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

Let’s take a look at what the Librem 5 software team were busy with in March 2020 (weeks 10-13). Some items are covered in more detail in separate blog posts at https://puri.sm/news. The idea is to summarize the coding and design efforts for the month and showcase how we’re standing on the shoulders of giants. Reusing existing free software allows contributions to flow back and forth between communities. These reports are usually rather link heavy pointing to individual merge requests on https://source.puri.sm or upstream (e.g. GNOME’s gitlab).

Adaptive Apps

This section features improvements on adaptive apps and the underlying GTK based widget library libhandy:

libhandy got a new avatar widget
libhandy also got a new deck widget, a spatially aware stack widget, supporting orientation, and swiping gestures.
A version of gnome-clocks with haptic feedback support is now available for the phone.
An adaptive version of Déjà Dup is now available on the phone

Phone Calls

Calls, our phone calls app, saw some visual improvements and internal rework:

Calls now uses in App notifications to come closer to the GNOME HIG.
Call getters to readonly properties. Thanks, Daniel Abrecht!
Calls got a new manager class to handle data management and error reporting
Fix origin-* signals in modemmanager and dummy plugin were fixed
Command line argument handling got fixed
Julian released Calls 0.1.3

Short and instant messaging

Chats (aka Chatty) handles SMS and instant messaging via XMPP. It has experimental support for various other formats via libpurple. The team spent a lot of time refactoring the internal and user facing parts of Chats:

Integration with Contacts is progressing
Formatting of national phone numbers was fixed
The window sizes are now remembered to make desktop use simpler
The SMS plugin now correctly ignores unsupported modems
The ‘new chat button’ got a popover menu which gets us closer to the designs.
Refactoring the code base to simplify further development. Browse the merge requests: 282, 284, 286, 287, 288, 290, 291, 292, 294, 295, 296, 298, 301, 302, 303, 305, 307, 308, 309.

Compositor and Shell

This section highlights progress in the graphical shell (phosh) and its wlroots based compositor phoc:

Phosh

We now connect asynchronously to ModemManager to avoid UI stalls.
We are adding media controls for your favorite music players.
The shell’s feedback quick setting now opens notifictions.
Added a patch to make the system enter power save mode on battery icon press but we’re currently discussing whether this is a good idea.
There’s a merge request for adding a Wifi QuickSetting.
And most of the above made it into phosh 0.2.1
There’s WIP merge requests to show thumbnails of running applications in the shell’s overview now:
And finally we cleaned up some things:
- one-off fixes
- panel: Clean up unused widget references

Phoc

We fixed the compositor to work without no_supertile hacks. This needs some more work to get it integrated upstream.
Phoc now builds with -Wshadow Thanks anteater!
We guard wlr-output-power-management usage with header existence check to help downstreams to build against released wlroots versions.
Sebastian updated the wlroots submodule.

Releases

On-Screen Keyboard

Squeekboard now ships a “manifesto” to motivate some design decisions.
The modifier API was merged to support keys like Alt and Control.
Dorota released squeekboard 1.9.1 with these changes.

Gnome Control Center (Settings) / GNOME Settings daemon

Settings now allow you to configure the feedback settings (haptic feedback, audio feedback).
Upstream work continued on WWAN (modem) integration: UI to manage modems and a rewrite of the wwan plugin.

System-Level integration

Our patches to proximity sensors, multi-channel devices, and some error handling cleanups got merged into io-sensor-proxy upstream, thanks!
This needed an extension to systemd’s hardware db.
We tagged another git snapshot of feedback working towards a first release.

Linux Kernel

The process of upstreaming our Linux kernel work is covered in a separate report. The current one is for Linux 5.5 and 5.6 so this is about downstream improvements:

Work towards making 5.6 the default kernel version used on the phone is progressing:
- the power saving helper was made 5.6 compatible.
- we’re building debs for easy on phone/devkit testing:
- HDMI support for the devkit was added
We enhanced our package build to simplify switching kernel versions.
We don’t accumulate old debs in gitlab-ci anymore, this helps with per commit testing.
Our test suite now distinguishes between the phone and devkit.
Some adjustments were made to our test suite for the 5.6 kernels to cover more kernel APIs. They also help to distinguish between phone and devkit, merge requests: 126, 127, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138.
The touch controllers firmware version can be read via debugfs.
Work on improving USB runtime power management started:
- linux-next/merge_requests/84
- linux-next/merge_requests/99
We changed the kernel config to enable some non-device specific power management.
We switched to the interconnect framework for devfreq. This moves more power management into the kernel and closer to what NXP submitted for mainline inclusion.
The redpine wifix driver now always goes into Mimic-UAPSD branch of power management fixing issues when enabling power management.
Several config options got enabled to make the kernel useful for more users:
- binfmt_misc support for better qemu-user and dosbox integration.
- WireGuard VPN support.
The touchscreen is now marked as compatible with edt, edt-ft5506 (linux-next!91) to support 10 simultaneous touchpoints.

Documentation

The developer documentation saw several updates:

The image of the Librem 5 software stack has been updated.
The docs now link to the AppStream MetaInfo Creator which is a useful tool to generate metadata e.g. used by GNOME Software. It also helps with the creation of the ubiquitous desktop files.
We now have documentation on how to use audio and haptic feedback.
To ease finding relevant parts for app development, David started to reorganize chapters a bit.
The docs can now use more space on wide screens.
Davermontav expanded the qemu image section by explaining how to access the virtual machine via ssh. Thanks!
The reference to the power button issue was updated now that this is fixed.

Visual Design

The visual design section shows progress on mockups that might get implemented eventually but it also has news on new and updated icons and other related artwork:

GNOME Software’s repository dialog got a redesign with a web-based mockup.
There was also discussion on how GNOME Software should behave in low power scenarios.
The Calls mockups got an update to clarify how accepting calls when the phone is locked should work.
Tobias updated the list pattern mockups with the latest styling. Check these if your application uses a GtkListBox.
Alexander is working on a new, unified window. There was some discussion about how this should look.
Tobias gave some design feedback on the new community-developed camera app.
The camera mockups were updated, taking into considerations more states in the desktop mode and the new unified window.
Tobias updated the Phosh mockups with initial landscape layouts, new hardware-disabled icons in the system area, and various changes to visuals.
There are also experimental mockups for a convergent shell now.

Lambda

If you made it down here and want to start contributing join us on matrix. We certainly welcome patches and issue comments 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.

Discover the Librem 5

Purism believes building the Librem 5 is just one step on the road to launching a digital rights movement, where we—the-people stand up for our digital rights, where we place the control of your data and your family’s data back where it belongs: in your own hands.

Preorder now

Librem 5 March 2020 Software Update