Regaining control of your smartphone with postmarketOS and Maemo Leste
Wajer, Merlijn B. W.
Ribbers, Bart
Linux mobile software and GNU/Linux distributions are currently not widely available for smartphones. This talk covers why it is desirable to have GNU/Linux (not: Android or Android-based) on your smartphone, what the current state of various software attempts at Linux on smartphones is, what progress has been made, and will also dive into the available old and new hardware (including the PinePhone and Librem 5) to run the software & distributions on. Smartphones running regular (F)OSS Linux distributions are not common. We intend to provide an overview of the current Linux FOSS mobile stacks, distributions that package/provide the mobile stacks and to discuss the hardware that one can use to run this software. We will provide additional details for the postmarketOS distribution and for Maemo Leste (Debian based FOSS mobile software). We also hope to go into some detail about the upcoming PinePhone postmarketOS is a distribution based on alpine, with a focus on minimalism, security and mobile software. postmarketOS supports many old and new smartphones with varying degrees of support, and also packages/ships with various mobile software suites like Plasma Mobile, Maemo/Hildon, Phosh and more. Maemo Leste is based on Maemo Fremantle (from the Nokia N900 days), but completely open source. It's a repository on top of Debian/Devuan that pulls in the entire Maemo/Hildon user interface and suite of applications. Building on top of a proven set of interfaces, Maemo Leste also aims to be mostly compatible with Maemo the way many people might remember it, with a modern twist. Pine64 (known for ARM laptops and SBC (Single Board Computers) has decided to get into the mobile business with the PineTab and the PinePhone device. Aiming to deliver developer devices in 2020Q1 and enthusiastic end-user devices in 2020Q2, they've energized software developers who arewriting mobile interfaces for Linux and have been producing a mobile phone at remarkable pace. We will show the Pine64 device and discuss the current state of Linux support on the device. We plan to give live demos during the presentation, but will have pre-recorded videos as fallback.
 So, it's 1500. It's time for the next talk by Merlin and Bart. And I'm really looking forward to this talk because it's not, as I perceive the project, not only about regaining control over your smartphones, which is of course very good, but it's also to be able to keep your phones longer even if there's no further support from vendors anymore. That's what I also like. But let's get more first-hand facts from Merlin and Bart. Enjoy. Thank you all. Does it work? Yeah, it works. Good. Okay. So, I'm Merlin and I'm Merlin. This is Bart. I'm going to show you what we're going to be talking about, then we'll introduce ourselves and we'll roll right into the contents. So this is better. So our talk is titled, Save as a Millenax on the Smartphone, How to Liberate Your Device by Running Actual Linux and Software You Control. So we're going to briefly introduce ourselves first. Then I will talk about why we need Millenax on the Smartphone, like why do we need it? I think the answer is obvious, but maybe it isn't, so we're going to discuss that for a while. Then I'll talk about some hard and hardware problems and potential solutions to that. Then Bart will give you an overview of all the existing software out there, like all the different efforts that people are undertaking. He'll talk about PostMarketOS and I'll talk about MIMO. And by that time, we should get to questions. So my name is Merlin or Merlin in Dutch. I studied at the University of Amsterdam. I did computer science. I do work for the Intel Archive. Archive work, they did the Wayback Machine, the Archive webpages and books and CDs and other cool stuff. And in my spare time at night, I work on MIMO, I am also a board member of the Amsterdam Hacker Space, have been for a while and I run tour exits and work on other free software projects. So my name is Bart Revers. I'm mostly known as CureTreeOut on the Internet. I work in PostMarketOS and also because of PostMarketOS, I also work on Alpine Linux. I'm still studying. I live in the Netherlands and my school set me a bit dominated by the proprietary Windows crowd, so I'm the only one that's trying to liberate the school. And yeah, basically that's it. Okay, so why should you run Linux on your smartphone? There's a couple of reasons for it. First of all, thank you. So how many of you are running iOS or Android? Just raise your hands. iOS or Android? How many of you are running Android? Most of you are running Android, right? So Android runs Linux of some kind, but it's not really new Linux. How many of you are running Linux US? It's like 5% of the people that just raised their hands. So most of you use Android that was installed by your vendor, which could be Motorola or Google or some other hardware vendor. And if you look at what we do on our laptops, like how many people if you were running Linux on your laptop? Right? Did you install it yourself? Yeah. Okay, but we do this on our servers. We do this on our desktops. We do this on our laptops, but we don't do it on our phones. And there are many reasons for that. And we'll get to some of those reasons, but first, why would you want that? So obviously if you run your software on your phone, on your laptop, you have full control. You already have, I mean, you decide what runs. You decide what distro you want. You decide if you want GNOME or KDE or Wayland or Xorg or Sway or whatever you want to run. And I think that's very important. I think that's what draws a lot of different crowds and binds us together in the fact that we can work on all these different things. And it gives you, and we have the freedom to modify whatever we want. So we can change the software. We can fix stuff. We can work as a community to make all this better. And with the smartphones, we really can. With Apple, it's just they work on something and that's it. Maybe you can report a bug and you'll hear something in a couple months. Google does some of the code as open source, but they work in a closed way. So every now and then they just drop code and that's kind of it. So there's no way that we as a community here can work together currently. There's some efforts to do that, but they're not super well known. And of course, if you have an Android phone right now, you're dependent on your manufacturer. If Motorola supports Android until 6.0, then if Android 7.0 is released or their security fixes, you have to wait for them to fix it or flash them as you ask if it supports your device. And there's no support and they usually they make you get a new device every couple years, which is not ideal. Because, you know, I'm still using my Nokia and your 100 and have been for the last 10 years and it still works fine. And very often Android has basically iOS as well. They have spyware built into some point that at the point that you know, like if you have your phone, you know it's tracking you in some way. And you have to figure out all these different ways of tracking. You have to deny permissions for everything. It gets very tricky. I think the right way to do it is to start with a device that doesn't track you at all in any way and then start reasoning about how you can make it not track you. Very often there's a lot of bloatware, super large apps and lock-ins with different communication platforms and I think that's not a good thing for the community as well. Okay, so what does it mean? If we want to be in control, we don't want to be dependent on a manufacturer, what do we need? So I think the essential pieces of a Glynynelex smartphone is that it has mainline Linux support and for those of you who don't know, mainline Linux means that you can go to kernel.org, the website of Linux. You download the latest release and you can build a free device and it works more or less that. There might be some driver issues, but it just works. And for most of your Android devices, you can't do that. It won't be supported in Linux because the vendor just made some changes and maybe if you're lucky you can get the changes as the last talk covered. And that's kind of it. So if you all want to work together on Linux, we need this to be there. And we want most of the drivers to be open source so that we can improve the drivers, make them better. And we need a boot loader without restrictions. So if you run a very Android boot loader or something else, as long as they allow you to boot Linux, your own version of Linux so it's not signed by some cryptographic key and you can just do it yourself, that's probably good enough. It will be ideal if the boot loader is completely open source from the start, but that might not be completely realistic. And of course, if you have Linux and a boot loader, you need something other than the kernel to actually do stuff with your phone. So we need usable user space that's free and open source. And ideally there will be many distros and many UIs like we have right now in our laptops. But there's quite some problems. So if you boot your laptop with Intel, you just kind of insert whatever your distro is. Maybe you want to CD or USB stick and it boots to a boot loader and it just boots to a desktop or UI and you can do things. And the phone just doesn't work that way. Hardware support on ARM is different. There's no BIOS that sets everything up and then loads a boot loader and then the boot loader will go to Linux and Linux looks at whatever the BIOS provides at ARM on whatever is in the PCI bus to load the drivers. This is not the ARM. There's no currently very good infrastructure to do that. There's some progress has been made, but for a lot of devices that doesn't work. So that's hard. You have to often compile your own kernel with the right options so you can't just plug in something and hope it works. And of course, most of the devices that I said have vendor-only kernels. So they take Linux on a certain point. They add some things and that's kind of it. They never contribute it back. The boot loader sometimes even lock down and specifically boot loaders here. You have to configure them manually. Often compile them as well because they have the same problem. They don't know what hardware is in your device and they can't detect what they should support so you can render something on your screen. And there are so many devices. There's so many different Android phones and there's so many different Chinese ones and different large United States manufacturers. And another problem is power management. Power management on the desktop and laptop is pretty good with Linux nowadays. If you're lucky, you can get eight or nine hours in your laptop. If your phone lasts only eight or nine hours in your pocket and gets warm, it's not a very good... You need something better. And with the 64-bit ARM, some of what I said before got a little better so there's some way to detect what drivers you have. If you have an EFI boot loader, then you can kind of do it but it's still somewhat problematic. So these are a lot of problems. There's some solutions that we as a community can... Or some things we can do as a community to hopefully make this a little less painful. We can focus only a couple of devices. So take a couple of Android phones or whatever phones people made that are not that hard to support or are GPL-friendly. I mean, have GPL-friendly manufacturers that kind of stuff will be good. Or if people are manufacturing new devices, they should pick a system on chip that is well supported by Linux already. So system on chip is basically the computer and graphics card. Most of the things integrated in a simple small thing that is on your phone. And there's actually a company doing that, or several companies doing that. We'll cover them in a bit. And I think the way to actually get Linux support proper is not to rely on Android and an Android kernel by vendor to provide some drivers and then rely on it. So there's some good projects at abstraction layers around Android and Android drivers so you can run your own Linux stuff on there. But it doesn't get us any closer to actual mainline Linux on our phones. So there are two companies working on new devices right now. The first one is Pine 64. They have a stand in the AW building today. I think they might have a stand on 205. So after the talk finishes, you can still go there. And they are showing off their phone and tablet with various OSs that currently are in alpha state or kind of working right now. So if you're excited, you should go there. And specifically, they are working on something called the Pine phone, maybe not surprising. It features an all-winner A64 SoC system on chip, and it has very good mainline support. And this is not necessarily because of the company all-winner, but because for the last couple years, people who visit FOS, have been working very actively to support the devices because you can find a lot of single board computers. So if you know Raspberry Pi, there's a lot of other boards like that. Like there's Oldie Max boards and Pine 64. They make boards with all-inerts in there, and you can use them as a small server at home or as a media box. So mainline support in Linux is really good. The driver support is getting pretty decent. There's 2GB of RAM, EMMC, and a quad-core CPU. And there's an open-source 3D driver. For many years, specifically 3D in the whole ARM space has been a big problem. And I think four or five years ago, someone here, LibV, started working on the Lima driver for the Mali 400 GPU. He did a lot of work. He did a big talk here on the K building a couple years ago, and then stopped working on it, and then others picked it up. And now today, we actually have a driver that works on wayline.xorg. So that's awesome. And another cool thing that the platform features are kill switches. So if you want to only turn off your microphone, you just flip a physical switch, and then the line of your microphone no longer runs through your phone, so there's no way that whatever you say will be recorded by the mono. You can do the same for Wi-Fi. You can turn off your cameras. You can do the same for Bluetooth. So that's kind of neat if you want some extra privacy features. It features the WorldWi 4G slash LTE modem, so wherever you go, it should just work. And they will likely, when the phone is finished, allow you to pick a distribution that kind of works on the phone, and then they'll preinstall it for you. So that's kind of cool. Our lab board continue. And it costs 150 euros. Approximately. The other company is Purism, is making the Liebren 5. This might be more known to the community. The device is actually based on a different sock than the Pinephone is. It's a bit more powerful as well. The kill switches are actually on the outside, while on the Pinephone, they're on the inside of the phone. So it's a bit easier actually to flip the switch. The mainline support is also pretty good. It still runs on some out of three patches, but they're actively being worked on and being upstreamed. From Purism, they're working on the distribution PureOS, which is the main focus for the Liebren 5. They're going to run it out of the box. And at the moment, they have the Chestnut Edition shipped. That just means it's one of the first batches that has shipped. They work in several batches, meaning the first batch is basically an early version, and there might be some little issues with it. And the next batch has those issues fixed. And then some issues might occur there. The next batch has those issues fixed. Chestnut Edition is basically for the brave heart, the people that don't really mind having some issues and don't mind working around them. I think right now the price is $800, but it's changing a bit, so it might not be accurate. And depending on the region you're at, it uses a different modem. I think especially USA versus Europe and India. This is basically just a prominent kind of pine phone, and hopefully we'll see a lot of people next year using it instead of their Android phones. So to give an overview of the currently various efforts to put Linux on mobile, there are a lot of distros out there at the moment. Just to start somewhere, we have KD Neon, made by the KDE project. It's already used on desktop a lot. It's basically based on a new one with the newest KDE stack on it. In case of mobile, they put the newest versions of all the mobile components of KDE on it. To make it work on current phones, just not the pine phone and the Libre 5, but on regular Android phones, they use Libre hybrid, which is a technique to make Android drivers and stuff work on regular Linux systems. And that's basically the main development distribution for KDE on mobile. The next one will be Ubuntu Touch. This is probably the most completed distribution at the moment out there. It works a bit differently than most distributions. The base system is read-only, and they install packages with, they call it the click system. And if they update the system, it just reboots into the recovery mode, installs a new version, then reboots into it, instead of running, say, AppGet update. It comes with Unity 8. On most devices at the moment, it uses, again, Lib Hybrid to work, to make the drivers work. But they're quite far advanced as well with the Pinephone and Libre 5 to make it work with mainline drivers and without Lib Hybrid. And if you want to run a Linux on mobile system like this year, and you want some apps to run, Ubuntu Touch is probably your best bet. Then we have Nemo Mobile, based on the, originally on Mir, nowadays, that's basically Salesforce OS. It basically takes Salesforce OS, but replaces the proprietary components of it with free and open source software that mainly comes down to the user interface and applications that come with it. It basically runs on every device that's selfish OS runs on it, just replace the, put the repository of them on top of it, install the different packages and it will run. Now we have LunOS, it's based on the older WebOS, which was made by LG. They originally discontinued the efforts to make WebOS, and then the community decided to fork it, make LunOS. Today's LG has picked up WebOS again, so LunOS is nowadays working with LG to bring the, all the components back together, make sure that it stays open source and it's based on modern techniques and hardware. Again, it uses Lib Hybrid to work instead of mainline drivers, but they're working on the Pinephone as well, in which case, again, they'll use the mainline drivers properly. Then we have Astroid OS, it's a bit different, it's not really smartphone OS, but more of a smart watch OS. It's, again, used Lib Hybrid, it's made for the smart watches, which basically is a moment run Android watch. It's a regular Linux system, I think it's based on Yocto or Open and Bennett, I'm not entirely sure. The UI and stuff is again based on Mer, which is updated in a different direction. Then AOSC, it's made for more of the Eastern Asian market, it's main focus is on Plasma Mobile, runs on mainline only, it doesn't run on any other devices that do not have mainline, so it's basically at the moment mainly the Pinephone and Libra 5. Then we have PureOS, this is made by Purism, the company that makes the Libra 5, it's mainly focused on running on the Libra 5, although also on the other Libra products, so the laptops. This PureOS will ship with Porsche, I'm not sure how to pronounce it properly, but it's based on the GNOME stack. They use GNOME technologies and they run GNOME applications, but adapt it so they are made responsive and will resize them to various phone sizes. This PureOS is made to only run on mainline kernels, because it's only made to run on Libra 5 really, but in theory you can run on any phone that has mainline. And it's a fork of Debian. Then we have Manjaro, they popped up recently showing they have interest in making a mobile version as well, it's Manjaro ARM project. They focus at the moment on Plasma Mobile, but they're based on ARC, so in theory they can run anything that ARC can run. And also it's made to run only on mainline kernels and at the moment they're working on mainly the Pinephone. And then we have NixOS, last year they got funding by Nelnet to work on it, so they now have a full time developer. It's a standalone OS, it works a bit differently, the package manager is quite interesting, I can recommend you look into it. It runs on the Pinephone as well, but they're also trying to get it on existing Android devices, in which case again they use Libybus. The interface that we'll come with is not set of stone yet, we're working on multiple interfaces, so you can probably eventually run Plasma Mobile in it and Forge and Unity and hopefully lots of others. So post-MarketOS, that's what I work on. In my opinion the best one, but probably others disagree. This was announced on the 26th of May 2017 by Oliver Smith, he had worked on it in private for a year by then, he made some basic tooling to work on it and at that point he thought was ready to show it to the world. When he made the original blog post that announced the project, it only supported two devices or at least booted on two devices, but basically now we boot up to one on the SF33 devices, it sounds like a lot but it's probably not even half of all the Android phones out there, quite a lot. Do note, we say support, but it doesn't mean you can pick up the phone, install post-MarketOS on it and expect to make a call and have fun with it. It's more, most devices are more in like a Raspberry Pi stage, you have a working Wi-Fi, you have a working screen and you can run some interesting applications in it, but don't expect that you can make calls or send SMS with it. We do have a few devices that what you can make calls with or at least close to make calls with, but most of them will not be the case. Well, post-MarketOS is based on Alpine Linux, it's probably a mostly popular distro for Docker containers and on server installations, but it will also work fine on laptops, desktops and in our host phones. We chose Alpine Linux mainly because it's really tiny. The base installation without the kernel that is, is only six megabytes big, so that's basically a booting system once you add the kernel. Because we work, we chose this because of size, because we work with a lot of change routes. Every time we do something, we make a change route, do some stuff in it, we remove the change route and that happens a lot and if you do that like six times a day, you don't really want to wait every time the whole distribution is installed. Because our system is only, only the basis anyway, is only six megabytes big, this isn't the issue. The change routes are made and this, made and removed again inferior within seconds and the development is quick because of it. We are basically a distro for repository on top of Alpine Linux, so we use all the packages from Alpine Linux and although we have our custom stuff sometimes, we do try to upstream as much as possible to Alpine Linux and where possible also custom patches to the various projects that are out there. We are like next to us basically, we are interface agnostic, meaning we currently focusing on Plasma Mobile, but we also ship Fosh, we had Unity in the past, Unity 8 and we'll ship, hopefully ship it again in the future, but we also ship with Hilden from Memo Lester and hopefully in the future also Glacier UI and any other UI that might pop up. So we try to give the choice to the user, you can use our system and it doesn't mean you have to be forced to one interface or another. Like I said before, don't expect most devices to install it on the system and then expect it to call. We are basically an alpha state, you can boot the system, you can mess around with have fun and except for a few devices, you probably won't use this phone in our case, but the Raspberry Pi is also cool basically, so you can use it like that. We have our chat channels on Matrix and ISE, please join when you feel free, we need both end users and developers, we can use all the help, hope to see you there. Back to Malin. Thank you, does it work? Yeah, I think so. Okay. Definitely works, right? Okay. So I'm going to tell you a bit about what I've been working on, which is Memo Lester, I hope I pronounced it correctly, I'm not from Finland and I've heard people pronounce it differently, Memo, IMO, I say Memo, hope it doesn't offend anyone. It was developed by Nokia a long time ago, Nokia was in the smart phone business, an internet tablet business maybe even before Apple made their first iPhone, maybe it was around the same time and they have been working on Memo for a while, they had various internet tablets, they had the N770, the N800, N810, those were all internet tablets, you can use them for navigation but they had no cellular modem in there and then they made the N100 that I still use today and they had a lot of people working on that OS and it was based on Debian and by that I don't mean that they literally used the Debian repository but they used APT, the package manager, the Debian package format and a lot of the base system was the same. They actually sold a lot of devices, they sold I think, well, a lot, at least I think it's a lot, they sold a couple hundred thousand Nokia N900s at least, so a lot of people who don't typically visit Fosnam actually use that device probably for a couple years. And it's still being maintained by the community, there were actually a lot of people using it, it was kind of dubbed the hacker phone because Nokia N100 had a radio transmitter and receiver in there so you could put it in your car and it will transmit radio on your car radio and you can just listen to that and a lot of cool features. And the community maintained it for a long time but now there's not a lot of maintenance anymore. But the cool thing is that they still have a lot of packages on memo.org with maps, calculators, useful stuff. Okay and I've been using it ever since as I said and the big problem is that not everything in Memo 5 which is the Memo they made for the Nokia N100 is open source. If it was, I think it would have kept on living for a long time ever since they made it. They made it and not, you know, being hiatus stated for a while. And big parts are not open source, that's a problem. So I've covered some of it, like why are we doing this? I love the OS and I still want to be able to use it, that's a personal reason for me and this phone, the N100 is becoming very old so I need a new device on which I can run the same or similar software which actually gives me news.co.nix on my phone. And I just wanted to be fully open source because this one is not. So it's been used by a lot of ordinary users, the UI might look a little arcane at this point, I'll also use screenshot later, I think it's actually very usable still but it doesn't look anything like iOS and Android now look like. And Memo Lesta is entirely community developed so over the years a lot of community members have worked and they've come and gone and there's currently three or four people actively working on Memo Lesta and we started about two years ago and there's a lot more people joining and testing and fixing minor things but there's like three or four core developers. So it's not that many. And I really like the fact that we're community developed because there's no corporate backing and there's no special interest, nobody wants to run their specific cloud on our device and we're not pre-installing any specific cloud software or whatever and there's no specific direction that will take it just because the company wants to do things that make sense financially. And it's compatible with existing software so as opposed to I think every single mobile dish for you named they all are on Wayland, right? And we're doing one that still uses X11, you can hate it or like it. The code works on X11, it was open source, there was no reason for us to make that work on Wayland right now. And it uses GTK2, 3 and QT and there are some parts of the GTK but it's mostly theming and some wedges but it also means that if you want to run, let's say something crazy Libre Office, you can just install it and it will actually just start on the device. It probably won't be very usable because there's all these buttons and menus but it will look stylishly, the dialogues will be styled and they kind of integrate in the system. If you take more SIM publications they'll probably just run. And I think that's a big feat because if you base your work on top of Debian and Dev1 as I'll talk about in a bit, then there's 20,000 packages in repository that you can all just install and use. And some of them might be a bit clunky but they might also be very good. And everything that we do is open source. Everything that we write now is GPL and if there's some open source license that was not GPL before then we just run with it. If not, you wrote something that was not GPL. Another thing that I really like is that the APIs for Mamo are developed with mobile in mind. So they thought about power management. They think about things like there's a proximity sensor so if you put something to your ear the screen needs to go off and the touchscreen shouldn't work anymore, right, because otherwise you're pressing buttons. Or if you're in a darker room then the brightness should adjust itself to the ambient level. There's a compass in there if you flip the phone it needs to go to port greater landscape mode, that kind of stuff. And all the APIs are there so if we're working on making all this work we have a fixed point. We just follow what the APIs did, we re-implement them and it all kind of just works. It uses only, on the end of the 100 it actually uses like 80 megabytes, 150 megabytes is the default I think on 64-bit devices. And there's a lot of applications out there that were community developed and if we keep the same APIs mostly then it's just a matter of recompiling them when they work. So I think that's really cool. And it allows us to keep focus. So what do we do? We ported code and we updated APIs. We looked at some code, programs that were not open source and we tried to figure out how they worked and re-implemented them. If they were a demo we just looked at the interfaces and we tried to just make that work. And we build everything in Jenkins. So we have Git repositories currently on GitHub and Jenkins just builds whatever we can make it build it for us and adds it back to the Debian repository. And installing Memo is as simple, if you want to do it you can just install Debian or Dev1 because we don't use systemd but someone is working on systemd support if you really want it. But you just add a single line and you install our meta package and that's it. It just works on top of Debian. I think that's really cool. And our aim is to make it work for people here at Fosism, for hackers, for open source enthusiasts and not necessarily for the end user. We'll maybe get there but we're not there now. And a really cool thing is that I think somewhere mid last year we submitted for funding for Nounet which is a non-profit in the Netherlands and we actually got 40,000 euros in funding. So we get paid for some of the work we do. This is what it looks like on the N900. You can see that I was testing some Python binding so the binary clock shows up there. The actual clock is not a binary clock. I was just testing a replacement clock applet. It's connected to the KPN network provider in Netherlands on 3G. The battery is full. It's on Wi-Fi. The 4 says the Wi-Fi signal is pretty strong. It's currently muted for sound and it tells me that the application manager thinks there's an update available. So what do we have now? It's alpha quality at best. If you got super excited, I'm sorry. Once it works and I can make phone calls, I'm going to start using it as my main device. I'm going to keep on dock footing it and I hope others will do the same. Right now it runs on the Nukia N900, the Motorola Droid 4 and the Pine phone. I haven't mentioned the Motorola Droid 4 before. It's made by Motorola and it's one of the last physical keyboard phones they made. Nukia N900 is a physical keyboard and that one does too. It has a pretty good chip power management-wise. I think two people have been working super actively on mainline support for years and now it actually works really well. So the Wi-Fi works, the modem works, power management works. You can get a couple days of power on that thing. So I think that's really cool. We use virtual machines for development. So you can run QMU, VMware, VirtualBox and you can just have the desktop environment in your virtual machine log in over SSH and do your development. We still need to get some core components in place. The main thing lacking I think right now is a phone UI because we are actually able to make some phone calls using the command line but that's not how you want to answer your phone or make a phone call. I think it will probably be a couple months, honestly, until we get to that point. But I'm still pretty excited. And as I said before, there are demo devices at the point 64.AW and I think they'll be there until 5. So maybe you've already seen them. And I'm really hoping that the power management will be really good because the Nokia 900 lasts for maybe a week, a week and a half if I don't use it that much. I've never seen that on an Android phone. So these are the devices we support and there's a link up there with more devices that are not that well supported but they kind of work. Like I said, we really try to focus on a couple. And last but not least, if you're really interested in PowerVR, we just did the 3D driver on the Nokia 900 and the Motorola Android 4. The state was terrible and we've been working on it with other people for a year and a half and now you can patch mainline Linux a little bit and it will start. The user space is still closed source but Texas Instruments is actually building new binaries for us. So it's actually looking pretty good. We'll leave it to Bart. As a conclusion, well as we showed, there are various UI's, various distributions available. Basically everybody's choice is available and possible. But all of them do need work. We need a lot of help. Nowadays we do have devices to run them on so please get a device, get into the various chat channels, ask what you can do. We don't just need developers, we also need end users. We need people to write documentation and with some where everybody can do that. Hopefully this year, probably first half of the year, maybe second half of the year, expect phones to actually show up. The Pine phone will work. The Libre 5 will by then work and hopefully next year most people here will be able to run such a device and be able to call with it, have fun with it. Just make sure don't be afraid to ask questions. We're all great people, we always appreciate every help we can get, all the help we can get and we hope to see you in the various channels and forums and all the places we are. Hope to welcome you into our community. Lastly, resources, quick links. Memo Lesta is available on FreeNote on RSC with hashtag Memo-Lesta. Postmarked is available also on FreeNote with hashtag PostmarkedOS. We're also on Matrix, the channels are bridge so it doesn't matter which you choose. Please join, have a look at our websites for more information and hope to see you next year. If you're interested in more technical details from Memo specifically, I did a talk a couple months ago in Bulgaria and OpenFest which is another great open source event like this and it's about an hour long. I'll make sure the slides are on the Foslin website somehow. It's more technical and in-depth than this talk. It's up there. Any questions? I think that's all my thoughts. It's all here, Lesta. With so many distributions being available, is there some plan to have something like flag packs? Can you please leave quietly or shovel quietly because I can't hear. Please repeat. With so many distributions available, is it possible that you can run, say, I don't know, flat pack or snap on it to develop and package for one of the distributions for all of them or do you have to basically build an APK for Alpine, a Dev for Debian based ones? So I guess the question is, with so many distributions available, do you want to package the app for all the different distributions or can you use snap or flat pack? Depends a bit on the distribution. Most distributions of data mentioned do support something like flat pack or snap. You can package them in FlatHub and you can install and run them on your device. Not all distribution might necessarily support out-of-box but often it's just app to get, install flat pack and it'll work. Hi, so I didn't hear anything about Hallyum. Are you working together with the Hallyum guys to get a... Okay. Okay. Are you working somehow together with the Hallyum guys to get... You know? I could not hear what you were saying. Please repeat. You didn't hear anything? Okay. So yeah, are you working together with the Hallyum guys to get the stack for Android mobile phones? Yes, no. Okay. Actually, I should tell you, see here. Yeah. Are you working together with the Hallyum guys? Hallyum guys? Okay, so the question is, are we working together with Hallyum? I think Hallyum is using Android as a base and it's like an abstraction around Android to make things work better on Android devices. I think a lot of distros are but MIMO is not because we really want to focus on mainline only and I don't want Android modem abstractions or graphics driver abstractions or anything else like that. Maybe people in the community have done it. They've used it to make MIMO less to work on Android phones. We might support that in the future but right now we don't do that. In case of post-marketOS, we have, I think, three or four devices actually using Hallyum slash deep hybrids. Most of them don't but we definitely appreciate the effort if somebody port Hallyum and our system to it. So yeah, we should part it. Do we have more questions? Thank you. Is it true that for the choice of the hardware for not pine for the other one for prism, you only can choose the battery from the prime prism window. So you're locked in with that battery, changing the battery. If you want to change the battery, the battery gets damaged and you want to change it. You're locked in with a prism. You can't buy a third window. So that depends a bit on the device. You said about changing batteries, right? You talk about changing batteries. Yeah, so that depends on the device. On the N100 you can change batteries without problem. The pine phone uses a standard Samsung battery so you can just buy those stock batteries and replace the battery in your pine phone. I'm not sure if you can replace it while the device is on. You could do that with some devices too. If you powered them over USB, swap out the battery, that kind of stuff, they can work. I can't hear you. On the prism smartphone you can't buy from another window the battery. Locked in with that, with the hardware. Yeah, the main problem with batteries is I guess the voltage and the size of the battery. Most phones even though manufacturers say you should not replace the battery, you can just get any other in the world work fine. If we take the pine phone, they basically already set from the store. They do support replacing battery. You can get I think a Galaxy J7 battery in the world work fine in the pine phone. In case of Liebherm 5, I think they use a custom form factor. So you did it bit hard. But the device itself is not the reason. There's no hardware limitations on the battery. It's just a form factor and if the voltage is good, it should be fine. What's the policy for binary blobs in PostmarketOS? What's the policy for binary blobs in PostmarketOS? Do you really care about them or just whatever? The question is if we care about binary blobs in PostmarketOS. We prefer not to, of course. When in some case some binary blobs or at least firmware is needed to get the device running. We do ship at least proprietary firmware. When possible, but there are some efforts to replace proprietary firmware and provider blobs with open source variants. We try to use it wherever possible. For example, the Mali GPU in the pine phone, it has binary blobs, but we try to use Mesa instead. That doesn't mean if it's actually needed to get the device running, sadly we have to, but we do packages. Okay, thanks. Any more questions? I have a question about MMLS. Does it support dual boot with original N900 firmware? Does it support what? Dual boot with original software from N900. Currently we haven't made it work with the other software that's on the old N100. If you, for example, take their binaries, you just want to run it on MMLS to write. It doesn't work. I've tried it a couple of times. Some simple binaries work. But other things start to go very wrong. It uses a different API. It uses its RML, not ARM hard flow, so the floating point stuff is different. It can still sometimes work. I think if you try hard enough, you might be able to make it work, but we haven't tried that hard. So good. Do we have any more questions? Thank you very much. Thank you.
 So, it's 1500.  It's time for the next talk by Merlin and Bart.  And I'm really looking forward to this talk because it's not, as I perceive the project,  not only about regaining control over your smartphones, which is of course very good,  but it's also to be able to keep your phones longer even if there's no further support  from vendors anymore.  That's what I also like.  But let's get more first-hand facts from Merlin and Bart.  Enjoy.  Thank you all.  Does it work?  Yeah, it works.  Good.  Okay.  So, I'm Merlin and I'm Merlin.  This is Bart.  I'm going to show you what we're going to be talking about, then we'll introduce ourselves  and we'll roll right into the contents.  So this is better.  So our talk is titled, Save as a Millenax on the Smartphone, How to Liberate Your Device  by Running Actual Linux and Software You Control.  So we're going to briefly introduce ourselves first.  Then I will talk about why we need Millenax on the Smartphone, like why do we need it?  I think the answer is obvious, but maybe it isn't, so we're going to discuss that for  a while.  Then I'll talk about some hard and hardware problems and potential solutions to that.  Then Bart will give you an overview of all the existing software out there, like all  the different efforts that people are undertaking.  He'll talk about PostMarketOS and I'll talk about MIMO.  And by that time, we should get to questions.  So my name is Merlin or Merlin in Dutch.  I studied at the University of Amsterdam.  I did computer science.  I do work for the Intel Archive.  Archive work, they did the Wayback Machine, the Archive webpages and books and CDs and  other cool stuff.  And in my spare time at night, I work on MIMO, I am also a board member of the Amsterdam  Hacker Space, have been for a while and I run tour exits and work on other free software  projects.  So my name is Bart Revers.  I'm mostly known as CureTreeOut on the Internet.  I work in PostMarketOS and also because of PostMarketOS, I also work on Alpine Linux.  I'm still studying.  I live in the Netherlands and my school set me a bit dominated by the proprietary Windows  crowd, so I'm the only one that's trying to liberate the school.  And yeah, basically that's it.  Okay, so why should you run Linux on your smartphone?  There's a couple of reasons for it.  First of all, thank you.  So how many of you are running iOS or Android?  Just raise your hands.  iOS or Android?  How many of you are running Android?  Most of you are running Android, right?  So Android runs Linux of some kind, but it's not really new Linux.  How many of you are running Linux US?  It's like 5% of the people that just raised their hands.  So most of you use Android that was installed by your vendor, which could be Motorola or  Google or some other hardware vendor.  And if you look at what we do on our laptops, like how many people if you were running Linux  on your laptop?  Right?  Did you install it yourself?  Yeah.  Okay, but we do this on our servers.  We do this on our desktops.  We do this on our laptops, but we don't do it on our phones.  And there are many reasons for that.  And we'll get to some of those reasons, but first, why would you want that?  So obviously if you run your software on your phone, on your laptop, you have full control.  You already have, I mean, you decide what runs.  You decide what distro you want.  You decide if you want GNOME or KDE or Wayland or Xorg or Sway or whatever you want to run.  And I think that's very important.  I think that's what draws a lot of different crowds and binds us together in the fact that  we can work on all these different things.  And it gives you, and we have the freedom to modify whatever we want.  So we can change the software.  We can fix stuff.  We can work as a community to make all this better.  And with the smartphones, we really can.  With Apple, it's just they work on something and that's it.  Maybe you can report a bug and you'll hear something in a couple months.  Google does some of the code as open source, but they work in a closed way.  So every now and then they just drop code and that's kind of it.  So there's no way that we as a community here can work together currently.  There's some efforts to do that, but they're not super well known.  And of course, if you have an Android phone right now, you're dependent on your manufacturer.  If Motorola supports Android until 6.0, then if Android 7.0 is released or their security  fixes, you have to wait for them to fix it or flash them as you ask if it supports your  device.  And there's no support and they usually they make you get a new device every couple years,  which is not ideal.  Because, you know, I'm still using my Nokia and your 100 and have been for the last 10  years and it still works fine.  And very often Android has basically iOS as well.  They have spyware built into some point that at the point that you know, like if you have  your phone, you know it's tracking you in some way.  And you have to figure out all these different ways of tracking.  You have to deny permissions for everything.  It gets very tricky.  I think the right way to do it is to start with a device that doesn't track you at all  in any way and then start reasoning about how you can make it not track you.  Very often there's a lot of bloatware, super large apps and lock-ins with different communication  platforms and I think that's not a good thing for the community as well.  Okay, so what does it mean?  If we want to be in control, we don't want to be dependent on a manufacturer, what do  we need?  So I think the essential pieces of a Glynynelex smartphone is that it has mainline Linux support  and for those of you who don't know, mainline Linux means that you can go to kernel.org,  the website of Linux.  You download the latest release and you can build a free device and it works more or less  that.  There might be some driver issues, but it just works.  And for most of your Android devices, you can't do that.  It won't be supported in Linux because the vendor just made some changes and maybe if  you're lucky you can get the changes as the last talk covered.  And that's kind of it.  So if you all want to work together on Linux, we need this to be there.  And we want most of the drivers to be open source so that we can improve the drivers,  make them better.  And we need a boot loader without restrictions.  So if you run a very Android boot loader or something else, as long as they allow you  to boot Linux, your own version of Linux so it's not signed by some cryptographic key  and you can just do it yourself, that's probably good enough.  It will be ideal if the boot loader is completely open source from the start, but that might  not be completely realistic.  And of course, if you have Linux and a boot loader, you need something other than the  kernel to actually do stuff with your phone.  So we need usable user space that's free and open source.  And ideally there will be many distros and many UIs like we have right now in our laptops.  But there's quite some problems.  So if you boot your laptop with Intel, you just kind of insert whatever your distro is.  Maybe you want to CD or USB stick and it boots to a boot loader and it just boots to a desktop  or UI and you can do things.  And the phone just doesn't work that way.  Hardware support on ARM is different.  There's no BIOS that sets everything up and then loads a boot loader and then the boot  loader will go to Linux and Linux looks at whatever the BIOS provides at ARM on whatever  is in the PCI bus to load the drivers.  This is not the ARM.  There's no currently very good infrastructure to do that.  There's some progress has been made, but for a lot of devices that doesn't work.  So that's hard.  You have to often compile your own kernel with the right options so you can't just plug  in something and hope it works.  And of course, most of the devices that I said have vendor-only kernels.  So they take Linux on a certain point.  They add some things and that's kind of it.  They never contribute it back.  The boot loader sometimes even lock down and specifically boot loaders here.  You have to configure them manually.  Often compile them as well because they have the same problem.  They don't know what hardware is in your device and they can't detect what they should support  so you can render something on your screen.  And there are so many devices.  There's so many different Android phones and there's so many different Chinese ones and  different large United States manufacturers.  And another problem is power management.  Power management on the desktop and laptop is pretty good with Linux nowadays.  If you're lucky, you can get eight or nine hours in your laptop.  If your phone lasts only eight or nine hours in your pocket and gets warm, it's not a very  good...  You need something better.  And with the 64-bit ARM, some of what I said before got a little better so there's some  way to detect what drivers you have.  If you have an EFI boot loader, then you can kind of do it but it's still somewhat problematic.  So these are a lot of problems.  There's some solutions that we as a community can...  Or some things we can do as a community to hopefully make this a little less painful.  We can focus only a couple of devices.  So take a couple of Android phones or whatever phones people made that are not that hard  to support or are GPL-friendly.  I mean, have GPL-friendly manufacturers that kind of stuff will be good.  Or if people are manufacturing new devices, they should pick a system on chip that is  well supported by Linux already.  So system on chip is basically the computer and graphics card.  Most of the things integrated in a simple small thing that is on your phone.  And there's actually a company doing that, or several companies doing that.  We'll cover them in a bit.  And I think the way to actually get Linux support proper is not to rely on Android and  an Android kernel by vendor to provide some drivers and then rely on it.  So there's some good projects at abstraction layers around Android and Android drivers  so you can run your own Linux stuff on there.  But it doesn't get us any closer to actual mainline Linux on our phones.  So there are two companies working on new devices right now.  The first one is Pine 64.  They have a stand in the AW building today.  I think they might have a stand on 205.  So after the talk finishes, you can still go there.  And they are showing off their phone and tablet with various OSs that currently are in alpha  state or kind of working right now.  So if you're excited, you should go there.  And specifically, they are working on something called the Pine phone, maybe not surprising.  It features an all-winner A64 SoC system on chip, and it has very good mainline support.  And this is not necessarily because of the company all-winner, but because for the last  couple years, people who visit FOS, have been working very actively to support the devices  because you can find a lot of single board computers.  So if you know Raspberry Pi, there's a lot of other boards like that.  Like there's Oldie Max boards and Pine 64.  They make boards with all-inerts in there, and you can use them as a small server at  home or as a media box.  So mainline support in Linux is really good.  The driver support is getting pretty decent.  There's 2GB of RAM, EMMC, and a quad-core CPU.  And there's an open-source 3D driver.  For many years, specifically 3D in the whole ARM space has been a big problem.  And I think four or five years ago, someone here, LibV, started working on the Lima driver  for the Mali 400 GPU.  He did a lot of work.  He did a big talk here on the K building a couple years ago, and then stopped working  on it, and then others picked it up.  And now today, we actually have a driver that works on wayline.xorg.  So that's awesome.  And another cool thing that the platform features are kill switches.  So if you want to only turn off your microphone, you just flip a physical switch, and then  the line of your microphone no longer runs through your phone, so there's no way that  whatever you say will be recorded by the mono.  You can do the same for Wi-Fi.  You can turn off your cameras.  You can do the same for Bluetooth.  So that's kind of neat if you want some extra privacy features.  It features the WorldWi 4G slash LTE modem, so wherever you go, it should just work.  And they will likely, when the phone is finished, allow you to pick a distribution that kind  of works on the phone, and then they'll preinstall it for you.  So that's kind of cool.  Our lab board continue.  And it costs 150 euros.  Approximately.  The other company is Purism, is making the Liebren 5.  This might be more known to the community.  The device is actually based on a different sock than the Pinephone is.  It's a bit more powerful as well.  The kill switches are actually on the outside, while on the Pinephone, they're on the inside  of the phone.  So it's a bit easier actually to flip the switch.  The mainline support is also pretty good.  It still runs on some out of three patches, but they're actively being worked on and being  upstreamed.  From Purism, they're working on the distribution PureOS, which is the main focus for the Liebren  5.  They're going to run it out of the box.  And at the moment, they have the Chestnut Edition shipped.  That just means it's one of the first batches that has shipped.  They work in several batches, meaning the first batch is basically an early version,  and there might be some little issues with it.  And the next batch has those issues fixed.  And then some issues might occur there.  The next batch has those issues fixed.  Chestnut Edition is basically for the brave heart, the people that don't really mind having  some issues and don't mind working around them.  I think right now the price is $800, but it's changing a bit, so it might not be accurate.  And depending on the region you're at, it uses a different modem.  I think especially USA versus Europe and India.  This is basically just a prominent kind of pine phone, and hopefully we'll see a lot  of people next year using it instead of their Android phones.  So to give an overview of the currently various efforts to put Linux on mobile, there are  a lot of distros out there at the moment.  Just to start somewhere, we have KD Neon, made by the KDE project.  It's already used on desktop a lot.  It's basically based on a new one with the newest KDE stack on it.  In case of mobile, they put the newest versions of all the mobile components of KDE on it.  To make it work on current phones, just not the pine phone and the Libre 5, but on regular  Android phones, they use Libre hybrid, which is a technique to make Android drivers and  stuff work on regular Linux systems.  And that's basically the main development distribution for KDE on mobile.  The next one will be Ubuntu Touch.  This is probably the most completed distribution at the moment out there.  It works a bit differently than most distributions.  The base system is read-only, and they install packages with, they call it the click system.  And if they update the system, it just reboots into the recovery mode, installs a new version,  then reboots into it, instead of running, say, AppGet update.  It comes with Unity 8.  On most devices at the moment, it uses, again, Lib Hybrid to work, to make the drivers work.  But they're quite far advanced as well with the Pinephone and Libre 5 to make it work with  mainline drivers and without Lib Hybrid.  And if you want to run a Linux on mobile system like this year, and you want some apps to  run, Ubuntu Touch is probably your best bet.  Then we have Nemo Mobile, based on the, originally on Mir, nowadays, that's basically  Salesforce OS.  It basically takes Salesforce OS, but replaces the proprietary components of it with free  and open source software that mainly comes down to the user interface and applications  that come with it.  It basically runs on every device that's selfish OS runs on it, just replace the, put the repository  of them on top of it, install the different packages and it will run.  Now we have LunOS, it's based on the older WebOS, which was made by LG.  They originally discontinued the efforts to make WebOS, and then the community decided  to fork it, make LunOS.  Today's LG has picked up WebOS again, so LunOS is nowadays working with LG to bring  the, all the components back together, make sure that it stays open source and it's based  on modern techniques and hardware.  Again, it uses Lib Hybrid to work instead of mainline drivers, but they're working on  the Pinephone as well, in which case, again, they'll use the mainline drivers properly.  Then we have Astroid OS, it's a bit different, it's not really smartphone OS, but more of  a smart watch OS.  It's, again, used Lib Hybrid, it's made for the smart watches, which basically is a moment  run Android watch.  It's a regular Linux system, I think it's based on Yocto or Open and Bennett, I'm not entirely  sure.  The UI and stuff is again based on Mer, which is updated in a different direction.  Then AOSC, it's made for more of the Eastern Asian market, it's main focus is on Plasma  Mobile, runs on mainline only, it doesn't run on any other devices that do not have  mainline, so it's basically at the moment mainly the Pinephone and Libra 5.  Then we have PureOS, this is made by Purism, the company that makes the Libra 5, it's mainly  focused on running on the Libra 5, although also on the other Libra products, so the laptops.  This PureOS will ship with Porsche, I'm not sure how to pronounce it properly, but it's  based on the GNOME stack.  They use GNOME technologies and they run GNOME applications, but adapt it so they are made  responsive and will resize them to various phone sizes.  This PureOS is made to only run on mainline kernels, because it's only made to run on  Libra 5 really, but in theory you can run on any phone that has mainline.  And it's a fork of Debian.  Then we have Manjaro, they popped up recently showing they have interest in making a mobile  version as well, it's Manjaro ARM project.  They focus at the moment on Plasma Mobile, but they're based on ARC, so in theory they  can run anything that ARC can run.  And also it's made to run only on mainline kernels and at the moment they're working  on mainly the Pinephone.  And then we have NixOS, last year they got funding by Nelnet to work on it, so they now  have a full time developer.  It's a standalone OS, it works a bit differently, the package manager is quite interesting,  I can recommend you look into it.  It runs on the Pinephone as well, but they're also trying to get it on existing Android devices,  in which case again they use Libybus.  The interface that we'll come with is not set of stone yet, we're working on multiple  interfaces, so you can probably eventually run Plasma Mobile in it and Forge and Unity  and hopefully lots of others.  So post-MarketOS, that's what I work on.  In my opinion the best one, but probably others disagree.  This was announced on the 26th of May 2017 by Oliver Smith, he had worked on it in private  for a year by then, he made some basic tooling to work on it and at that point he thought  was ready to show it to the world.  When he made the original blog post that announced the project, it only supported two devices  or at least booted on two devices, but basically now we boot up to one on the SF33 devices,  it sounds like a lot but it's probably not even half of all the Android phones out there,  quite a lot.  Do note, we say support, but it doesn't mean you can pick up the phone, install post-MarketOS  on it and expect to make a call and have fun with it.  It's more, most devices are more in like a Raspberry Pi stage, you have a working Wi-Fi,  you have a working screen and you can run some interesting applications in it, but don't  expect that you can make calls or send SMS with it.  We do have a few devices that what you can make calls with or at least close to make  calls with, but most of them will not be the case.  Well, post-MarketOS is based on Alpine Linux, it's probably a mostly popular distro for  Docker containers and on server installations, but it will also work fine on laptops, desktops  and in our host phones.  We chose Alpine Linux mainly because it's really tiny.  The base installation without the kernel that is, is only six megabytes big, so that's  basically a booting system once you add the kernel.  Because we work, we chose this because of size, because we work with a lot of change  routes.  Every time we do something, we make a change route, do some stuff in it, we remove the  change route and that happens a lot and if you do that like six times a day, you don't  really want to wait every time the whole distribution is installed.  Because our system is only, only the basis anyway, is only six megabytes big, this isn't  the issue.  The change routes are made and this, made and removed again inferior within seconds  and the development is quick because of it.  We are basically a distro for repository on top of Alpine Linux, so we use all the packages  from Alpine Linux and although we have our custom stuff sometimes, we do try to upstream  as much as possible to Alpine Linux and where possible also custom patches to the various  projects that are out there.  We are like next to us basically, we are interface agnostic, meaning we currently focusing on  Plasma Mobile, but we also ship Fosh, we had Unity in the past, Unity 8 and we'll ship,  hopefully ship it again in the future, but we also ship with Hilden from Memo Lester  and hopefully in the future also Glacier UI and any other UI that might pop up.  So we try to give the choice to the user, you can use our system and it doesn't mean  you have to be forced to one interface or another.  Like I said before, don't expect most devices to install it on the system and then expect  it to call.  We are basically an alpha state, you can boot the system, you can mess around with have fun  and except for a few devices, you probably won't use this phone in our case, but the  Raspberry Pi is also cool basically, so you can use it like that.  We have our chat channels on Matrix and ISE, please join when you feel free, we need both  end users and developers, we can use all the help, hope to see you there.  Back to Malin.  Thank you, does it work?  Yeah, I think so.  Okay.  Definitely works, right?  Okay.  So I'm going to tell you a bit about what I've been working on, which is Memo Lester, I  hope I pronounced it correctly, I'm not from Finland and I've heard people pronounce it  differently, Memo, IMO, I say Memo, hope it doesn't offend anyone.  It was developed by Nokia a long time ago, Nokia was in the smart phone business, an  internet tablet business maybe even before Apple made their first iPhone, maybe it was  around the same time and they have been working on Memo for a while, they had various internet  tablets, they had the N770, the N800, N810, those were all internet tablets, you can use  them for navigation but they had no cellular modem in there and then they made the N100  that I still use today and they had a lot of people working on that OS and it was based  on Debian and by that I don't mean that they literally used the Debian repository but they  used APT, the package manager, the Debian package format and a lot of the base system  was the same.  They actually sold a lot of devices, they sold I think, well, a lot, at least I think  it's a lot, they sold a couple hundred thousand Nokia N900s at least, so a lot of people who  don't typically visit Fosnam actually use that device probably for a couple years.  And it's still being maintained by the community, there were actually a lot of people using  it, it was kind of dubbed the hacker phone because Nokia N100 had a radio transmitter  and receiver in there so you could put it in your car and it will transmit radio on  your car radio and you can just listen to that and a lot of cool features.  And the community maintained it for a long time but now there's not a lot of maintenance  anymore.  But the cool thing is that they still have a lot of packages on memo.org with maps,  calculators, useful stuff.  Okay and I've been using it ever since as I said and the big problem is that not everything  in Memo 5 which is the Memo they made for the Nokia N100 is open source.  If it was, I think it would have kept on living for a long time ever since they made it.  They made it and not, you know, being hiatus stated for a while.  And big parts are not open source, that's a problem.  So I've covered some of it, like why are we doing this?  I love the OS and I still want to be able to use it, that's a personal reason for me  and this phone, the N100 is becoming very old so I need a new device on which I can  run the same or similar software which actually gives me news.co.nix on my phone.  And I just wanted to be fully open source because this one is not.  So it's been used by a lot of ordinary users, the UI might look a little arcane at this  point, I'll also use screenshot later, I think it's actually very usable still but it doesn't  look anything like iOS and Android now look like.  And Memo Lesta is entirely community developed so over the years a lot of community members  have worked and they've come and gone and there's currently three or four people actively  working on Memo Lesta and we started about two years ago and there's a lot more people  joining and testing and fixing minor things but there's like three or four core developers.  So it's not that many.  And I really like the fact that we're community developed because there's no corporate backing  and there's no special interest, nobody wants to run their specific cloud on our device  and we're not pre-installing any specific cloud software or whatever and there's no  specific direction that will take it just because the company wants to do things that  make sense financially.  And it's compatible with existing software so as opposed to I think every single mobile  dish for you named they all are on Wayland, right?  And we're doing one that still uses X11, you can hate it or like it.  The code works on X11, it was open source, there was no reason for us to make that work  on Wayland right now.  And it uses GTK2, 3 and QT and there are some parts of the GTK but it's mostly theming  and some wedges but it also means that if you want to run, let's say something crazy  Libre Office, you can just install it and it will actually just start on the device.  It probably won't be very usable because there's all these buttons and menus but it  will look stylishly, the dialogues will be styled and they kind of integrate in the  system.  If you take more SIM publications they'll probably just run.  And I think that's a big feat because if you base your work on top of Debian and Dev1 as  I'll talk about in a bit, then there's 20,000 packages in repository that you can all just  install and use.  And some of them might be a bit clunky but they might also be very good.  And everything that we do is open source.  Everything that we write now is GPL and if there's some open source license that was  not GPL before then we just run with it.  If not, you wrote something that was not GPL.  Another thing that I really like is that the APIs for Mamo are developed with mobile in  mind.  So they thought about power management.  They think about things like there's a proximity sensor so if you put something to your ear  the screen needs to go off and the touchscreen shouldn't work anymore, right, because otherwise  you're pressing buttons.  Or if you're in a darker room then the brightness should adjust itself to the ambient level.  There's a compass in there if you flip the phone it needs to go to port greater landscape  mode, that kind of stuff.  And all the APIs are there so if we're working on making all this work we have a fixed point.  We just follow what the APIs did, we re-implement them and it all kind of just works.  It uses only, on the end of the 100 it actually uses like 80 megabytes, 150 megabytes is the  default I think on 64-bit devices.  And there's a lot of applications out there that were community developed and if we keep  the same APIs mostly then it's just a matter of recompiling them when they work.  So I think that's really cool.  And it allows us to keep focus.  So what do we do?  We ported code and we updated APIs.  We looked at some code, programs that were not open source and we tried to figure out  how they worked and re-implemented them.  If they were a demo we just looked at the interfaces and we tried to just make that work.  And we build everything in Jenkins.  So we have Git repositories currently on GitHub and Jenkins just builds whatever we can make  it build it for us and adds it back to the Debian repository.  And installing Memo is as simple, if you want to do it you can just install Debian or Dev1  because we don't use systemd but someone is working on systemd support if you really  want it.  But you just add a single line and you install our meta package and that's it.  It just works on top of Debian.  I think that's really cool.  And our aim is to make it work for people here at Fosism, for hackers, for open source  enthusiasts and not necessarily for the end user.  We'll maybe get there but we're not there now.  And a really cool thing is that I think somewhere mid last year we submitted for funding for  Nounet which is a non-profit in the Netherlands and we actually got 40,000 euros in funding.  So we get paid for some of the work we do.  This is what it looks like on the N900.  You can see that I was testing some Python binding so the binary clock shows up there.  The actual clock is not a binary clock.  I was just testing a replacement clock applet.  It's connected to the KPN network provider in Netherlands on 3G.  The battery is full.  It's on Wi-Fi.  The 4 says the Wi-Fi signal is pretty strong.  It's currently muted for sound and it tells me that the application manager thinks there's  an update available.  So what do we have now?  It's alpha quality at best.  If you got super excited, I'm sorry.  Once it works and I can make phone calls, I'm going to start using it as my main device.  I'm going to keep on dock footing it and I hope others will do the same.  Right now it runs on the Nukia N900, the Motorola Droid 4 and the Pine phone.  I haven't mentioned the Motorola Droid 4 before.  It's made by Motorola and it's one of the last physical keyboard phones they made.  Nukia N900 is a physical keyboard and that one does too.  It has a pretty good chip power management-wise.  I think two people have been working super actively on mainline support for years and  now it actually works really well.  So the Wi-Fi works, the modem works, power management works.  You can get a couple days of power on that thing.  So I think that's really cool.  We use virtual machines for development.  So you can run QMU, VMware, VirtualBox and you can just have the desktop environment in  your virtual machine log in over SSH and do your development.  We still need to get some core components in place.  The main thing lacking I think right now is a phone UI because we are actually able to  make some phone calls using the command line but that's not how you want to answer your  phone or make a phone call.  I think it will probably be a couple months, honestly, until we get to that point.  But I'm still pretty excited.  And as I said before, there are demo devices at the point 64.AW and I think they'll be  there until 5.  So maybe you've already seen them.  And I'm really hoping that the power management will be really good because the Nokia 900  lasts for maybe a week, a week and a half if I don't use it that much.  I've never seen that on an Android phone.  So these are the devices we support and there's a link up there with more devices that are  not that well supported but they kind of work.  Like I said, we really try to focus on a couple.  And last but not least, if you're really interested in PowerVR, we just did the 3D driver on the  Nokia 900 and the Motorola Android 4.  The state was terrible and we've been working on it with other people for a year and a half  and now you can patch mainline Linux a little bit and it will start.  The user space is still closed source but Texas Instruments is actually building new  binaries for us.  So it's actually looking pretty good.  We'll leave it to Bart.  As a conclusion, well as we showed, there are various UI's, various distributions available.  Basically everybody's choice is available and possible.  But all of them do need work.  We need a lot of help.  Nowadays we do have devices to run them on so please get a device, get into the various  chat channels, ask what you can do.  We don't just need developers, we also need end users.  We need people to write documentation and with some where everybody can do that.  Hopefully this year, probably first half of the year, maybe second half of the year, expect  phones to actually show up.  The Pine phone will work.  The Libre 5 will by then work and hopefully next year most people here will be able to  run such a device and be able to call with it, have fun with it.  Just make sure don't be afraid to ask questions.  We're all great people, we always appreciate every help we can get, all the help we can  get and we hope to see you in the various channels and forums and all the places we are.  Hope to welcome you into our community.  Lastly, resources, quick links.  Memo Lesta is available on FreeNote on RSC with hashtag Memo-Lesta.  Postmarked is available also on FreeNote with hashtag PostmarkedOS.  We're also on Matrix, the channels are bridge so it doesn't matter which you choose.  Please join, have a look at our websites for more information and hope to see you next  year.  If you're interested in more technical details from Memo specifically, I did a talk a couple  months ago in Bulgaria and OpenFest which is another great open source event like this  and it's about an hour long.  I'll make sure the slides are on the Foslin website somehow.  It's more technical and in-depth than this talk.  It's up there.  Any questions?  I think that's all my thoughts.  It's all here, Lesta.  With so many distributions being available, is there some plan to have something like  flag packs?  Can you please leave quietly or shovel quietly because I can't hear.  Please repeat.  With so many distributions available, is it possible that you can run, say, I don't know,  flat pack or snap on it to develop and package for one of the distributions for all of them  or do you have to basically build an APK for Alpine, a Dev for Debian based ones?  So I guess the question is, with so many distributions available, do you want to package the app for  all the different distributions or can you use snap or flat pack?  Depends a bit on the distribution.  Most distributions of data mentioned do support something like flat pack or snap.  You can package them in FlatHub and you can install and run them on your device.  Not all distribution might necessarily support out-of-box but often it's just app to get,  install flat pack and it'll work.  Hi, so I didn't hear anything about Hallyum.  Are you working together with the Hallyum guys to get a...  Okay.  Okay.  Are you working somehow together with the Hallyum guys to get...  You know?  I could not hear what you were saying.  Please repeat.  You didn't hear anything?  Okay.  So yeah, are you working together with the Hallyum guys to get the stack for Android mobile  phones?  Yes, no.  Okay.  Actually, I should tell you, see here.  Yeah.  Are you working together with the Hallyum guys?  Hallyum guys?  Okay, so the question is, are we working together with Hallyum?  I think Hallyum is using Android as a base and it's like an abstraction around Android  to make things work better on Android devices.  I think a lot of distros are but MIMO is not because we really want to focus on mainline  only and I don't want Android modem abstractions or graphics driver abstractions or anything  else like that.  Maybe people in the community have done it.  They've used it to make MIMO less to work on Android phones.  We might support that in the future but right now we don't do that.  In case of post-marketOS, we have, I think, three or four devices actually using Hallyum  slash deep hybrids.  Most of them don't but we definitely appreciate the effort if somebody port Hallyum and our  system to it.  So yeah, we should part it.  Do we have more questions?  Thank you.  Is it true that for the choice of the hardware for not pine for the other one for prism,  you only can choose the battery from the prime prism window.  So you're locked in with that battery, changing the battery.  If you want to change the battery, the battery gets damaged and you want to change it.  You're locked in with a prism.  You can't buy a third window.  So that depends a bit on the device.  You said about changing batteries, right?  You talk about changing batteries.  Yeah, so that depends on the device.  On the N100 you can change batteries without problem.  The pine phone uses a standard Samsung battery so you can just buy those stock batteries  and replace the battery in your pine phone.  I'm not sure if you can replace it while the device is on.  You could do that with some devices too.  If you powered them over USB, swap out the battery, that kind of stuff, they can work.  I can't hear you.  On the prism smartphone you can't buy from another window the battery.  Locked in with that, with the hardware.  Yeah, the main problem with batteries is I guess the voltage and the size of the battery.  Most phones even though manufacturers say you should not replace the battery, you can  just get any other in the world work fine.  If we take the pine phone, they basically already set from the store.  They do support replacing battery.  You can get I think a Galaxy J7 battery in the world work fine in the pine phone.  In case of Liebherm 5, I think they use a custom form factor.  So you did it bit hard.  But the device itself is not the reason.  There's no hardware limitations on the battery.  It's just a form factor and if the voltage is good, it should be fine.  What's the policy for binary blobs in PostmarketOS?  What's the policy for binary blobs in PostmarketOS?  Do you really care about them or just whatever?  The question is if we care about binary blobs in PostmarketOS.  We prefer not to, of course.  When in some case some binary blobs or at least firmware is needed to get the device  running.  We do ship at least proprietary firmware.  When possible, but there are some efforts to replace proprietary firmware and provider  blobs with open source variants.  We try to use it wherever possible.  For example, the Mali GPU in the pine phone, it has binary blobs, but we try to use Mesa  instead.  That doesn't mean if it's actually needed to get the device running, sadly we have to,  but we do packages.  Okay, thanks.  Any more questions?  I have a question about MMLS.  Does it support dual boot with original N900 firmware?  Does it support what?  Dual boot with original software from N900.  Currently we haven't made it work with the other software that's on the old N100.  If you, for example, take their binaries, you just want to run it on MMLS to write.  It doesn't work.  I've tried it a couple of times.  Some simple binaries work.  But other things start to go very wrong.  It uses a different API.  It uses its RML, not ARM hard flow, so the floating point stuff is different.  It can still sometimes work.  I think if you try hard enough, you might be able to make it work, but we haven't tried  that hard.  So good.  Do we have any more questions?  Thank you very much.  Thank you.
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So, it's 1500. It's time for the next talk by Merlin and Bart. And I'm really looking forward to this talk because it's not, as I perceive the project, not only about regaining control over your smartphones, which is of course very good, but it's also to be able to keep your phones longer even if there's no further support from vendors anymore. That's what I also like. But let's get more first-hand facts from Merlin and Bart. Enjoy. Thank you all. Does it work? Yeah, it works. Good. Okay. So, I'm Merlin and I'm Merlin. This is Bart. I'm going to show you what we're going to be talking about, then we'll introduce ourselves and we'll roll right into the contents. So this is better. So our talk is titled, Save as a Millenax on the Smartphone, How to Liberate Your Device by Running Actual Linux and Software You Control. So we're going to briefly introduce ourselves first. Then I will talk about why we need Millenax on the Smartphone, like why do we need it? I think the answer is obvious, but maybe it isn't, so we're going to discuss that for a while. Then I'll talk about some hard and hardware problems and potential solutions to that. Then Bart will give you an overview of all the existing software out there, like all the different efforts that people are undertaking. He'll talk about PostMarketOS and I'll talk about MIMO. And by that time, we should get to questions. So my name is Merlin or Merlin in Dutch. I studied at the University of Amsterdam. I did computer science. I do work for the Intel Archive. Archive work, they did the Wayback Machine, the Archive webpages and books and CDs and other cool stuff. And in my spare time at night, I work on MIMO, I am also a board member of the Amsterdam Hacker Space, have been for a while and I run tour exits and work on other free software projects. So my name is Bart Revers. I'm mostly known as CureTreeOut on the Internet. I work in PostMarketOS and also because of PostMarketOS, I also work on Alpine Linux. I'm still studying. I live in the Netherlands and my school set me a bit dominated by the proprietary Windows crowd, so I'm the only one that's trying to liberate the school. And yeah, basically that's it. Okay, so why should you run Linux on your smartphone? There's a couple of reasons for it. First of all, thank you. So how many of you are running iOS or Android? Just raise your hands. iOS or Android? How many of you are running Android? Most of you are running Android, right? So Android runs Linux of some kind, but it's not really new Linux. How many of you are running Linux US? It's like 5% of the people that just raised their hands. So most of you use Android that was installed by your vendor, which could be Motorola or Google or some other hardware vendor. And if you look at what we do on our laptops, like how many people if you were running Linux on your laptop? Right? Did you install it yourself? Yeah. Okay, but we do this on our servers. We do this on our desktops. We do this on our laptops, but we don't do it on our phones. And there are many reasons for that. And we'll get to some of those reasons, but first, why would you want that? So obviously if you run your software on your phone, on your laptop, you have full control. You already have, I mean, you decide what runs. You decide what distro you want. You decide if you want GNOME or KDE or Wayland or Xorg or Sway or whatever you want to run. And I think that's very important. I think that's what draws a lot of different crowds and binds us together in the fact that we can work on all these different things. And it gives you, and we have the freedom to modify whatever we want. So we can change the software. We can fix stuff. We can work as a community to make all this better. And with the smartphones, we really can. With Apple, it's just they work on something and that's it. Maybe you can report a bug and you'll hear something in a couple months. Google does some of the code as open source, but they work in a closed way. So every now and then they just drop code and that's kind of it. So there's no way that we as a community here can work together currently. There's some efforts to do that, but they're not super well known. And of course, if you have an Android phone right now, you're dependent on your manufacturer. If Motorola supports Android until 6.0, then if Android 7.0 is released or their security fixes, you have to wait for them to fix it or flash them as you ask if it supports your device. And there's no support and they usually they make you get a new device every couple years, which is not ideal. Because, you know, I'm still using my Nokia and your 100 and have been for the last 10 years and it still works fine. And very often Android has basically iOS as well. They have spyware built into some point that at the point that you know, like if you have your phone, you know it's tracking you in some way. And you have to figure out all these different ways of tracking. You have to deny permissions for everything. It gets very tricky. I think the right way to do it is to start with a device that doesn't track you at all in any way and then start reasoning about how you can make it not track you. Very often there's a lot of bloatware, super large apps and lock-ins with different communication platforms and I think that's not a good thing for the community as well. Okay, so what does it mean? If we want to be in control, we don't want to be dependent on a manufacturer, what do we need? So I think the essential pieces of a Glynynelex smartphone is that it has mainline Linux support and for those of you who don't know, mainline Linux means that you can go to kernel.org, the website of Linux. You download the latest release and you can build a free device and it works more or less that. There might be some driver issues, but it just works. And for most of your Android devices, you can't do that. It won't be supported in Linux because the vendor just made some changes and maybe if you're lucky you can get the changes as the last talk covered. And that's kind of it. So if you all want to work together on Linux, we need this to be there. And we want most of the drivers to be open source so that we can improve the drivers, make them better. And we need a boot loader without restrictions. So if you run a very Android boot loader or something else, as long as they allow you to boot Linux, your own version of Linux so it's not signed by some cryptographic key and you can just do it yourself, that's probably good enough. It will be ideal if the boot loader is completely open source from the start, but that might not be completely realistic. And of course, if you have Linux and a boot loader, you need something other than the kernel to actually do stuff with your phone. So we need usable user space that's free and open source. And ideally there will be many distros and many UIs like we have right now in our laptops. But there's quite some problems. So if you boot your laptop with Intel, you just kind of insert whatever your distro is. Maybe you want to CD or USB stick and it boots to a boot loader and it just boots to a desktop or UI and you can do things. And the phone just doesn't work that way. Hardware support on ARM is different. There's no BIOS that sets everything up and then loads a boot loader and then the boot loader will go to Linux and Linux looks at whatever the BIOS provides at ARM on whatever is in the PCI bus to load the drivers. This is not the ARM. There's no currently very good infrastructure to do that. There's some progress has been made, but for a lot of devices that doesn't work. So that's hard. You have to often compile your own kernel with the right options so you can't just plug in something and hope it works. And of course, most of the devices that I said have vendor-only kernels. So they take Linux on a certain point. They add some things and that's kind of it. They never contribute it back. The boot loader sometimes even lock down and specifically boot loaders here. You have to configure them manually. Often compile them as well because they have the same problem. They don't know what hardware is in your device and they can't detect what they should support so you can render something on your screen. And there are so many devices. There's so many different Android phones and there's so many different Chinese ones and different large United States manufacturers. And another problem is power management. Power management on the desktop and laptop is pretty good with Linux nowadays. If you're lucky, you can get eight or nine hours in your laptop. If your phone lasts only eight or nine hours in your pocket and gets warm, it's not a very good... You need something better. And with the 64-bit ARM, some of what I said before got a little better so there's some way to detect what drivers you have. If you have an EFI boot loader, then you can kind of do it but it's still somewhat problematic. So these are a lot of problems. There's some solutions that we as a community can... Or some things we can do as a community to hopefully make this a little less painful. We can focus only a couple of devices. So take a couple of Android phones or whatever phones people made that are not that hard to support or are GPL-friendly. I mean, have GPL-friendly manufacturers that kind of stuff will be good. Or if people are manufacturing new devices, they should pick a system on chip that is well supported by Linux already. So system on chip is basically the computer and graphics card. Most of the things integrated in a simple small thing that is on your phone. And there's actually a company doing that, or several companies doing that. We'll cover them in a bit. And I think the way to actually get Linux support proper is not to rely on Android and an Android kernel by vendor to provide some drivers and then rely on it. So there's some good projects at abstraction layers around Android and Android drivers so you can run your own Linux stuff on there. But it doesn't get us any closer to actual mainline Linux on our phones. So there are two companies working on new devices right now. The first one is Pine 64. They have a stand in the AW building today. I think they might have a stand on 205. So after the talk finishes, you can still go there. And they are showing off their phone and tablet with various OSs that currently are in alpha state or kind of working right now. So if you're excited, you should go there. And specifically, they are working on something called the Pine phone, maybe not surprising. It features an all-winner A64 SoC system on chip, and it has very good mainline support. And this is not necessarily because of the company all-winner, but because for the last couple years, people who visit FOS, have been working very actively to support the devices because you can find a lot of single board computers. So if you know Raspberry Pi, there's a lot of other boards like that. Like there's Oldie Max boards and Pine 64. They make boards with all-inerts in there, and you can use them as a small server at home or as a media box. So mainline support in Linux is really good. The driver support is getting pretty decent. There's 2GB of RAM, EMMC, and a quad-core CPU. And there's an open-source 3D driver. For many years, specifically 3D in the whole ARM space has been a big problem. And I think four or five years ago, someone here, LibV, started working on the Lima driver for the Mali 400 GPU. He did a lot of work. He did a big talk here on the K building a couple years ago, and then stopped working on it, and then others picked it up. And now today, we actually have a driver that works on wayline.xorg. So that's awesome. And another cool thing that the platform features are kill switches. So if you want to only turn off your microphone, you just flip a physical switch, and then the line of your microphone no longer runs through your phone, so there's no way that whatever you say will be recorded by the mono. You can do the same for Wi-Fi. You can turn off your cameras. You can do the same for Bluetooth. So that's kind of neat if you want some extra privacy features. It features the WorldWi 4G slash LTE modem, so wherever you go, it should just work. And they will likely, when the phone is finished, allow you to pick a distribution that kind of works on the phone, and then they'll preinstall it for you. So that's kind of cool. Our lab board continue. And it costs 150 euros. Approximately. The other company is Purism, is making the Liebren 5. This might be more known to the community. The device is actually based on a different sock than the Pinephone is. It's a bit more powerful as well. The kill switches are actually on the outside, while on the Pinephone, they're on the inside of the phone. So it's a bit easier actually to flip the switch. The mainline support is also pretty good. It still runs on some out of three patches, but they're actively being worked on and being upstreamed. From Purism, they're working on the distribution PureOS, which is the main focus for the Liebren 5. They're going to run it out of the box. And at the moment, they have the Chestnut Edition shipped. That just means it's one of the first batches that has shipped. They work in several batches, meaning the first batch is basically an early version, and there might be some little issues with it. And the next batch has those issues fixed. And then some issues might occur there. The next batch has those issues fixed. Chestnut Edition is basically for the brave heart, the people that don't really mind having some issues and don't mind working around them. I think right now the price is $800, but it's changing a bit, so it might not be accurate. And depending on the region you're at, it uses a different modem. I think especially USA versus Europe and India. This is basically just a prominent kind of pine phone, and hopefully we'll see a lot of people next year using it instead of their Android phones. So to give an overview of the currently various efforts to put Linux on mobile, there are a lot of distros out there at the moment. Just to start somewhere, we have KD Neon, made by the KDE project. It's already used on desktop a lot. It's basically based on a new one with the newest KDE stack on it. In case of mobile, they put the newest versions of all the mobile components of KDE on it. To make it work on current phones, just not the pine phone and the Libre 5, but on regular Android phones, they use Libre hybrid, which is a technique to make Android drivers and stuff work on regular Linux systems. And that's basically the main development distribution for KDE on mobile. The next one will be Ubuntu Touch. This is probably the most completed distribution at the moment out there. It works a bit differently than most distributions. The base system is read-only, and they install packages with, they call it the click system. And if they update the system, it just reboots into the recovery mode, installs a new version, then reboots into it, instead of running, say, AppGet update. It comes with Unity 8. On most devices at the moment, it uses, again, Lib Hybrid to work, to make the drivers work. But they're quite far advanced as well with the Pinephone and Libre 5 to make it work with mainline drivers and without Lib Hybrid. And if you want to run a Linux on mobile system like this year, and you want some apps to run, Ubuntu Touch is probably your best bet. Then we have Nemo Mobile, based on the, originally on Mir, nowadays, that's basically Salesforce OS. It basically takes Salesforce OS, but replaces the proprietary components of it with free and open source software that mainly comes down to the user interface and applications that come with it. It basically runs on every device that's selfish OS runs on it, just replace the, put the repository of them on top of it, install the different packages and it will run. Now we have LunOS, it's based on the older WebOS, which was made by LG. They originally discontinued the efforts to make WebOS, and then the community decided to fork it, make LunOS. Today's LG has picked up WebOS again, so LunOS is nowadays working with LG to bring the, all the components back together, make sure that it stays open source and it's based on modern techniques and hardware. Again, it uses Lib Hybrid to work instead of mainline drivers, but they're working on the Pinephone as well, in which case, again, they'll use the mainline drivers properly. Then we have Astroid OS, it's a bit different, it's not really smartphone OS, but more of a smart watch OS. It's, again, used Lib Hybrid, it's made for the smart watches, which basically is a moment run Android watch. It's a regular Linux system, I think it's based on Yocto or Open and Bennett, I'm not entirely sure. The UI and stuff is again based on Mer, which is updated in a different direction. Then AOSC, it's made for more of the Eastern Asian market, it's main focus is on Plasma Mobile, runs on mainline only, it doesn't run on any other devices that do not have mainline, so it's basically at the moment mainly the Pinephone and Libra 5. Then we have PureOS, this is made by Purism, the company that makes the Libra 5, it's mainly focused on running on the Libra 5, although also on the other Libra products, so the laptops. This PureOS will ship with Porsche, I'm not sure how to pronounce it properly, but it's based on the GNOME stack. They use GNOME technologies and they run GNOME applications, but adapt it so they are made responsive and will resize them to various phone sizes. This PureOS is made to only run on mainline kernels, because it's only made to run on Libra 5 really, but in theory you can run on any phone that has mainline. And it's a fork of Debian. Then we have Manjaro, they popped up recently showing they have interest in making a mobile version as well, it's Manjaro ARM project. They focus at the moment on Plasma Mobile, but they're based on ARC, so in theory they can run anything that ARC can run. And also it's made to run only on mainline kernels and at the moment they're working on mainly the Pinephone. And then we have NixOS, last year they got funding by Nelnet to work on it, so they now have a full time developer. It's a standalone OS, it works a bit differently, the package manager is quite interesting, I can recommend you look into it. It runs on the Pinephone as well, but they're also trying to get it on existing Android devices, in which case again they use Libybus. The interface that we'll come with is not set of stone yet, we're working on multiple interfaces, so you can probably eventually run Plasma Mobile in it and Forge and Unity and hopefully lots of others. So post-MarketOS, that's what I work on. In my opinion the best one, but probably others disagree. This was announced on the 26th of May 2017 by Oliver Smith, he had worked on it in private for a year by then, he made some basic tooling to work on it and at that point he thought was ready to show it to the world. When he made the original blog post that announced the project, it only supported two devices or at least booted on two devices, but basically now we boot up to one on the SF33 devices, it sounds like a lot but it's probably not even half of all the Android phones out there, quite a lot. Do note, we say support, but it doesn't mean you can pick up the phone, install post-MarketOS on it and expect to make a call and have fun with it. It's more, most devices are more in like a Raspberry Pi stage, you have a working Wi-Fi, you have a working screen and you can run some interesting applications in it, but don't expect that you can make calls or send SMS with it. We do have a few devices that what you can make calls with or at least close to make calls with, but most of them will not be the case. Well, post-MarketOS is based on Alpine Linux, it's probably a mostly popular distro for Docker containers and on server installations, but it will also work fine on laptops, desktops and in our host phones. We chose Alpine Linux mainly because it's really tiny. The base installation without the kernel that is, is only six megabytes big, so that's basically a booting system once you add the kernel. Because we work, we chose this because of size, because we work with a lot of change routes. Every time we do something, we make a change route, do some stuff in it, we remove the change route and that happens a lot and if you do that like six times a day, you don't really want to wait every time the whole distribution is installed. Because our system is only, only the basis anyway, is only six megabytes big, this isn't the issue. The change routes are made and this, made and removed again inferior within seconds and the development is quick because of it. We are basically a distro for repository on top of Alpine Linux, so we use all the packages from Alpine Linux and although we have our custom stuff sometimes, we do try to upstream as much as possible to Alpine Linux and where possible also custom patches to the various projects that are out there. We are like next to us basically, we are interface agnostic, meaning we currently focusing on Plasma Mobile, but we also ship Fosh, we had Unity in the past, Unity 8 and we'll ship, hopefully ship it again in the future, but we also ship with Hilden from Memo Lester and hopefully in the future also Glacier UI and any other UI that might pop up. So we try to give the choice to the user, you can use our system and it doesn't mean you have to be forced to one interface or another. Like I said before, don't expect most devices to install it on the system and then expect it to call. We are basically an alpha state, you can boot the system, you can mess around with have fun and except for a few devices, you probably won't use this phone in our case, but the Raspberry Pi is also cool basically, so you can use it like that. We have our chat channels on Matrix and ISE, please join when you feel free, we need both end users and developers, we can use all the help, hope to see you there. Back to Malin. Thank you, does it work? Yeah, I think so. Okay. Definitely works, right? Okay. So I'm going to tell you a bit about what I've been working on, which is Memo Lester, I hope I pronounced it correctly, I'm not from Finland and I've heard people pronounce it differently, Memo, IMO, I say Memo, hope it doesn't offend anyone. It was developed by Nokia a long time ago, Nokia was in the smart phone business, an internet tablet business maybe even before Apple made their first iPhone, maybe it was around the same time and they have been working on Memo for a while, they had various internet tablets, they had the N770, the N800, N810, those were all internet tablets, you can use them for navigation but they had no cellular modem in there and then they made the N100 that I still use today and they had a lot of people working on that OS and it was based on Debian and by that I don't mean that they literally used the Debian repository but they used APT, the package manager, the Debian package format and a lot of the base system was the same. They actually sold a lot of devices, they sold I think, well, a lot, at least I think it's a lot, they sold a couple hundred thousand Nokia N900s at least, so a lot of people who don't typically visit Fosnam actually use that device probably for a couple years. And it's still being maintained by the community, there were actually a lot of people using it, it was kind of dubbed the hacker phone because Nokia N100 had a radio transmitter and receiver in there so you could put it in your car and it will transmit radio on your car radio and you can just listen to that and a lot of cool features. And the community maintained it for a long time but now there's not a lot of maintenance anymore. But the cool thing is that they still have a lot of packages on memo.org with maps, calculators, useful stuff. Okay and I've been using it ever since as I said and the big problem is that not everything in Memo 5 which is the Memo they made for the Nokia N100 is open source. If it was, I think it would have kept on living for a long time ever since they made it. They made it and not, you know, being hiatus stated for a while. And big parts are not open source, that's a problem. So I've covered some of it, like why are we doing this? I love the OS and I still want to be able to use it, that's a personal reason for me and this phone, the N100 is becoming very old so I need a new device on which I can run the same or similar software which actually gives me news.co.nix on my phone. And I just wanted to be fully open source because this one is not. So it's been used by a lot of ordinary users, the UI might look a little arcane at this point, I'll also use screenshot later, I think it's actually very usable still but it doesn't look anything like iOS and Android now look like. And Memo Lesta is entirely community developed so over the years a lot of community members have worked and they've come and gone and there's currently three or four people actively working on Memo Lesta and we started about two years ago and there's a lot more people joining and testing and fixing minor things but there's like three or four core developers. So it's not that many. And I really like the fact that we're community developed because there's no corporate backing and there's no special interest, nobody wants to run their specific cloud on our device and we're not pre-installing any specific cloud software or whatever and there's no specific direction that will take it just because the company wants to do things that make sense financially. And it's compatible with existing software so as opposed to I think every single mobile dish for you named they all are on Wayland, right? And we're doing one that still uses X11, you can hate it or like it. The code works on X11, it was open source, there was no reason for us to make that work on Wayland right now. And it uses GTK2, 3 and QT and there are some parts of the GTK but it's mostly theming and some wedges but it also means that if you want to run, let's say something crazy Libre Office, you can just install it and it will actually just start on the device. It probably won't be very usable because there's all these buttons and menus but it will look stylishly, the dialogues will be styled and they kind of integrate in the system. If you take more SIM publications they'll probably just run. And I think that's a big feat because if you base your work on top of Debian and Dev1 as I'll talk about in a bit, then there's 20,000 packages in repository that you can all just install and use. And some of them might be a bit clunky but they might also be very good. And everything that we do is open source. Everything that we write now is GPL and if there's some open source license that was not GPL before then we just run with it. If not, you wrote something that was not GPL. Another thing that I really like is that the APIs for Mamo are developed with mobile in mind. So they thought about power management. They think about things like there's a proximity sensor so if you put something to your ear the screen needs to go off and the touchscreen shouldn't work anymore, right, because otherwise you're pressing buttons. Or if you're in a darker room then the brightness should adjust itself to the ambient level. There's a compass in there if you flip the phone it needs to go to port greater landscape mode, that kind of stuff. And all the APIs are there so if we're working on making all this work we have a fixed point. We just follow what the APIs did, we re-implement them and it all kind of just works. It uses only, on the end of the 100 it actually uses like 80 megabytes, 150 megabytes is the default I think on 64-bit devices. And there's a lot of applications out there that were community developed and if we keep the same APIs mostly then it's just a matter of recompiling them when they work. So I think that's really cool. And it allows us to keep focus. So what do we do? We ported code and we updated APIs. We looked at some code, programs that were not open source and we tried to figure out how they worked and re-implemented them. If they were a demo we just looked at the interfaces and we tried to just make that work. And we build everything in Jenkins. So we have Git repositories currently on GitHub and Jenkins just builds whatever we can make it build it for us and adds it back to the Debian repository. And installing Memo is as simple, if you want to do it you can just install Debian or Dev1 because we don't use systemd but someone is working on systemd support if you really want it. But you just add a single line and you install our meta package and that's it. It just works on top of Debian. I think that's really cool. And our aim is to make it work for people here at Fosism, for hackers, for open source enthusiasts and not necessarily for the end user. We'll maybe get there but we're not there now. And a really cool thing is that I think somewhere mid last year we submitted for funding for Nounet which is a non-profit in the Netherlands and we actually got 40,000 euros in funding. So we get paid for some of the work we do. This is what it looks like on the N900. You can see that I was testing some Python binding so the binary clock shows up there. The actual clock is not a binary clock. I was just testing a replacement clock applet. It's connected to the KPN network provider in Netherlands on 3G. The battery is full. It's on Wi-Fi. The 4 says the Wi-Fi signal is pretty strong. It's currently muted for sound and it tells me that the application manager thinks there's an update available. So what do we have now? It's alpha quality at best. If you got super excited, I'm sorry. Once it works and I can make phone calls, I'm going to start using it as my main device. I'm going to keep on dock footing it and I hope others will do the same. Right now it runs on the Nukia N900, the Motorola Droid 4 and the Pine phone. I haven't mentioned the Motorola Droid 4 before. It's made by Motorola and it's one of the last physical keyboard phones they made. Nukia N900 is a physical keyboard and that one does too. It has a pretty good chip power management-wise. I think two people have been working super actively on mainline support for years and now it actually works really well. So the Wi-Fi works, the modem works, power management works. You can get a couple days of power on that thing. So I think that's really cool. We use virtual machines for development. So you can run QMU, VMware, VirtualBox and you can just have the desktop environment in your virtual machine log in over SSH and do your development. We still need to get some core components in place. The main thing lacking I think right now is a phone UI because we are actually able to make some phone calls using the command line but that's not how you want to answer your phone or make a phone call. I think it will probably be a couple months, honestly, until we get to that point. But I'm still pretty excited. And as I said before, there are demo devices at the point 64.AW and I think they'll be there until 5. So maybe you've already seen them. And I'm really hoping that the power management will be really good because the Nokia 900 lasts for maybe a week, a week and a half if I don't use it that much. I've never seen that on an Android phone. So these are the devices we support and there's a link up there with more devices that are not that well supported but they kind of work. Like I said, we really try to focus on a couple. And last but not least, if you're really interested in PowerVR, we just did the 3D driver on the Nokia 900 and the Motorola Android 4. The state was terrible and we've been working on it with other people for a year and a half and now you can patch mainline Linux a little bit and it will start. The user space is still closed source but Texas Instruments is actually building new binaries for us. So it's actually looking pretty good. We'll leave it to Bart. As a conclusion, well as we showed, there are various UI's, various distributions available. Basically everybody's choice is available and possible. But all of them do need work. We need a lot of help. Nowadays we do have devices to run them on so please get a device, get into the various chat channels, ask what you can do. We don't just need developers, we also need end users. We need people to write documentation and with some where everybody can do that. Hopefully this year, probably first half of the year, maybe second half of the year, expect phones to actually show up. The Pine phone will work. The Libre 5 will by then work and hopefully next year most people here will be able to run such a device and be able to call with it, have fun with it. Just make sure don't be afraid to ask questions. We're all great people, we always appreciate every help we can get, all the help we can get and we hope to see you in the various channels and forums and all the places we are. Hope to welcome you into our community. Lastly, resources, quick links. Memo Lesta is available on FreeNote on RSC with hashtag Memo-Lesta. Postmarked is available also on FreeNote with hashtag PostmarkedOS. We're also on Matrix, the channels are bridge so it doesn't matter which you choose. Please join, have a look at our websites for more information and hope to see you next year. If you're interested in more technical details from Memo specifically, I did a talk a couple months ago in Bulgaria and OpenFest which is another great open source event like this and it's about an hour long. I'll make sure the slides are on the Foslin website somehow. It's more technical and in-depth than this talk. It's up there. Any questions? I think that's all my thoughts. It's all here, Lesta. With so many distributions being available, is there some plan to have something like flag packs? Can you please leave quietly or shovel quietly because I can't hear. Please repeat. With so many distributions available, is it possible that you can run, say, I don't know, flat pack or snap on it to develop and package for one of the distributions for all of them or do you have to basically build an APK for Alpine, a Dev for Debian based ones? So I guess the question is, with so many distributions available, do you want to package the app for all the different distributions or can you use snap or flat pack? Depends a bit on the distribution. Most distributions of data mentioned do support something like flat pack or snap. You can package them in FlatHub and you can install and run them on your device. Not all distribution might necessarily support out-of-box but often it's just app to get, install flat pack and it'll work. Hi, so I didn't hear anything about Hallyum. Are you working together with the Hallyum guys to get a... Okay. Okay. Are you working somehow together with the Hallyum guys to get... You know? I could not hear what you were saying. Please repeat. You didn't hear anything? Okay. So yeah, are you working together with the Hallyum guys to get the stack for Android mobile phones? Yes, no. Okay. Actually, I should tell you, see here. Yeah. Are you working together with the Hallyum guys? Hallyum guys? Okay, so the question is, are we working together with Hallyum? I think Hallyum is using Android as a base and it's like an abstraction around Android to make things work better on Android devices. I think a lot of distros are but MIMO is not because we really want to focus on mainline only and I don't want Android modem abstractions or graphics driver abstractions or anything else like that. Maybe people in the community have done it. They've used it to make MIMO less to work on Android phones. We might support that in the future but right now we don't do that. In case of post-marketOS, we have, I think, three or four devices actually using Hallyum slash deep hybrids. Most of them don't but we definitely appreciate the effort if somebody port Hallyum and our system to it. So yeah, we should part it. Do we have more questions? Thank you. Is it true that for the choice of the hardware for not pine for the other one for prism, you only can choose the battery from the prime prism window. So you're locked in with that battery, changing the battery. If you want to change the battery, the battery gets damaged and you want to change it. You're locked in with a prism. You can't buy a third window. So that depends a bit on the device. You said about changing batteries, right? You talk about changing batteries. Yeah, so that depends on the device. On the N100 you can change batteries without problem. The pine phone uses a standard Samsung battery so you can just buy those stock batteries and replace the battery in your pine phone. I'm not sure if you can replace it while the device is on. You could do that with some devices too. If you powered them over USB, swap out the battery, that kind of stuff, they can work. I can't hear you. On the prism smartphone you can't buy from another window the battery. Locked in with that, with the hardware. Yeah, the main problem with batteries is I guess the voltage and the size of the battery. Most phones even though manufacturers say you should not replace the battery, you can just get any other in the world work fine. If we take the pine phone, they basically already set from the store. They do support replacing battery. You can get I think a Galaxy J7 battery in the world work fine in the pine phone. In case of Liebherm 5, I think they use a custom form factor. So you did it bit hard. But the device itself is not the reason. There's no hardware limitations on the battery. It's just a form factor and if the voltage is good, it should be fine. What's the policy for binary blobs in PostmarketOS? What's the policy for binary blobs in PostmarketOS? Do you really care about them or just whatever? The question is if we care about binary blobs in PostmarketOS. We prefer not to, of course. When in some case some binary blobs or at least firmware is needed to get the device running. We do ship at least proprietary firmware. When possible, but there are some efforts to replace proprietary firmware and provider blobs with open source variants. We try to use it wherever possible. For example, the Mali GPU in the pine phone, it has binary blobs, but we try to use Mesa instead. That doesn't mean if it's actually needed to get the device running, sadly we have to, but we do packages. Okay, thanks. Any more questions? I have a question about MMLS. Does it support dual boot with original N900 firmware? Does it support what? Dual boot with original software from N900. Currently we haven't made it work with the other software that's on the old N100. If you, for example, take their binaries, you just want to run it on MMLS to write. It doesn't work. I've tried it a couple of times. Some simple binaries work. But other things start to go very wrong. It uses a different API. It uses its RML, not ARM hard flow, so the floating point stuff is different. It can still sometimes work. I think if you try hard enough, you might be able to make it work, but we haven't tried that hard. So good. Do we have any more questions? Thank you very much. Thank you.
talk about why we need Millenax on the going to discuss that for a while. Then I'll talk Revers. I'm mostly known as CureTreeOut on the your smartphone? There's a couple of reasons for it's not really new Linux. How many of you are running Linux US? It's like 5% of the people that So we can change the software. We can fix stuff. better. And with the smartphones, we really can. is released or their security fixes, you have to is that it has mainline Linux support and for need this to be there. And we want most of the boot loader is completely open source from the Hardware support on ARM is different. There's no There's some progress has been made, but for a couple years, people who visit FOS, have been their Android phones. So to give an overview of on current phones, just not the pine phone and you want to run a Linux on mobile system like user interface and applications that come with source and it's based on modern techniques and moment run Android watch. It's a regular Linux They focus at the moment on Plasma Mobile, but trying to get it on existing Android devices, in that we'll come with is not set of stone yet, post-MarketOS is based on Alpine Linux, it's will also work fine on laptops, desktops and in for repository on top of Alpine Linux, so we use we currently focusing on Plasma Mobile, but we users and developers, we can use all the help, compatible with existing software so as opposed work on top of Debian and Dev1 as I'll talk about to go off and the touchscreen shouldn't work do. This is what it looks like on the N900. You N900 is a physical keyboard and that one does link up there with more devices that are not that please get a device, get into the various chat can get, all the help we can get and we hope to distributions being available, is there some plan on your device. Not all distribution might that for the choice of the hardware for not pine