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Hey there, and welcome, as usual, to your FOSSphones November News Roundup!
We have some cool new updates to get into, including a new release of Ubuntu Touch, an update on the FuriPhone, a new project attempting to port FreeBSD to the PinePhone Pro, and more. We will also, of course, have our usual FOSSphones App Highlight to share our FOSS mobile app choices with you for this month. With all that being said, let's dive into the roundup!
If you're a fan of Ubuntu Touch like I am, then you might be glad to know there is a new update to check out! A maintenance release of the 20.04 (focal) series, OTA-6 is available, or is becoming available, for the following devices:
The number of changes in this update are minimal, due to the team's current focus on the Ubuntu base OS upgrades. However, even with that being said, there are still some changes to keep in mind with this update.
Some support for newer generations of the Android HAL (hardware abstraction layer) has been added. This will help Ubuntu Touch support newer devices, including the FairPhone 5 and the forthcoming Vollaphone Quintus even better, without implying full support for these devices at this time.
Wireless Display has seen some improved stability on some devices.
There were also some general bug fixes and security updates.
Keep in mind that for this release, VoLTE has been disabled on the Vollaphone X23 and Vollaphone 22 running the Halium 12 port. This was due to a regression at the last minute, and work is ongoing to debug the issue and get it restored on the affected devices.
If you want to read the full update from the Ubuntu Touch Team on this new OTA-6 upgrade, and learn how to get it on your own device, please check out the full post from the Ubuntu Touch Team to get the full scoop.
Last roundup, we covered the new FuriPhone from FuriLabs. This time around, we have a new update from this project to share with you, in the form of some updates to its operating system, FuriOS.
FuriOS 13.0.4 brings support for things like:
All in all, this looks to be a nice quality-of-life improvement for Furi Labs' Debian-based operating system, and I look forward to continuing to see what comes from the company in future releases.
There were a bunch of smaller fixes, as well, that were not mentioned here. If you want to see the full scoop on this new update to FuriOS, check out the post at this link.
Now this is pretty cool, and something I will be paying close attention to as work goes on with it. I love and appreciate all free operating systems, not just GNU/Linux, so that includes projects which I also use sometimes, such as FreeBSD. FreeBSD has been an integral part of the FOSS world for a long time, keeping that BSD train rolling, along with the few other *BSD distributions we have out there (netBSD, openBSD, etc).
FreeBSD does just fine on the desktop and server, but there haven't been any serious efforts to bring it over to mobile, at least to my knowledge. That changes now, with this new announcement from FreeBSD, from their quarterly status update. In a section called "PinePhone Pro Support", with a short section describing how there is currently an image that boots on PinePhone Pro (FreeBSD RELEASE), it has no working screen output, and has some other issues.
The goal for the announcement being outlined, then, is to "step-by-step support additional components so that the device (PinePhone Pro) might be usable as a highly mobile FreeBSD device". Also, according to the announcement, groundwork has been being laid to support cross-compiling a custom 15.0-RELEASE kernel, as well as toggling LEDs. The next step will be to write drivers for the RK818 power management chip, and then continuing on from there.
Obviously, this is in a very early state of work in the FreeBSD community with no bootable images to test out just yet, but keep an eye on this project! I know I will be, and look forward to testing out a working image of FreeBSD on mobile. It will be a lot of fun to test out and help contribute to.
If you want to learn more about this announcement and read more of the FreeBSD quarterly update, I invite you to check out this link for the lowdown.
Phosh is a regular on this roundup, as it tends to see new updates at least once a month. This is fine with me, as it is my preferred mobile Linux environment at the moment, and I love continuing to see it evolve.
A few weeks ago, it saw its latest stable release, 0.42.1. We're going to cover the majority of this update, and as usual, invite you to read the full post from the Phosh Team at the link we will leave at the end of this part of the update.
This update exists in order to bring important bug fixes for phoc and squeekboard, so we won't be covering any updates to Phosh shell itself today.
~ Phoc updates
You can read the detailed list of changes to Phoc here.
~ Squeekboard updates
You can read the detailed list of changes to Squeekboard here.
This update was a lot more minimal than the last few we've covered when it comes to Phosh, mostly covering some bug fixes in Phosh core components, adding more stability and creating one of our premiere mobile desktop environments.
If you want to learn more about the 0.42.1 update in full, I encourage you, as usual, to check out the full post from the Phosh Team.
Each and every roundup, FOSSphones likes to spotlight some of the free and open-source mobile applications we have been using on our devices, whether they are degoogled AOSP devices, or mobile Linux phones.
Here are some of the ones we have been enjoying since the last roundup:
Have you been using some cool FOSS mobile apps lately that we haven't spotlighted here yet? Let us know on the Fediverse or X (our social links are in the footer of this site), and we will cover it in a future FOSSphones App Highlight!
That will just about do it for this FOSSphones News Roundup. I will be keeping an eye out, as usual, on new developments for our next roundup, and until the time comes for it, I hope you have a great November!