The release of the postmarketOS 21.12 project is presented, which develops a Linux distribution for smartphones based on the Alpine Linux package base, the Musl standard C library and the BusyBox utility set. The goal of the project is to provide a Linux distribution for smartphones that does not depend on the official firmware support life cycle and is not tied to standard solutions of the main industry players that set the development vector. Builds are prepared for PINE64 PinePhone, Purism Librem 5 and 23 community supported devices including Samsung Galaxy A3/A3/S4, Xiaomi Mi Note 2/Redmi 2, OnePlus 6 and even Nokia N900. Limited experimental support has been provided for over 300 devices.
The postmarketOS environment is unified as much as possible and puts all device-specific components into a separate package, all other packages are identical for all devices and are based on Alpine Linux packages. Whenever possible, the assemblies use the vanilla Linux kernel, and if this is not possible, then the kernels from the firmware prepared by the device manufacturers. KDE Plasma Mobile, Phosh and Sxmo are offered as the main user shells, but other environments are available, including GNOME, MATE and Xfce.
In the new release:
- The package base is synchronized with Alpine Linux 3.15.
- The number of devices officially supported by the community has been increased from 15 to 23. Added support for Arrow DragonBoard 410c, Lenovo A6000/A6010, ODROID HC, PINE64 PineBook Pro, PINE64 RockPro64, Samsung Galaxy Tab A 8.0/9.7, and Xiaomi Pocophone F1. The Nokia N900 PC Communicator has been temporarily removed from the list of supported devices, support for which will be transferred from the category of devices supported by the community to the βtestingβ category before the appearance of the maintainer, for which ready assemblies are not published. The change is due to the departure of the maintainer and the need to update the core for Nokia N900 and test assemblies. Of the projects that continue to form assemblies for the Nokia N900, Maemo Leste is noted.
- Supported smartphones and tablets are built with Phosh, KDE Plasma Mobile, and Sxmo user interfaces optimized for mobile devices. For other types of devices, such as the PineBook Pro laptop, builds have been prepared with fixed desktops based on KDE Plasma, GNOME, Sway, and Phosh.
- Updated versions of mobile user interfaces. The graphical shell Sxmo (Simple X Mobile), adhering to the Unix philosophy, has been updated to version 1.6. The key change in the new version was the transition to using the Sway window manager instead of dwm (dwm support was retained as an option) and moving the graphics stack from X11 to Wayland. Other improvements in Sxmo include a redesign of the screen lock code, support for group chats, and the ability to send / receive MMS.
The Plasma Mobile shell has been updated to version 21.12, a detailed review of which was offered in a separate news item.
- The Phosh environment, based on GNOME technologies and developed by Purism for the Librem 5 smartphone, continues to be based on version 0.14.0, proposed by the release of postmarketOS 21.06 SP4 and implementing such innovations as a splash screen to indicate the launch of applications, a Wi-Fi indicator in hotspot mode access, rewind buttons in the widget with a media player and stop playing when you turn off the headphones. Additional changes added in postmarketOS 21.12 include updating many GNOME programs, including gnome-settings, to the GNOME 41 state, as well as fixing issues with displaying the Firefox icon in the preview window.
- Added a TTYescape handler that allows you to switch to console mode with the classic command line on devices that do not have an external keyboard connected. The mode is considered as an analogue of the "Ctrl + Alt + F1" screen provided in classic Linux distributions, which can be used to selectively terminate processes, analyze interface freezes and other diagnostics. The activation of the console mode is carried out by three short presses of the power button while holding down the volume up button at this moment. A similar combination is used to return to the GUI.
- The postmarketos-tweaks application has been updated to version 0.9.0, which adds the ability to control the application list filter in Phosh and change the timeout for entering deep sleep mode. In postmarketOS 21.12, this default timeout has been reduced from 15 minutes to 2 minutes to save battery power.
- The toolkit for generating boot files (postmarketos-mkinitfs) has been rewritten, which has improved support for scripts for installing additional files related to the boot process (boot-deploy), which significantly improved the stability of updating the kernel and initramfs.
- A new set of configuration files for Firefox (mobile-config-firefox 3.0.0) has been proposed, which is adapted for changes in the design of Firefox 91. In the new version, the Firefox navigation bar has been moved to the bottom of the screen, the reader mode interface has been improved (reader view), a blocker has been added by default uBlock Origin ads.
Source: opennet.ru