Thank you everyone and thank you for attending this presentation.
So the title is Mobian to Stable and Beyond because right now we've been only doing some
development release but first what is Mobian? You could think of it as a Debian derivative
or in Debian language a blend which is targeting mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.
We provide a separate package repository but it's not a standalone distribution right
and we have some ready-to-use disk images which are built for several devices and more on that
later but Mobian is actually a very very small overlay. In our whole package repository we have
44 source packages compared to 35,000 and more on Debian itself so it's really some tiny bits
and actually we are planning to drop some of those packages and my hope is that basically
one year from now we will be down to something like 15 or maybe 20 packages at most because we
have some transitional packages and actually the most difficult to get rid of will be device support
packages where we have downstream patch kernels and stuff like that but in the end Mobian isn't
supposed to be a long-term project it's really supposed to be merged into Debian itself and
just improve the overall Debian ecosystem rather than being a standalone project aimed solely at
mobile users. The question we have been seeing a lot lately over the past few months is basically
where can I find the latest Mobian stable image? You can't because it doesn't exist yet.
We target Debian testing which is a moving target you could think of it as a kind of
rolling release distribution and the Debian testing distro is frozen every once in a while
it's about every once every two years and then moved on to Debian stable. The latest stable
release from Debian was bullseye which was released a bit less than two years ago and back then we
definitely weren't ready for prime time. For example we had version 0.6.8.2 while we now
up to version 0.24 for the compositor and shell sides and there's been a lot of progress over
the past two years. Back when bullseye was released we didn't have stuff like eG25 manager
which is basically a piece of software handling the pine phone and pine phone pro modem configuring
it properly to work as we expect. We didn't have MMS we have very few adaptive applications because
lib add waiter at the time was not even existing we had lib handy but no GTK4 and no lib add waiter
and so in the end we decided against releasing a stable Mobian version for bullseye and the ecosystem
was only starting to ramp up there were still lots of issues and bugs and instabilities and really a
low count of actually usable mobile applications. So what does going stable mean for Mobian?
If you look back at the bookworm development cycle which is basically the past two years
we've seen some great progress both in the overall mobile ecosystem and in Debian itself.
The system is really really richer than it was before and it's still growing and more and more
people are creating or modifying applications so they can run just fine on our tiny displays here.
Graphical environments are more usable and way more stable than they used to be. I mean if you've
been using Fosh like two years ago it was all tapping buttons and trying to get the things
right. Last year we had the swipes which was a huge usability improvement and overall lots of
bugs were fixed so it can run smoothly on many devices and that's just awesome and we even
uploaded a lot of packages we were hosting downstream to Debian itself and that even includes
some Mobian specific package such as the splash screen theme, the installer settings, the repository
key ring also so we have the GPG keys for Mobian also in Debian now so if there's another mishap
it happened last year we let the GPG key expire and user was stuck and had to download those
manually now they'll be able to just update the keys from upstream Debian and still have access to
the Mobian repo. We had also fixed some early mistakes and some optimal choices regarding
how we name packages, how we organize those and how we decided to ship all the device support
tweaks. For example we used to have for each device one tweaks package, one support package which
was just a meta package putting in all the dependencies. Right now for Qualcomm devices
we have two packages which are in Debian itself, those are Qcomm found utils which contains all
the tweaks which are common to every Qualcomm supported device and we have Dreadjuicer as well
which I'll tell a bit more in a minute and in the end now seems a good time to finally go stable
So what will it look like? We have support for the devices we already support basically so those
are the Linux first forms, Pinefone, Pinefone Pro and the Librem 5. We also have some Qualcomm
based devices mostly SDM 845 thanks to the awesome work the community has done on this kernel
and of course we also shipped some 86 images with or without non-free firmware depending
on what you want and it runs just fine for example on the Microsoft Surface Pro and Surface Go
tablets. This is really awesome. We'll also ship two flavors of Mobian one with Fosh and the other
one with SXMO. We would have loved to ship a Plasma Mobile flavor as well but this won't make it
I'm pleased to announce that Plasma Mobile is finally in Debian itself but we only have the basics
which are the calls, contact book, SMS application and settings application and of course the Plasma
Mobile shell but that's not enough to ship a stable image based on Plasma Mobile so we'll keep
that one and start releasing it for the Trixie development cycle which is the next Debian testing
and of course we'll ship an LTS kernel and we'll commit to keep it up to date with security updates
and try to update it as often as possible for all the supported devices.
We also going to ship some kind of semi universal images. One thing we'd like to achieve with Mobian
is that you could just ship one image and flash it on any supported device and the kernel would
support the device. All the small config tweaks needed for this device would be applied automatically.
The firmware could be extracted and so on and we didn't quite get there yet but we're getting
closer. For example on the SDMA45 devices those are Android based devices and they need some
proprietary firmware blobs to just work. The thing is this firmware is shipped by the
phone manufacturer. There's no clear license allowing you to redistribute it so we just can
package those into Debian and call it today. This is where I came from. I came with a joint
juicer. The thing is this is a small runtime program. It runs on boot. It mounts the Android
vendor partitions, fetches the firmware from there and copies it into the Linux user space
root file system and then afterwards you rebuild the Initram FS, reboot the device and on the next
boot you have your Android device with all the firmware you need running just right now without
the need for downloading firmware from the internet. By doing so we also can have one image
for every single SDMA45 devices. One root FS at least because the boot image is using the device
tree for the specific device but you have one root file system and as many boot images as you have
device supported and it just avoids the need for any device specific tweaks and so we hope
that in the future this can be extended to other Qualcomm-based devices such as the Fairphone 4
for example which by the way runs quite nicely on Mobian thanks to the work Luca has done so far.
So that's one of the semi-universal images. The other one we're planning to implement is for
all the.64 devices because those need very few device specific tweaks. The two of those,
the PinePhone and the PineTab already share the same kernel and all we have to do which is not that
easy but all we have to do is basically import the downstream patches for the PinePhone Pro into
this kernel. This can happen quite easily but we still have some things some details we need to
work out especially considering the audio configuration on those devices due to the need
to have the modem properly talking to the SOC in terms of audio and frequencies and so on.
So this might get pushed back a bit but we're working on it and we really hope that it can be
done for Bookworm so that we only have SDM845 images,.64 images and one other for the Libram 5
which needs its own kernel because basically there are some patches that are incompatible
with the PinePhone Pro kernel. They share the same display the same block for the display output
and if it works on one device it doesn't work on the other. Anyway what we'll do during the
freeze period so basically Debian is being frozen in preparation for the stable release.
We cannot have new packages in Debian starting the 12th of this month and one month later we
cannot have any update at all unless it's bug-fixed but we'll still be able to work on downstream
packages to improve the stability and fix the remaining issues and hopefully but we make no
promise there we'll be able to work a bit more upstream by submitting kernel patches,
implementing proper Tobu support for the Libram 5 and PineTab for example and yeah maybe we could
think of other things but for now we're focusing on trying to improve things during the few months
we'll have left before the stable release and so what's next once we have more stable well we'll
switch obviously to the Trixie development cycle tracking the next Debian testing and trying to
get even better software support for mobile devices and so we're going to try to make it easier
to support new devices in Mobian this is already we're paving the way with the SDM845 images and
the Pine64 images and trying to get to a universal image and so we will hopefully make it easier for
people to just support their own device we will also support 64-bit RISC-5 we actually have all
the bits and pieces in place we have a dev board which is actually as a GitLab runner and is able
to build packages for this architecture which is already supported in Debian and so that's one
we'll just flip the switch once the stable release is there we'll keep packaging new software and
new options for our users bits plus my mobile as I mentioned already Lomiri the UB ports user
interface and finally try to get this universal image thing out of the box and working smoothly
that's basically it for me you have a bunch of links there the slides are uploaded to the
website so feel free to go there and yeah I'm not sure we have time for any question a little bit
so first thank you very much
so one minute two minutes for questions
well the question was
for the semi-universal images where we extract firmware from the android vendor partition
do we have a solution for getting the updates from the vendor itself the
answer is no you just get what you have on the device by the time it's run you can flash a new
android ROM on your device and then reinstall mobian if needed and then it will pick the new
firmware but there's no automated way and I really doubt that android phone vendors will
participate in LVFS to get updates in a timely manner to users one last question perhaps yes
would it be possible for mobian to be completely assimilated in debian
almost the only thing that will be pushing us farther from this goal right now it's kernel
support if we manage to get fully supported devices in the upstream kernel that means
upstreaming lots of downstream patches and doing so for any new device which will arise in the next
few years then yes we'll be able to be completely part of debian and have no downstream repository
at all but for now we're being held back by the kernel situation basically okay thank you very
much we don't have more time thank you