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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 July and August 2020 (weeks 27-35).

Some items are covered in more detail in separate blog posts at https://puri.sm/news. The idea of this summary is so you can 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).

New software releases have an extra section so if you’re using phosh, squeekbord, phoc, chatty, etc. outside of PureOS this section might be worth a quick look.

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 July and August:

• Remove obsolete files

• window: Use GtkStack to stack sidebar widgets

• Use SIM provider country code for parsing phone number

• Add bash completion support

• new-chat-dialog: Add an empty search view

• utils: Use g_uri_unescape_string to parse URI

• settings-dialog: Allow toggling switch by activating the row

• window: Hide rows with empty chat when folded

• window: Simplify updating a headerbar button

• history: Fix possible deadlock

• chat-view: Focus chat entry when mapped

• chat: Add ‘buddy-typing’ property and use it

• chat-view: Clear related hash table data on finalize

• manager: Add chat-deleted signal and use it

• Reduce usage of chatty_conversation

• notify: Remove unused code

• list-row: Add some translation comments

• window: Use chatty-chat APIs where possible

• purple-notify: Place dialog over the current active window

• manager: Move buddy-icon-changed from conversation

• Use chatty-chat API to set notifications

• window: Simplify getting current chat

• window: Simplify setting item

• user-info-dialog: Reduce direct usage of purple API

• window: Simplify filtering of chat list

• Add API to get active chat and use it

• manager: Add open-chat signal and use it

• chat-view: Replace purple APIs with chatty-chat APIs

• application: Show main window on clicking notification

• window: Always reset unread count after opening a chat

• chat: Show messages when account is disconnected/disabled

• window: Don’t change selection when fold mode changes

• chat: Add API to delete chat and use it

• window: Some Cleanup

• Remove ChattyConversation struct

• chat: Simplify setting PurpleConversation

• more cleanup

• chat-view: Don’t Let Return key insert newline if set to send mssage

• Move chatty-conversation to chatty-manager

• Use ChattyItem API to check if item is SMS

• chat: Fix setting ui_data when buddy/chat is already set

• And we also dropped some unused protocol icons that complicated getting it into Debian.

purple-mm-sms plugin

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

• Add an API to get SIM country code so chatty can use the to figure out local versus international numbers
• Watch for modem manager changes so we connect properly when it’s not available right away.
• Don’t parse NULL strings avoiding a crash
• Debian: Add gbp.conf

Phone Calls

Calls (the app handling phone calls) saw many translation updates by Yuri Chornoivan, Tim Sabsch, Marc Riera, Scootergrisen, Balázs Meskó, Daniel Șerbănescu and Emin Tufan Çetin but there were improvements on the code side:

• We fixed anonymous caller in call history
• An irritating error string got fixed
• Arnaud Ferraris fixed the calls window growing out of bounds with longer translations.
• Mohammed Sadiq provided a patch for USSD support

Compositor and Shell

This section highlights progress in Librem 5’s GTK based graphical shell named Phosh and its wlroots based compositor Phoc as well as the on-screen keyboard Squeekboard:

Phosh

• Clean up unneeded size checks related to application thumbnails in the overview
• Optimize background drawing a bit for less flickering and better scaling.
• Cleanup the wifi device state so the GUI matches what NetworkManager thinks about it
• Fix the Portrait-Landscape quick setting to match the actual screen orientation
• Set a logical monitor position so GNOME Settings (g-c-c) gets an idea how screens are layed out
• Add a Bluetooth icon and quick setting
• Use a LED to alert the user about new notifications
• Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras implemented the shell side to support volume buttons.
• Clarify some i18n strings
• Expire tray notifications so don’t stick around forever.
• 10n: disambiguate timestamp strings
• Add some more developer docs
• Fix dependencies so session setup works more easily
• Create a meta-packages for a mobile environment using Phosh and GNOME components
• Handle –help in session start script
• Many translation updates thanks Emin Tufan Çetin, Daniel Șerbănescu, Yuri Chornoivan, Scootergrisen, Balázs Meskó, Marc Riera, Rafael Fontenelle, Sebastian Spaeth, Nikola Pavlica

Phoc

• Always put a touched view into focus to interact with the correct surface.
• Rework damage tracking debug mode so the device stays usable with this turned on.
• Avoid damaging the whole output in touchpoints debug mode
• Don’t try to render a surface with no texture
• Catch up with wlroots 0.11.0
• Evangelos Ribeiro Tzaras implemented the KeyboradGrabManager which is e.g. needed to support volume keys.
• Check whether the root surface isn’t NULL in view_render_to_buffer to avoid a crash
• Make sure we update the display on rotation. Otherwise, it will only rotate after a surface changes the content.

wlroots

• Drop a now unneeded downstream patch
• Sync patches with Debian’s 0.10.1-1

Squeekboard

• Another approach to a terminal layout

Gnome Control Center (Settings) / GNOME Settings daemon

• wwan: Fix signal strength display when extended signal retrieval is disabled
• Mohammed Sadiq implemented the new date time-date editor dialog design upstream and fixed activating time and timezone rows
• He also updated his MR to ease providing hotspot information to mobile devices via QR code which got merged eventually.

GTK

• GtkTextView: Fix select-all from touch bubble making text selection more robust
• GtkEntry: Make sure the magnifier popover is restricted to the widget’s limits

Librem5 Base

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

• Blank faster by default
• Disable dim on idle
• Add a gpsd configuration
• Really remove /etc/network/interfaces.d/usb0 so upgraded systems benefit from improved networking via usb as well.
• Fixed the tests to work properly with the L5’s BM818
• Swap microphone channels in wm8962 SpeakerPhone profile to better work when the speaker is on.
• Turn down the headphone volume to avoid distortion now that the headphone jack works with dogwood.
• Use stereo output and let the codec downmix to mono when needed so both the mono speaker and the stereo headphone can work.
• profile.d: Use a OpenGL ES contexts in GDK to use a GLES context. Otherwise, GTK requires a GL >= 3.0 context which is not common on mobile free software drivers and GLES is preferred on mobile anyway.
• Update the Epiphany’s user agent string to have a better chance of being detected as a mobile browser.

Feedbackd

Feedbackd is responsible for haptic, audio and LED-based feedback:

• Document “button-released” in the event naming spec
• Support per event profiles so an application can select less feedback
• Support LEDs
• Connect done handler in async case too – otherwise we miss the end event.
• Arnaud Ferraris fixed several typos in the manual pages
• Stop feedbacked from filling the logs on missing sound files
• Feedbackd now better handles missing hardware (feedbackd!34) haptic motors (for e.g. running on a laptop for testing).
• Arnaud Ferraris fixed led color parsing

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 and the next one will be about 5.9 since there’s not much to report for 5.8. This section mostly about downstream improvements:

• Martin prepared updates for 5.8 by updating through many RC candidates 5.8-rc3, 5.8-rc4, 5.8-rc5, 5.8-rc6, 5.8-rc7 up to the final 5.8 but we decided to skip that one and went on 5.9-rc1, 5.9-rc2 (see https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/linux-next/-/tree/imx8-next-librem5) since that allowed us to drop many hacks in the display subsystem by switching to mainline drivers (some of which we backported from linux-next).
• The current 5.7 shipped to users got updates from the Linux stable tree:
  • 5.7.9,
  • 5.7.10
  • 5.7.12
  • 5.7.14
• And there was a bunch of fixes and improvements:
  • Add the hardwired USB parts to the device tree giving a more complete representation
  • Empty multi-touch slots when fetching data fails. This helps when unlocking the phone after the screen blanks.
  • Log less by default. Less I/O is good for battery life.
  • Use higher initial LCD panel brightness
  • Fix crash in gadget serial
  • Update wifi module firmware got updated
  • Simplify updating the wifi module firmware
  • Workaround emmc related boot hang
  • mxsfb: Announce supported modifiers to help compositors
  • Make dogwood talk less to the pmic
  • Export DAC/ADC monomix switches from the codec needed for stereo headphone support
  • Set proximity levels per batch. This gives userspace an idea when an object is typically close to the device.
  • Fix runtime PM for the SD card reader allowing us to enable hub suspend by default saving quite some power.
• Martin’s quest to get the Librem 5 device tree merged into upstream Linux continued and succeded with
  • v4 which introduced support for different board revisions (aka batches).
  • v5
  • v6 which got merged to appear in Linux 5.10.

flash-kernel

• Prepare for a separate dogwood DT, also upstream

ATF/U-boot

• Add Debian packaging for ATF and UBoot so we can update uboot from a running system
• Use the right (DisplayPort) firmware when building for the phone
• Update NXP Firmware to 8.8

Build Infrastructure

• CI: Set package jobs dependencies to an empty list to avoid needless copying of unused artifacts

Unsorted upstream fixes

• SDL2: Wayland: Fix transform and scale handling when setting display mode helps your games under Wayland

Releases

These were the releases during August and September for projects we’re upstream:

• Chatty 0.1.14
• purple-mm-sms 0.1.5, 0.1.6, 0.1.7
• Phosh 0.4.0, 0.4.1
• Phoc 0.4.1, 0.4.2
• Feedbackd: 0.0.2020707 and 0.0.20200714
• Calls 0.1.7
• wys 0.1.8 to adjust to Librem 5 model name changes
• squeekboard 1.9.3
• librem5-devkit-tools 0.1.1
• librem5-base 22 and 23

Updates

Updated packages in PureOS to improve things for phone usage:

• ModemManager got updated to 1.14 along with its companion libqmi which moved to 1.26
• Plymouth got updated to 0.9.4 for all of PureOS to fix some issues when setting the default theme
• iio-sensor-proxy got an update to 3.0 to get all the proximity sensor changes we added upstream
• mesa got updated to 20.1.5 getting us way closer to upstream and picking up many etnaviv related fixes
• SuperTuxKart 1.2~rc1

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.

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