try to be helpful.#