PostmarketOS updates: new homepage, pmbootstrap v3, sensors, libcamera | Hacker News Reader

PostmarketOS updates: new homepage, pmbootstrap v3, sensors, libcamera

postmarketos.org

97 pointsgoranmoomin22 comments

The compatibility matrix and devices pages is annoyingly lacking of details. I checked several time if I could find a phone that would be compatible and most devices have no or "partial" support for camera and GPS which would be requirements to use a phone as a daily driver.

Problem is partial is waaay to vague a word without details on the device page. For instance, I would need only a camera for quick QR code scans, or taking pictures of informations I don't want to note as I am one of those luddites who still like to carry a camera around. No need for full feature list of most smartphone these days (panoramic mode, selfie modes, HDR, pixel binning whatever).

I think if you're hoping to just pick up a phone, install PostmarketOS, and start using it, it's not for you yet. From https://postmarketos.org/state/ (linked from the "Install" page):

> postmarketOS is for Linux enthusiasts. For hackers, tinkerers, technical people who are interested in pushing their mobile devices beyond what can be done with the stock operating system: more free software, mainline kernel, getting software updates until the hardware breaks, better privacy, less distracting features, etc.

> The goal is to make postmarketOS usable for non-technical people too, but we are not there yet.

Anyway, from casual observance following a couple of PMOS folks on Mastodon, but never having attempted to run it myself, I believe many people are using a OnePlus 6. Whose wiki page also provides more detail on failure modes: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/OnePlus_6_(oneplus-enchil...

> I think if you're hoping to just pick up a phone, install PostmarketOS, and start using it, it's not for you yet. From https://postmarketos.org/state/ (linked from the "Install" page): > >> postmarketOS is for Linux enthusiasts. For hackers, tinkerers, technical people who are interested in pushing their mobile devices beyond what can be done with the stock operating system: more free software, mainline kernel, getting software updates until the hardware breaks, better privacy, less distracting features, etc.

Well it just says that above. I am technical. Do I have the skills,time and patience to reverse engineer some proprietary blobs from an unknown chip to manage to make the missing features work perfectly on a mainline kernel, that is another thing but this is not what your excerpt say.

Anyway thanks for the pointer on the device, I think I had seen it but concluded that the missing camera support would make it too cumbersome in most situations. While I often have a digital compact camera with me, it would be super annoying to have to extract the sdcard and mount it on the phone just to access a qrcode or send my partner some informations I am reading on a sign/panel...and entirely impossible when using a film or an instant camera! Or I'd need to find a model that is supported by gphoto or have a usb webcam with me (provided an usb otg cable works with postmarket) https://gphoto.sourceforge.io/doc/remote/

>>For hackers, tinkerers, technical people who are interested in pushing their mobile devices beyond what can be done with the stock operating system: ...

I think this is poor phrasing. If it can't do many of the things that the stock operating system can do it is not pushing "beyond" the stock operating system. It is moving the phone into a little playground off to the side. That's fine if that's what one is interested in, but the phrasing gave me a different impression at first.

> If it can't do many of the things that the stock operating system can do it is not pushing "beyond" the stock operating system.

OTOH if it can do things that the stock OS can't do, then it certainly can be pushing beyond stock.

That's just a way to make themselves look good. You should read that with anti-bullshit glasses on:

Not supported = It will NEVER work.

Partial = Boots a kernel and possibly shows something on the screen, but it's unusable in any relevant way.

Supported = It used to barely work at some time, but nobody tested any new version since then.

It's possible to run postmarketos in a proot within termux on android if you'd like to try it out or just want a nice touch enabled Linux UI on your phone/tablet. There are some incomplete instructions for an older version of postmarketos on the termux subreddit, I'm currently working on an updated and cleaner version.

Oh, cool; that would be really nice for lowering friction, and honestly it might be a nice thing to have in termux outright (even if you're still using Android on a long-term basis). I wonder how hard it would be to get postmarketos added as an official option through https://github.com/termux/proot-distro/tree/master - seems like it should be straightforward? There's already an Alpine config, and PMOS is pretty close to that

Okay, got curious and played with it... it seems like just this will do it?

    /data/data/com.termux/files/usr/etc/proot-distro/alpine-pmos.sh


    DISTRO_NAME="Alpine Linux with postmarketos added"
    DISTRO_COMMENT="Rolling release branch (edge)."

    TARBALL_URL['aarch64']="https://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/v3.20/releases/aarch64/alpine-minirootfs-3.20.2-aarch64.tar.gz"
    TARBALL_SHA256['aarch64']="6ae4d30a75dacd5991a1c1ab13453a119b54a437d236b1680b6d844f015d141b"

    # based on https://github.com/termux/proot-distro/blob/master/distro-build/alpine.sh
    distro_setup() {
        mv ./etc/apk/repositories ./etc/apk/repositories.initial
        echo "http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/main" > ./etc/apk/repositories
        echo "http://dl-cdn.alpinelinux.org/alpine/edge/community" >> ./etc/apk/repositories
        echo "https://mirror.postmarketos.org/postmarketos/master" >> ./etc/apk/repositories
        run_proot_cmd wget -O /etc/apk/keys/build.postmarketos.org.rsa.pub https://gitlab.com/postmarketOS/pmbootstrap/raw/master/pmb/data/keys/build.postmarketos.org.rsa.pub
        run_proot_cmd apk upgrade
        run_proot_cmd apk add shadow-login
        #run_proot_cmd ln -sf /var/cache/apk /etc/apk/cache  # ?
    }

If you're talking about guides and cleanup and such, I'm concerned that I've missed something - is it not just that easy? If I was publishing a wiki page or something, literally the only things I'd include would be the initial step to install proot-distro in the first place, and fleshing out the rest of the tarball urls so it works on more than aarch64.

Postmarketos is great, far from perfect but making calls and sending sms worked well for me on an op6. My dream is thunderbolt support so I can dock and just use a phone instead of laptop, not sure if any postmarketos phone supports that yet though

Not thunderbolt, but I've used a pinephone pro plugged into a USB-C dock with monitor/mouse/keyboard and it worked fine (except for the battery discharging even when plugged in, which I suspect is either a software bug or particular to my exact hardware setup)

I fear that this project, just like almost all other similar ones, just spread a false sense of a "sustainable, privacy and security focused free software mobile OS".

Almost all mobile devices, and surely all smartphones and tablets, require a large number of so-called "vendor blobs" (or just a single huge one) needed to operate almost all the hardware: wifi, Bluetooth, baseband "modem" and even GNSS receivers and touch input.

Those vendor-provided, undocumented and closed source software all need to run with high privilege levels, aka root. Thus they can do, intercept and inject almost anything within the device with no user interaction or authorization.

So, IMHO, all those projects simply give users "more power", but only as far as the vendors allow for. While an unknown amount of power is used by some other third (or fourth or fifth) party silently and undetected.

A small example.

That super secure auditable open source communication application does use strong cryptography, but still needs to use those blobs for unencrypted human-oriented I/O.

Whatever you type, scan display and record will need to get in through those blobs in an unencrypted (or maybe backdoored) blobs to get to and from the user or before getting through the encryption mill.

Have you ever heard about those spying or surveillance Trojans? Those are them!

How can we trust that? Simply we cannot. We just pretend it will be a fair play in a game we don't fully know.

Don't you exagerate a bit ? I mean, of course I can never be sure of anything, but that's just like that with my PC computer, my laptop, my whatever. But, the simple fact of being able to bypass the whole google stack is a already an important thing to me.

More trust is already a bit better than no trust at all...

And PostmarketOS is not about building phone. For someone buidling a new phone, I feel your comment is more relevant.

I don't think I exaggerate. I think I am looking at bare facts. Unless proven otherwise.

They still provide value, as they reduce the amount of parties you have to blindly trust and the amount of ToS and privacy policies you have to accept.

Postmarket indeed delivers value to users. I simply say it maybe not a "sustainable, privacy and security focused free software mobile OS". I would make it clear that those blobs are still needed to make it working and that 100% trust or security or privacy cannot be achieved.

As a diehard GNU guy, at least it's good to have PostmarketOS where you could just throw the propietary firmware to the trash and/or maybe burn the telephony module, either fisically or disable it with AT commands.

For touch input I'm pretty sure X.Org/Wayland and such will do it fine with vanilla modules.

Or better, you can repurpose an old tablet (not phones related) as a homemade netbook with some OTG module and a keyboard.

With tablets and cheap ARM Chinese netbooks it's where PmOS shines.

You cannot reliably "throw the propietary firmware to the trash and/or maybe burn the telephony module, either phisically or disable it with AT commands" as there is no or too little documentation available. Moreover, a device with no communication mean is as useful as a bike to a fish.

Again, all of those non-proprietary software is for the CPU. The rest of the hardware requires those blobs.

>a device with no comm...

For you, maybe. If wireless works, I could install all the required packages for thinkering and then disconnect it forever for offline programming/gaming or even news reading, or as a nice mp3/video/ebook reader plus a cool ScummVM interpreter to play point and click games.

Not everyone needs a 4G connection.

Wifi and bluetooth won't work without the blob. Not even the touch. This slips why I am puzzled. Maybe just USB. But I wouldn't bet on that.

USB OTG adapter + a cheap atheros device.

Also, on wireless, most of the modules are on the non-free mainline Linux kernel, but owning GNU/Linux + prop fw device it's far better than an opaque Android one even if PmOS is not fully free as GNU distros state.

From there it's easy to scale up on a freedom ladder.

Also, PmOS it's not just about smartphones. Once the Tokio Techbook support gets better, you can repurpose cheap $30-40 dollars ARM netbooks with PmOS as a light hacking/writting/multimedia device with something like cwm/dwm/fluxbox and light software such as mplayer, mupdf, netsurf...

What's your threat model?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com