What are /r/postmarketOS's favorite Products & Services?

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postmarketOS v21.06 SP3 is out with a new Sxmo release, OnePlus6/6T improvements (close-to-mainline, of course 😉) and more. The picture shows latest tweaks app with the new oled theme. Thanks to everybody who made this possible! 🙏

https://postmarketos.org/blog/2021/10/10/v21.06.3-release/

Remember the 100 days post, where we showed Doom running on the LG G Watch R? I've just recently realized that there's /r/itrunsdoom and shared the old blog post there today with a reference to the new one. Just noting this down here so it's easy to find the thread later.

Why not? Seems like a fun project to me, and if I had such a device I wouldn't want to throw it away for sure.

Just in case you're thinking: "Why waste development time with this, when we could be working on important features such as phone calls", see "Why We Evolve in Many Directions" from the last blog post.

This post means a massive success for us, /u/PureTryOut did amazing work here! \o/

However, to someone not as familiar with pmOS as we are, they might not see the massive work that went into it from that screenshot. I would wait until it is a bit more polished until we post it elsewhere, and announce it together with a blog post about it on <https://postmarketos.org> and /r/linux.

While it looks good in itself, it seems to be unmaintained... This page shows latest commit was in 2013, and it seems to be built with Qt4 rather than Qt5.

Somebody should rehost it on a site different from Sourceforge (Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket, anything else Git based with wget downloadable archives) and update it to use Qt5 instead.

Hi /u/tigerinus,

this looks like fallout from the recent postmarketos-mkinitramfs rewrite in postmarketOS edge (there's also a stable branch of postmarketOS where this has not yet been rolled out, but since hammerhead is in the testing device category, it's not part of stable).

Please make a bug report here: https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/issues

More information: https://postmarketos.org/edge/2021/09/03/new-mkinitfs/

See the "introduction" link on the pmbootstrap README.

1) Instead of installing a bunch of junk on your system, everything you need to build + manipulate the phones is in one (chroot) directory. This means it works on any disto, and every developer isn't assembling a unique toolchain from random versions of upstream tools.

2) When you build something, it also lets you directly test it with QEMU ARM emulation. (QEMU lets you boot up an entire system in a VM, but it also lets you run an ARM binary against your existing x86 kernel, which is a quick way to test some things. I think pmbootstrap does this so you can chroot into a full ARM busybox "linux system" without waiting for it to boot. It's like running Alpine in Docker, but also with CPU emulation.)

> I was just wondering if creating a kernel that uses the initramfs to load programs could be done

Er, yes? That's exactly why initramfs exists. I'm not sure what you are asking.

> Should I post this somewhere on the github issue tracker instead?

Yes, the issue tracker is better for bug reports.

Regarding your issue, when you've tried telnet, have you enabled the debug-shell?

https://postmarketos.org/debug-shell

In case you did not, it would be helpful to know whether telnet works that way.

> I'm now able to ping the device despite the device status being DOWN.

Can you get it up? ip link set usb0 up

(replace usb0 with the network device name on your PC)

> “The connection check traffic can be observed and analyzed by the party controlling the connectivity check server and any entity observing the network traffic,” explains Mullvad in the blog post. > > “Even if the content of the message does not reveal anything more than "some Android device connected", the metadata (which includes the source IP) can be used to derive further information, especially if combined with data such as WiFi access point locations.”

The only valid point I can see here is giving data to the third party controlling the server. Any other observing entity can grab the same information from a VPN connection. So giving a VPN the option to set their own connectivity check endpoint could be an option.

You can buy them cheap on Pines website, or buy one for not much more on Amazon. That’s what I did. I vetted reviews and the one I got from Amazon does work on Pine64 devices.

DSD TECH USB to 3.5mm 3.3V TTL Cable with Audio Jack Interface 6FT https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07XXVF4RM/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_ECR6G3CHJ6V79AMN6944

IKR ! And the wiki is just AMAZING.

Btw, if you're interested, you can also do it on android using this app It also uses power management as a workaround when using the "Turn screen off" function associated with a button. It didn't work on android Go but I've used it on my other Samsung a20 phone and it works.

As the download page on our website says:

> Edge is recommended for development (latest features, occasional breakage).

Yes, it is "risky". You can use it perfectly fine but you have to be prepared for occasional breakage which you might have to fix or workaround yourself. We'll of course never try to break edge and we'll fix it when it happens, but we can't guarantee the same stability as on stable.

We made it just before the end of the year! The new v21.12 release is ... released... This release contains 8 more devices, bringing our total number supported in stable releases up to 23!

This also brings the great TTYescape feature to stable where it's possible to drop into a shell with a few taps of the volume button.

https://postmarketos.org/blog/2021/12/29/v21.12-release/

Alpine linux has 32bit isos.

https://www.alpinelinux.org/downloads/

There is also a way to turn an existing alpine installation into postmarketOS. This probably won't work for x86 as there are only x86_64 packages in the postmarket repository.

https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Existing_Alpine_installation

u/puretryout

Got a bit further by using:

>pmbootstrap aportgen binutils-aarch64 gcc-aarch64

Then pmbootstrap install --sdcard /dev/sda

The new pmbootstrap log no longer shows error 127, and instead shows this:

• [10:58:56] *** (1/5) PREPARE NATIVE CHROOT ***
• [10:59:00] *** (2/5) CREATE DEVICE ROOTFS ("pine64-pinephone") ***
• [10:59:02] Register qemu binfmt (aarch64)
• [10:59:05] ERROR: Could not find dependency 'so:libQt5WebEngineCore.so.5' in any aports folder or APKINDEX. See: <https://postmarketos.org/depends>
• [10:59:05] See also: <https://postmarketos.org/troubleshooting> Run 'pmbootstrap log' for details.

The gitlab shows issues with compilation, but it looks like that was way back in 2017. Surely that dependency must be somewhere.

Any tips?

I'm also running into this issue on Ubuntu 20.04.

Edit:
I think the "warning: file not found" is probably the culprit.

Edit 2:
On further digging, I think it has to do with this:

https://postmarketos.org/blog/2020/07/21/breaking-update-in-edge/

Unfortunately it looks like we just have to wait for them to catch-up.

This was the error message given. Troubleshooting does not seem to specify for this problem.

[13:11:46] *** (1/5) PREPARE NATIVE CHROOT ***
[13:11:46] Update package index for x86_64 (4 file(s))
[13:11:49] (native) install alpine-base
[13:11:54] NOTE: Valid pkgvers are described here:
[13:11:54] <https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/APKBUILD_Reference#pkgver>
[13:11:54] ERROR: Invalid pkgver '3.x.x' in APKBUILD: /home/jenkem_chic/.local/var/pmbootstrap/cache_git/pmaports/device/testing/linux-pine64-tab.station/APKBUILD
[13:11:54] See also: <https://postmarketos.org/troubleshooting>
Run 'pmbootstrap log' for details.

So now I reinstalled pmbootstrap and retried the building. It still fails at 2/5, but has a different error message.

[13:55:44] *** (2/5) CREATE DEVICE ROOTFS ("oneplus-bacon") *** [13:55:49] ERROR: Could not find dependency 'so:libkworkspace5.so.5' in any aports folder or APKINDEX. See: <https://postmarketos.org/depends>

The wiki says, I should look for the package in the pmbootstrap folder with $ find aports -name "hello-world", but that is where I am stuck at the moment. The library is needed by qt5-qtx11extras, as the log later says. Do you know what to do now...?

I followed the (fastboot cable required) instructions on the TWRP website:

https://twrp.me/amazon/amazonsoho.html

Getting TWRP on it might be helpful as an installation method for pmOS once a port exists. If not TWRP, then I imagine a fastboot cable will be required for fastboot mode.

What is exciting is that someone on xda has worked on getting jem working on a close to mainline kernel. As the two tablets are very similar, I plan on using that work to get soho close to mainline too, but I'm a newbie developer, so one step at a time - including figuring out why I can't get this kernel to build (it's a new error now).

>It seems that the PP or L5 must either get way better support or they will be wiped out by better hardware or old hardware that will get just as much support with similar performance.

The whole point of them is to be completely mainline and run without any patches, not only for the kernel but also in userspace. If that succeeds there's no need in the future for community support as everything will be mainline just as you don't need support for your CPU, AMD GPU or some WiFi cards on your laptop/desktop.

>Unless something has changed I didn't see, neither can act as a phone yet, and both still use binary blobs.

They can both act as a phone, they just currently do it very poorly. Neither of them are released yet, it's still pre-release hardware.

>Other phones like the L5 and PP will also partially support binary blobs and mostly open source, so I don't see a big difference between philosophies (similar to bringing either to a "green party" plastic forks you found for free or buying bamboo forks that were sustainable made). Are you familiar with the replicant project?

The few binary blobs for the Librem 5 and the PinePhone are being worked on being removed (it is not final hardware yet). I don't see that happening with the 845.

Otherwise I agree.

>The problem with the devices is that they seem like a stepping stone or POC before it runs on other phones rather than a better phone to buy over the long term. What are you using your L5 for currently?

It's because they literally are pre-release hardware right now, it seems like a POC because it is a POC. I don't have my Librem 5 yet because I don't want a prototype either, I'm waiting patiently on the final hardware batch. I'm not in a hurry and I certainly wouldn't buy a PinePhone or a Librem 5 if I was.

I don't really care that much about speed as much as support. It seems that the PP or L5 must either get way better support or they will be wiped out by better hardware or old hardware that will get just as much support with similar performance. Unless something has changed I didn't see, neither can act as a phone yet, and both still use binary blobs. Other phones like the L5 and PP will also partially support binary blobs and mostly open source, so I don't see a big difference between philosophies (similar to bringing either to a "green party" plastic forks you found for free or buying bamboo forks that were sustainable made). Are you familiar with the replicant project?

The problem with the devices is that they seem like a stepping stone or POC before it runs on other phones rather than a better phone to buy over the long term. What are you using your L5 for currently?

For a degoogled phone I think https://grapheneos.org/ is pretty good. I'm still trying to figure out what route to take. I like my pinephone better all the time. Nothing is perfect everything has tradeoffs. For now I setup a pihole and installed wireguard for my mobile as a project. Eventually I'll probably flash graphene on 4a when they are supported or just use the pinephone.

Aside from the comments you've already read about people not wanting any Facebook garbage preinstalled, there's also the legal issue.

You can't just host someone else's binaries, that would be copyright infringement. If the anbox folks would do it, they'd basically be a week or so away from a Facebook lawsuit.

WhatsApp depends on Google's services as far as I know so it'll always be a pain outside Android phones until Facebook decides to make an official app for Linux. Same with Inbox or any other closed-source app you can think of.

Any open source app (like the ones on fdroid) might be repackaged and redistributed with Anbox, but what's the point.

The pinephone is probably not for you. It's an incredible project that is opening a world that the Samsungs and Qualcoms of the world want to keep closed, but it's not ready for general consumer use yet. If you don't want to use the pinephone because it's a hackable Linux device, you'll probably want to wait for the next one because right now it's slower than other phones in its price class, has little to no app support and has bad battery life.

If you want to move out of Google rather than entirely out of Android, consider using something like LineageOS instead. It's got all the usability festures of Android with none of the Google stalking (at least, until you install the Google stalking apps of your choice). There's a hard-to-Google project called /e/ that takes LineageOS and extends it with stuff similar to what Google does: it offers cloud sync, an email client, maps, an app store, contact sync and a browser with ad blocking by default. All together it's a neat project that offers a non-Google smartphone while stil feeling like a full smartphone.

If you want to buy a device with support, an OS preinstalled, ready for consumers, your options are Apple or any of the Android manufacturers. Sorry.

Yeah I can tell that it can gets annoying if you don't care about having a password on your device. :)

Anyway feel free to ask about Phosh in `#phosh:talk.puri.sm` on [Matrix](https://matrix.org)!