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Guido Günther

Phone Developer

Latest posts by Guido Günther (see all)

• Opportunistic Word Completion - December 21, 2023
• Developing for Mobile Linux with Phosh – Part 0: Running Nested - February 21, 2023
• Phosh 2022 in Retrospect - January 9, 2023

This is another incarnation of the software development progress for the Librem 5. This time for June 2020 (weeks 23-26). Some items are covered in more detail in separate blog posts at https://puri.sm/news. The idea of this summary is to have a closer look at the coding and design side of things. It also shows how much we’re standing on the shoulders of giants reusing existing software and how contributions are flowing back and forth between upstream and downstream projects. This quickly gets interesting since we’re upstream for some projects (e.g. calls, phosh, chatty) and downstream for others (e.g Debian, Linux kernel, GNOME). So these reports are usually rather link heavy pointing to individual merge requests on https://source.puri.sm or to the upstream side (like e.g. GNOME’s gitlab).

Adaptive Apps

This section features improvements on adaptive apps, GTK, and underlying GTK based widget libraries like libhandy:

Short and instant messaging

Chats (aka Chatty) handles SMS via ModemManager and instant messaging via XMPP. It has experimental support for various other formats via libpurple. Sadiq’s cleanups and bug fixes continued during June:

• Fix chat history with duplicate timestamps
• History: Fix a function signature
• Add chatty-history tests
• Set uid on creating a message and adapt to API changes
• Message-row: Align the message label depending on the direction
• Tests: Add direct database tests for history
• Implement asynchronous history
• Manager: Don’t reconnect to SMS account on network error saving some battery
• Message-row: Remove unused code
• Contact-provider: Avoid creating contacts with empty value
• Window: Use stripped string for alias to avoid odd contact names
• User-info-dialog: Fix label for SMS chat
• New-chat-dialog: Inform user if contacts app failed to open
• Application: Fix setting daemon mode
• Window: Select the first chat if in non-folded mode
• gbp.conf: Set multimaint-merge as default when generating changelog
• ci: Enable coverage report
• Fix showing contact numbers of unknown type
• pp-buddy: Return contact value if available

purple-mm-sms plugin

Purple-mm-sms is the libpuruple plugin to handle SMS via ModemManager:

• Free device the right way to avoid criticals and crashes
• ci: Use standard definitions so testing Debian packages becomes easy

Phone Calls

Calls (the app handling phone calls) has seen a UI improvement to anonymous callers.

Compositor and Shell

This section highlights progress in Librem 5’s GTK based graphical shell named Phosh and its wlroots based compositor Phoc:

Phosh

• Support for window thumbnails finally got merged into phosh and phoc.

• Phosh can now control MPRIS based music players

  

• Cleaned up CSS a bit to remove duplications:

• Connect to g-s-d’s brightness handling asynchronously since this sometimes made shell startup slower than needed.

• Fix the panel height – it accidentally grew by 3 pixels.

• Fix feedback profile name in QuickSetting

• PhoshHome: Use PhoshLayerSurface signals and props to better handle resizing

• Improve tests so we can test against a running compositor bumping test coverage but also enabling us to test code that was hard to test before.

• Add WWan and Wifi quick-settings based on Julian‘s work) and get rid of all self hiding widgets while at that making the whole StatusIcon/QuickSetting code more consistent.

  

• Show operator name in WWAN quick settings

• Simplify background handling. The old code was a mixture of pre-xdg/wl-output and past xdg/wl-output.

Phoc

• Sebastian’s work to scale down oversized views got merged and is configurable per application.
• Move CI’s coverage gathering to separate step to make the pipeline more robust.
• Send wl_surface_{enter,leave} events to subsurfaces to get us in line with other compositors.

wlroots

• Sync patches with Debian’s 0.10.1-1

GTK

• GdkWaylandWindow: Don’t reset scale to 1 with no outputs (corresponding upstream merge request)

Librem5 Base

The librem5-base package contains configuration data and meta packages that pull in the needed software:

• Add gnome-chess since it now fits the screen
• Override the Firefox desktop file to make it work right after installation.

image-builder

The image-builder is responsible for creating bootable disk images:

• Increase image sizes by 300MB to compensate for bigger /boot.

gnome-usage

gnome-usage shows CPU and disk usage:

• Forward thermal view upstream

feedbackd

Feedbackd is responsible for haptic, audio (and later) LED based feedback:

• Add manpages feedbackd!22

Linux Kernel

The process of upstreaming our Linux kernel work progress is covered in a separate report. The current one is for Linux 5.7 so this is mostly about downstream improvements:

• The Librem 5 now uses Linux 5.7 by default from this tree with these improvements on top:

  • The internal USB 2.0 hub and SD card reader can now be suspended after some udev rule tweaks and removal of some quirks. when the SD card is not mounted by using runtime power management saving an awful lot of power. Allowing it to suspend when mounted but idle is in the works.
  • Update to Linux 5.7.5
  • Empty all slots on the touch controller when unable to fetch data. This helps in cases where swiping worked but not touch down.

• Linux 5.8 is already being prepared with ZRAM and ZSWAP enabled.

• Martin’s quest to get the Librem 5 device tree merged continued with v2 and v3

Releases

These were the releases during may for projects we’re upstream:

• phosh 0.3.1: phosh!523
• phoc 0.1.9: phoc!164
• librem5-base 21: librem5-base!147
• librem5-devkit-tools 0.0.11: librem5-devkit-tools!157

Lambda

If you made it down here and want to start contributing join us on matrix. We welcome you to join a discussion or submit patches on https://source.puri.sm. If you want to grab an issue and can’t think of a particular problem, check the easy and helpwanted tags in our GitLab instance. See you next month.