Gadgets
LINMOB.net - Weekly #MobilePOSIX Update (25/2022): Better Processing in Megapixels and another report on the PinePhone Pro Cameras
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 27th of June 2022 02:40:49 AM Filed under

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Solana Saga: Essential Devs Now Have A New Phone For You
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Friday 24th of June 2022 11:50:06 AM Filed under

Firstly, An open-source software toolkit called Solana Mobile Stack (SMS) enables the creation of native Android apps based on the Solana blockchain. The Mobile Wallet Adapter, a protocol for connecting mobile Solana wallets, is part of the package. It will function on all mobile devices, not just Android ones, claims the company.
Nonetheless, Keeping private keys, seed phrases, and other sensitive data secure on Android is now possible through the Seed Vault feature. Seed phrases are essentially the passwords that unlock crypto funds, and the company is providing a custody solution to keep them secure. SMS offers Solana Pay for Android, a platform that permits mobile payments.
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LINMOB.net - Weekly #LinuxPhone Update (24/2022): postmarketOS 22.06 and other software progress
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 20th of June 2022 10:53:15 PM Filed under

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Two Years of Life with PinePhone
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Sunday 19th of June 2022 06:15:50 PM Filed under
Would I get a PinePhone again? Yes, totally. Granted, I have been lucky so far: My hardware has held up well, when I dropped my PinePhones I was lucky enough to not break them, I am not affected by a failing WiFi/BT chip (an issue not too uncommon by my anecdata). No, I don't use it as a daily driver, which was something I thought I would do by this point - but that's on me, not on the PinePhone: I just can't stop buying more hardware, be it Linux Phones and competing platforms.
I know, some people will wonder if they should buy a PinePhone after reading this, and I can't really answer this question for you. Read up on PINE64's return policy, maybe; check whether your current phone network is compatible and decide whether you could live with the available applications. Watch some videos and decide if you can live with the time Firefox takes to launch and a lack of notifications.9 Make sure to have the willingness and time to tinker, to get the deeper "Linux knowledge" necessary if you don't have it, to make whatever distribution you start with your own: This is a far more involved process than upgrading from one iPhone to another, in most cases even more involved than switching between the major platforms! With all this considered, it can be a fun ride, a great learning experience, a nice nerdy thing to do! Oh, and if you do so, make sure to be supportive to the software ecosystem, in contributions and/or funding Thanks!
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Anbernic RG353P is a retro gaming handheld that dual boots Android and Linux
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 16th of June 2022 08:18:49 PM Filed under



Handheld gaming company Anbernic’s latest device is a device with a retro design, a 3.5 inch, 640 x 480 pixel touchscreen IPS LCD display, and a 1.8 GHz Rockchip RK3566 quad-core ARM Cortex-A55 processor with Mali-G52 MP2 graphics.
But perhaps the most unusual thing about the Anbernic RG353P is that it’s a dual-boot system that ships with both Android and Linux software. The RG353P goes up for pre-order June 18th, with prices starting at $130.
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postmarketOS 22.06 aims to revive end-of-life smartphones
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 15th of June 2022 03:49:44 PM Filed under


A Linux distro for smartphones abandoned by their manufacturers, postmarketOS, has introduced in-place upgrades.
Alpine Linux is a very minimal general-purpose distro that runs well on low-end kit, as The Reg FOSS desk found when we looked at version 3.16 last month. postmarketOS's – pmOS for short – version 22.06 is based on the same version.
This itself is distinctive. Most other third-party smartphone OSes, such as LineageOS or GrapheneOS, or the former CyanogenMod, are based on the core of Android itself.
The project is quite different. It uses the mainline Linux kernel, and a standard userland, to support a wide variety of devices. The theory is that not needing a manufacturer's outdated firmware or drivers means that pmOS can use more current components, direct from the various upstream Linux projects. The project's own wiki currently lists over 200 supported devices, including phones, tablets, and e-book readers, ranging back to the venerable Nokia N900.
They're not all equally supported, though. Most of them can can boot, many have Wi-Fi support, but currently just two actual phones work as phones: the open-source hardware PinePhone and the Purism Librem 5. Even saying that, though, the ability to connect to Wi-Fi and use an old device as a pocketable terminal could make obsolete hardware useful again.
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Fairphone Easy: a smartphone subscription for a fairer future
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Wednesday 15th of June 2022 11:48:32 AM Filed under

The world needs a new business model. The electronics industry focuses on selling new devices as often as possible to make a profit, driving rapid product life cycles, overconsumption and waste. Fairphone knows that while profit is important, a fairer, cleaner future is most important of all; we must move towards a circular economy that makes the most of the resources we have. That’s why we love longevity and design longer-lasting, easily repairable smartphones – while encouraging others to embrace longevity too. After all, the longer you keep your phone, the lower its environmental and social footprint. That’s where our new business model comes in.
We are proud to announce the launch of Fairphone Easy, a smartphone subscription service that takes our circular ambitions to the next level. We’re giving users in The Netherlands the option to use our most sustainable and modular phone yet, the Fairphone 4 (in green, with 8GB/256GB), for a fixed monthly fee, rather than buying it.
Fairphone Easy subscribers don’t need to worry about replacing their phone or about fixing it when something breaks. We take care of any maintenance or upgrades needed. Users are also rewarded with lower monthly fees if they take care of and use their phone for longer: for every year the phone stays damage free, the monthly discount increases, rewarding users for taking part in our mission for smartphone longevity.
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LINMOB.net - Weekly #LinuxPhone Update (23;2022): Linux on Apple A7-A8X, flaws in U-Boot and the number 100
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Sunday 12th of June 2022 02:41:18 PM Filed under

A new Manjaro Phosh Beta, videos about Phosh on tablets and its upcoming gestures, and another Ubuntu Touch Q&A!
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Sailfish OS - Command Line Interface & Customisation
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 10th of June 2022 01:15:01 AM Filed under

MTP (the same protocol Android devices use) will expose the /home/nemo folder to the connecting computer, both to graphical and command line applications. But it hides some files and folders from the connected system.
A more powerful way is to connect through a terminal via SSH, as explained here.
The phone's shell and my beloved URxvt terminal emulator have difficulties communicating. I installed xterm on my computer and am using this to connect to the phone. Works perfectly.
Of course one can always use the terminal app directly on the phone. It gives full access to the system via devel-su, just as via SSH.
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LINMOB.net - Weekly #LinuxPhone Update (22/2022): A new, quite different Linux Phone and GNOME Shell for Mobile
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 6th of June 2022 07:10:07 PM Filed under

Also: Multiple Librem 5 usage reports/impressions/reviews, a glimpse at Sailfish OS on the Sony XPERIA 10 III, booting Linux on older iOS devices, and I'm sick with COVID19.
[...]
Six weeks ago, we featured a brief note about public funding for GNOME Shell Mobile. Back then, I thought that this was likely about the ecosystem or Phosh, and did not click the Code link on the funding page - time is scarce, and thus I missed that this actually was about GNOME Shell. As the blog post and Calebccff's videos (1, 2 show, this is already quite smooth and impressive. Sure, there's a lot of work to be done, e.g. regarding the virtual keyboard.
Now what does this mean for Phosh? According to Purism Developer Sebastian Krzyszkowiak, it does not change anything in the short term, as e.g. Calls UI for accepting can be reused with Phosh easily, while it would require more work with GNOME Shell, since that does not use GTK, but a custom, Clutter-based toolkit. Sounds like GNOME Shell Mobile is going to be more for tablets or PDAs in the short term – which is great, too! If this saddens you, because you're longing for gestures or a different app drawer: Phosh is getting some gestures with 0.20, and more might land soon if open Merge Requests can be taken as an indicator.
Having already spoiled that stacks are too different to transfer improvements (beyond design work) from Mutter/Shell to wlroots-based Phosh/Phoc or vice versa, and assuming you're afraid of duplicate efforts (as a user): Don't worry about it. Duplicate efforts happen all the time in FOSS land, intentionally or unintentionally. Looking at Qt land and the shells of Plasma Mobile, Maui Shell, CutiePi Shell, Nemo Mobile, Lomiri, CuboCore's shell and whatever the thing JingOS shipped was called again - duplicated effort does not hurt, as long as the people driving the efforts have enough dedication and continued motivation to make them great. So let's be supportive and be glad to have yet another great FOSS option on smaller and larger touch screens!
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digiKam 7.7.0 is released
After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release.
| Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand
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Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech
The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world.
Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility.
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