[00:00.000 --> 00:18.240]  Thank you everyone and thank you for attending this presentation.
[00:18.240 --> 00:24.240]  So the title is Mobian to Stable and Beyond because right now we've been only doing some
[00:24.240 --> 00:32.960]  development release but first what is Mobian? You could think of it as a Debian derivative
[00:32.960 --> 00:40.000]  or in Debian language a blend which is targeting mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.
[00:42.000 --> 00:48.720]  We provide a separate package repository but it's not a standalone distribution right
[00:48.720 --> 00:56.480]  and we have some ready-to-use disk images which are built for several devices and more on that
[00:56.480 --> 01:04.880]  later but Mobian is actually a very very small overlay. In our whole package repository we have
[01:04.880 --> 01:15.920]  44 source packages compared to 35,000 and more on Debian itself so it's really some tiny bits
[01:15.920 --> 01:22.800]  and actually we are planning to drop some of those packages and my hope is that basically
[01:22.800 --> 01:31.280]  one year from now we will be down to something like 15 or maybe 20 packages at most because we
[01:31.280 --> 01:37.520]  have some transitional packages and actually the most difficult to get rid of will be device support
[01:37.520 --> 01:44.560]  packages where we have downstream patch kernels and stuff like that but in the end Mobian isn't
[01:44.560 --> 01:50.640]  supposed to be a long-term project it's really supposed to be merged into Debian itself and
[01:50.640 --> 01:56.880]  just improve the overall Debian ecosystem rather than being a standalone project aimed solely at
[01:56.880 --> 02:05.120]  mobile users. The question we have been seeing a lot lately over the past few months is basically
[02:05.120 --> 02:11.920]  where can I find the latest Mobian stable image? You can't because it doesn't exist yet.
[02:11.920 --> 02:19.280]  We target Debian testing which is a moving target you could think of it as a kind of
[02:19.280 --> 02:26.880]  rolling release distribution and the Debian testing distro is frozen every once in a while
[02:26.880 --> 02:35.600]  it's about every once every two years and then moved on to Debian stable. The latest stable
[02:35.600 --> 02:42.240]  release from Debian was bullseye which was released a bit less than two years ago and back then we
[02:42.240 --> 02:53.040]  definitely weren't ready for prime time. For example we had version 0.6.8.2 while we now
[02:53.040 --> 03:00.880]  up to version 0.24 for the compositor and shell sides and there's been a lot of progress over
[03:00.880 --> 03:08.720]  the past two years. Back when bullseye was released we didn't have stuff like eG25 manager
[03:08.720 --> 03:14.800]  which is basically a piece of software handling the pine phone and pine phone pro modem configuring
[03:14.800 --> 03:23.600]  it properly to work as we expect. We didn't have MMS we have very few adaptive applications because
[03:23.600 --> 03:30.800]  lib add waiter at the time was not even existing we had lib handy but no GTK4 and no lib add waiter
[03:31.840 --> 03:40.240]  and so in the end we decided against releasing a stable Mobian version for bullseye and the ecosystem
[03:40.240 --> 03:47.680]  was only starting to ramp up there were still lots of issues and bugs and instabilities and really a
[03:47.680 --> 03:57.040]  low count of actually usable mobile applications. So what does going stable mean for Mobian?
[03:58.960 --> 04:03.920]  If you look back at the bookworm development cycle which is basically the past two years
[04:05.600 --> 04:11.600]  we've seen some great progress both in the overall mobile ecosystem and in Debian itself.
[04:11.600 --> 04:19.280]  The system is really really richer than it was before and it's still growing and more and more
[04:19.280 --> 04:26.720]  people are creating or modifying applications so they can run just fine on our tiny displays here.
[04:28.800 --> 04:35.840]  Graphical environments are more usable and way more stable than they used to be. I mean if you've
[04:35.840 --> 04:44.240]  been using Fosh like two years ago it was all tapping buttons and trying to get the things
[04:44.240 --> 04:52.000]  right. Last year we had the swipes which was a huge usability improvement and overall lots of
[04:52.000 --> 04:59.920]  bugs were fixed so it can run smoothly on many devices and that's just awesome and we even
[04:59.920 --> 05:07.840]  uploaded a lot of packages we were hosting downstream to Debian itself and that even includes
[05:07.840 --> 05:16.080]  some Mobian specific package such as the splash screen theme, the installer settings, the repository
[05:16.080 --> 05:24.480]  key ring also so we have the GPG keys for Mobian also in Debian now so if there's another mishap
[05:24.480 --> 05:31.120]  it happened last year we let the GPG key expire and user was stuck and had to download those
[05:31.120 --> 05:38.560]  manually now they'll be able to just update the keys from upstream Debian and still have access to
[05:38.560 --> 05:48.400]  the Mobian repo. We had also fixed some early mistakes and some optimal choices regarding
[05:48.400 --> 05:59.600]  how we name packages, how we organize those and how we decided to ship all the device support
[06:00.320 --> 06:07.200]  tweaks. For example we used to have for each device one tweaks package, one support package which
[06:07.200 --> 06:12.800]  was just a meta package putting in all the dependencies. Right now for Qualcomm devices
[06:12.800 --> 06:21.040]  we have two packages which are in Debian itself, those are Qcomm found utils which contains all
[06:21.040 --> 06:27.840]  the tweaks which are common to every Qualcomm supported device and we have Dreadjuicer as well
[06:28.720 --> 06:38.560]  which I'll tell a bit more in a minute and in the end now seems a good time to finally go stable
[06:38.560 --> 06:48.000]  So what will it look like? We have support for the devices we already support basically so those
[06:48.000 --> 06:54.000]  are the Linux first forms, Pinefone, Pinefone Pro and the Librem 5. We also have some Qualcomm
[06:54.000 --> 07:01.520]  based devices mostly SDM 845 thanks to the awesome work the community has done on this kernel
[07:01.520 --> 07:10.320]  and of course we also shipped some 86 images with or without non-free firmware depending
[07:10.320 --> 07:16.240]  on what you want and it runs just fine for example on the Microsoft Surface Pro and Surface Go
[07:16.240 --> 07:25.600]  tablets. This is really awesome. We'll also ship two flavors of Mobian one with Fosh and the other
[07:25.600 --> 07:33.280]  one with SXMO. We would have loved to ship a Plasma Mobile flavor as well but this won't make it
[07:33.920 --> 07:40.800]  I'm pleased to announce that Plasma Mobile is finally in Debian itself but we only have the basics
[07:40.800 --> 07:47.680]  which are the calls, contact book, SMS application and settings application and of course the Plasma
[07:47.680 --> 07:53.760]  Mobile shell but that's not enough to ship a stable image based on Plasma Mobile so we'll keep
[07:53.760 --> 07:59.840]  that one and start releasing it for the Trixie development cycle which is the next Debian testing
[08:00.720 --> 08:07.360]  and of course we'll ship an LTS kernel and we'll commit to keep it up to date with security updates
[08:07.360 --> 08:11.600]  and try to update it as often as possible for all the supported devices.
[08:14.000 --> 08:23.040]  We also going to ship some kind of semi universal images. One thing we'd like to achieve with Mobian
[08:23.040 --> 08:29.360]  is that you could just ship one image and flash it on any supported device and the kernel would
[08:29.360 --> 08:35.600]  support the device. All the small config tweaks needed for this device would be applied automatically.
[08:36.160 --> 08:44.480]  The firmware could be extracted and so on and we didn't quite get there yet but we're getting
[08:44.480 --> 08:53.120]  closer. For example on the SDMA45 devices those are Android based devices and they need some
[08:53.120 --> 09:00.720]  proprietary firmware blobs to just work. The thing is this firmware is shipped by the
[09:00.720 --> 09:07.840]  phone manufacturer. There's no clear license allowing you to redistribute it so we just can
[09:07.840 --> 09:15.760]  package those into Debian and call it today. This is where I came from. I came with a joint
[09:15.760 --> 09:24.080]  juicer. The thing is this is a small runtime program. It runs on boot. It mounts the Android
[09:24.080 --> 09:30.960]  vendor partitions, fetches the firmware from there and copies it into the Linux user space
[09:30.960 --> 09:38.560]  root file system and then afterwards you rebuild the Initram FS, reboot the device and on the next
[09:38.560 --> 09:46.160]  boot you have your Android device with all the firmware you need running just right now without
[09:46.160 --> 09:55.840]  the need for downloading firmware from the internet. By doing so we also can have one image
[09:55.840 --> 10:06.800]  for every single SDMA45 devices. One root FS at least because the boot image is using the device
[10:06.800 --> 10:13.440]  tree for the specific device but you have one root file system and as many boot images as you have
[10:13.440 --> 10:21.840]  device supported and it just avoids the need for any device specific tweaks and so we hope
[10:21.840 --> 10:27.040]  that in the future this can be extended to other Qualcomm-based devices such as the Fairphone 4
[10:27.040 --> 10:32.720]  for example which by the way runs quite nicely on Mobian thanks to the work Luca has done so far.
[10:35.120 --> 10:41.600]  So that's one of the semi-universal images. The other one we're planning to implement is for
[10:41.600 --> 10:51.600]  all the.64 devices because those need very few device specific tweaks. The two of those,
[10:51.600 --> 10:59.120]  the PinePhone and the PineTab already share the same kernel and all we have to do which is not that
[10:59.120 --> 11:04.720]  easy but all we have to do is basically import the downstream patches for the PinePhone Pro into
[11:05.360 --> 11:15.360]  this kernel. This can happen quite easily but we still have some things some details we need to
[11:15.360 --> 11:23.280]  work out especially considering the audio configuration on those devices due to the need
[11:23.280 --> 11:32.000]  to have the modem properly talking to the SOC in terms of audio and frequencies and so on.
[11:33.280 --> 11:38.880]  So this might get pushed back a bit but we're working on it and we really hope that it can be
[11:38.880 --> 11:48.720]  done for Bookworm so that we only have SDM845 images,.64 images and one other for the Libram 5
[11:49.760 --> 11:55.520]  which needs its own kernel because basically there are some patches that are incompatible
[11:55.520 --> 12:02.880]  with the PinePhone Pro kernel. They share the same display the same block for the display output
[12:02.880 --> 12:10.160]  and if it works on one device it doesn't work on the other. Anyway what we'll do during the
[12:10.160 --> 12:17.680]  freeze period so basically Debian is being frozen in preparation for the stable release.
[12:18.640 --> 12:27.040]  We cannot have new packages in Debian starting the 12th of this month and one month later we
[12:27.040 --> 12:33.280]  cannot have any update at all unless it's bug-fixed but we'll still be able to work on downstream
[12:33.280 --> 12:39.680]  packages to improve the stability and fix the remaining issues and hopefully but we make no
[12:39.680 --> 12:44.320]  promise there we'll be able to work a bit more upstream by submitting kernel patches,
[12:45.280 --> 12:54.640]  implementing proper Tobu support for the Libram 5 and PineTab for example and yeah maybe we could
[12:54.640 --> 13:01.680]  think of other things but for now we're focusing on trying to improve things during the few months
[13:01.680 --> 13:09.280]  we'll have left before the stable release and so what's next once we have more stable well we'll
[13:09.280 --> 13:16.240]  switch obviously to the Trixie development cycle tracking the next Debian testing and trying to
[13:16.240 --> 13:25.520]  get even better software support for mobile devices and so we're going to try to make it easier
[13:26.160 --> 13:34.640]  to support new devices in Mobian this is already we're paving the way with the SDM845 images and
[13:34.640 --> 13:41.040]  the Pine64 images and trying to get to a universal image and so we will hopefully make it easier for
[13:41.040 --> 13:48.800]  people to just support their own device we will also support 64-bit RISC-5 we actually have all
[13:48.800 --> 13:55.360]  the bits and pieces in place we have a dev board which is actually as a GitLab runner and is able
[13:55.360 --> 14:02.800]  to build packages for this architecture which is already supported in Debian and so that's one
[14:02.800 --> 14:09.760]  we'll just flip the switch once the stable release is there we'll keep packaging new software and
[14:09.760 --> 14:16.560]  new options for our users bits plus my mobile as I mentioned already Lomiri the UB ports user
[14:16.560 --> 14:24.640]  interface and finally try to get this universal image thing out of the box and working smoothly
[14:27.600 --> 14:32.880]  that's basically it for me you have a bunch of links there the slides are uploaded to the
[14:32.880 --> 14:40.080]  website so feel free to go there and yeah I'm not sure we have time for any question a little bit
[14:40.080 --> 14:41.280]  so first thank you very much
[14:48.720 --> 14:51.200]  so one minute two minutes for questions
[14:51.200 --> 15:20.320]  well the question was
[15:21.280 --> 15:26.960]  for the semi-universal images where we extract firmware from the android vendor partition
[15:27.600 --> 15:32.640]  do we have a solution for getting the updates from the vendor itself the
[15:33.600 --> 15:41.440]  answer is no you just get what you have on the device by the time it's run you can flash a new
[15:41.440 --> 15:49.920]  android ROM on your device and then reinstall mobian if needed and then it will pick the new
[15:49.920 --> 15:56.640]  firmware but there's no automated way and I really doubt that android phone vendors will
[15:56.640 --> 16:07.200]  participate in LVFS to get updates in a timely manner to users one last question perhaps yes
[16:07.200 --> 16:18.000]  would it be possible for mobian to be completely assimilated in debian
[16:19.440 --> 16:27.200]  almost the only thing that will be pushing us farther from this goal right now it's kernel
[16:27.200 --> 16:36.000]  support if we manage to get fully supported devices in the upstream kernel that means
[16:36.000 --> 16:42.080]  upstreaming lots of downstream patches and doing so for any new device which will arise in the next
[16:42.080 --> 16:48.800]  few years then yes we'll be able to be completely part of debian and have no downstream repository
[16:48.800 --> 16:56.560]  at all but for now we're being held back by the kernel situation basically okay thank you very
[16:56.560 --> 17:09.200]  much we don't have more time thank you