The release of the postmarketOS 22.06 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 25 community supported devices including Samsung Galaxy A3/A5/S4, Xiaomi Mi Note 2/Redmi 2, OnePlus 6, Lenovo A6000, ASUS MeMo Pad 7 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 3.16. The postmarketOS release preparation cycle was shortened after the formation of the next Alpine branch - the new release was prepared and tested in 3 weeks, instead of the previously practiced 6 weeks.
- The number of devices officially supported by the community has been increased from 25 to 27. Support has been added for Samsung Galaxy S III and SHIFT 6mq smartphones.
- Added support for updating the system to a new release of postmarketOS without flashing. Updates are currently only available for systems with Sxmo, Phosh and Plasma Mobile graphical environments. In its current form, support for updating from version 21.12 to 22.06 is provided, but an unofficially developed update installation mechanism can be used to switch between any postmarketOS releases, including rolling back to the previous release (for example, you can install the βedgeβ branch, within which the next one develops release, and then revert to version 22.06). Only the command line interface is currently available for managing updates (the postmarketos-release-upgrade package is installed and the utility of the same name is launched), but integration with GNOME Software and KDE Discover is expected in the future.
- The graphical shell Sxmo (Simple X Mobile), based on the Sway composite manager and adhering to the Unix philosophy, has been updated to version 1.9. The new version adds support for device profiles (for each device, you can use different button layouts and activate certain features), improved work with Bluetooth, Pipewire is used by default to control multimedia streams, the menus for receiving incoming calls and controlling sound have been redone, for managing services involved superd.
- The Phosh environment based on GNOME technologies and developed by Purism for the Librem 5 smartphone has been updated to version 0.17, which offers minor visible improvements (for example, added a mobile network connection indicator), solved problems with the transition to sleep mode, and continued to refine the interface. In the future, it is planned to synchronize Phosh components with the GNOME 42 codebase and translate applications to GTK4 and libadwaita. Of the applications added to the new release of postmarketOS based on GTK4 and libadwaita, the calendar-scheduler Karlender is noted.
- The KDE Plasma Mobile shell has been updated to version 22.04, a detailed review of which was offered in a separate news item.
- Using the fwupd firmware download toolkit, it is possible to install an alternative firmware for the PinePhone smartphone modem.
- Added unudhcpd, a simple DHCP server capable of allocating 1 IP address to any client that sends a request. The specified DHCP server was written specifically to organize a communication channel when connecting a computer to a phone via USB (for example, setting up a connection is used to enter the device via SSH). The server is very compact and is not prone to problems when connecting the phone to several different computers.
Source: opennet.ru