Developers at Purism have released a new version of the Phosh user interface for Linux phones, bringing bug fixes, usability improvements, and several other changes to this phone shell used by multiple smartphone Linux distributions including some versions of postmarketOS (which recently celebrated its fourth birthday, by the way).
Meanwhile, the folks at Jingling have released a new build of JingOS, their Linux distribution for tablets (and eventually smartphones). The developer of the most promising Linux kernel patches for the PinePhone has begun digging into the schematics and software for the upcoming PinePhone keyboard, and it looks like it’ll be a pretty hackable device.
Here’s a roundup of recent mobile Linux news.
- JingOS v0.9 for x86 [JingOS release notes]
JingOS v0.9 is available, and the latest build of the Linux distro for tablets adds support for changing the screen resolution, complex passwords, compressing/uncompressing in the Files app, and more. This build is for tablets with x86 chips only, but the company’s upcoming JingPad A1 tablet has an ARM-based chip and there are plans to port JingOS to run on phones in the future. The company released a first hands-on video showing the A1 hardware and software last week.Â
- Phosh v0.11.0 released [Purism]
New features include support for toggling wireless features from the Quick Settings or opening the Settings app by long-pressing, a torch brightness slider, support for showing battery percentage in the top bar, and initial support for gnome-session –systemd. - PinePhone keyboard observations [Megi]
Megi’s analysis of the upcoming PinePhone keyboard‘s schematics, firmware, and components includes plenty of insights for hardware and/or software hackers. - PinePhone keyboard – more observations [Megi]
It looks like it should be fairly simple to flash custom firmware on the upcoming Pinephone keyboard. Megi has already figure out how, and lays out some details (and possible reasons your want custom firmware). - Developing Nemomobile with PinePhone
I recently took a look at Nemo Mobile running on the PinePhone. But Jozef Mlich goes further and describes the process for bug testing the operating system and starting to fix some of those bugs. - Flashing Biktorgj’s Modem Firmware [LinMob]
This guide may come in handy if you want to try replacing the PinePhone’s modem firmware with Biktorgj’s recently-released open-source alternative. - Four years of postmarketOS [postmarketOS]
Four years after setting out to breathe new life into old phones by allowing uses to replace Android with a Linux-based OS, postmarketOS now boots on close to 300 devices and there are a growing number of devices like the PinePhone, Librem 5, and even some phones that shipped with Android that are capable of running close-to-upstream Linux kernels.
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