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Sailfish OS update from Jolla
Temperatures may have dropped down a bit from the heights we experienced — in the northern hemisphere at least — a few weeks ago, but it’s still very much Summer here in Finland. At Jolla we’re celebrating not only by spending as much time in the warm sun as we can, but also by reducing the price of Sailfish OS in our Summer Sale. Hopefully you’ll already have seen the posts on the forum, Facebook and Twitter, but we wanted to share a few more of the details.
I asked Lotta Isotalo, Business Development and Marketing Coordinator at Jolla, to explain a little more about what the sale is and why it’s happening.
Jolla’s Summer Sales Campaign offers Sailfish OS for Sony Xperia models at a discounted price of 39,90€. The Summer Sales Campaign will run until Monday 15 August.
So if you’ve not yet grabbed the chance to get a Sailfish OS licence at a discount price, don’t wait too long. While it is true that we’ve run sales before, they don’t come around very often. “Usually, a few times a year or when there is a special occasion” Lotta explains.
We decided to have a Summer Sale as it has been a while since the last campaign, and it was time to offer something nice to the community
If you do decide now is the time to get yourself a Sailfish OS licence, then we’re sure you’ll appreciate the discount. And if you know someone who’s been thinking of taking the plunge, but hasn’t quite done it yet, please let them know that there’s no better time. And I can honestly say that there’s no better way to spend time in the cool summer air than getting acquainted with all the exciting features of a brand new operating system!
Energy from the Community
Meetup in Switzerland
A few weeks ago we brought you news of the French-speaking meetup being organised by Patrick (pherjung), due to be held in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Back then it was still in the planning stages, and we included a poll to help figure out the best date for it to be held on.
Things have progressed nicely since then, and combining the results from the poll with data gathered through other means, Patrick settled on the 22nd October for the event, with the exact location being the FIXME Hackerspace.
We were quite taken by the lovely poster design that the team have been working on and wanted to share it with you. The preview here is only a draft, but we hope you’ll agree that it’s already looking very dramatic.
Meetup in Austria
If you’re a bit further east than Lausanne, you might be interested to know that the community are also considering a meetup in Austria. The exact location isn’t yet decided, but as nephros, who first proposed the idea on the forum says, “the obvious one would be Vienna, but maybe Linz or Salzburg”.
The thread has already garnered support from quite a few people (by my reckoning, more than enough to already have an enjoyable event), but if it’s within your locus of travel and you might be interested, do add your voice to the thread and generate more support.
Repository roundup
We’ve seen many pull requests both proposed and merged this fortnight. The SDK and documentation have fared particularly well, with Jolla’s martyone being particularly prolific. But it’s also nice to see a solid number of pull requests coming from the community as well.
Let’s check out what we got.
Homescreen
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lipstick, the compositor and main user interface of your phone, Tomin1 created a pull request to support anX-DBusActivatablekey in desktop files. This works likeDBusActivatable, which allows an app to be opened via DBus, but without the restriction that the name must be in “reverse DNS notation” form (e.g. “org.sailfishos.docs”). Tomin1 also opened a pull request to update the documentation on the topic. -
Also in
lipstick, JacekJagosz has proposed a pull request to allow Discord notifications (from the Discord Android app) to work correctly. As JacekJagosz points out, “Discord is one of the most popular chat apps right now”, so the functionality will be useful to many users.
SDK
The SDK got a big bunch of pull requests both proposed and merged in the last fortnight.
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mic, used for creating operating system images, martyone had his pull request merged to ensure/var/lockexists, and so avoids the SDK hitting an error when it doesn’t. -
Also in
mic, martyone also had his pull request merged for ensuring thatmic[fails on error](CLOSED https://github.com/sailfishos/mic/pull/13) if the--erroronfailparameter is added. Previously these errors weren’t bubbling up. -
Also in
mic, and also from martyone, this merged pull request adds a dependency tokmodto avoid an error that causedmicto fail on new installs. martyone also took the opportunity to clean up the package files to avoidrpmlinterrors and warnings. -
Also in
mic, martyone has proposed a pull request to generate the package’s changelog from the git history when building with the SDK. -
scratchbox2, the cross-compilation tool used by the SDK, thaodan has had a pull request merged to fix the order of prefix selection to avoid build tools being run under the target policy when they should be run under the tooling policy. -
sailfish-qtcreator, the Sailfish IDE, martyone has proposed a pull request to allowvalgrindto perform memcheck with tunnelled connections. If accepted, this will allow memcheck to be performed successfully using the emulator. -
sfdk-build-tools, a package of scripts used to build the Sailfish SDK, martyone has proposed a pull request to include a manifest file in the sdk archives, so that the existence of the correct tooling can be detected without the need to decompress the entire target archive first.
Packaging
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sdk-setup, part of the Sailfish SDK, martyone had a pull request merged to ensure that for apps that have both a.changesand a.changes.runfile in their source, the.changes.runfile takes precedence. This is useful when a changelog that’s autogenerated from the git log has to be appended to an older static changelog. martyone also had his pull request merged to update thesfdkdocumentation on the same topic. -
Also in
sdk-setup, martyone has proposed a pull request to fix a bug that prevented arguments being passed through fromsfdk makewhen%make_buildis used in an application’s spec file. -
Also in
sdk-setup, martyone has proposed a pull request to allow a broader range of tag names in projects to be picked up by the build process. The functionality is used when automatically determining the version number of a package from the tags in thegithistory. -
python3, the popular and widely used programming language, Tomin1 has proposed a pull request to update the python3 package with a patch from Fedora so thatrpmbuilduses a timestamp from the changelog to avoid repeated builds having different contents, but without a performance hit in the process. -
nemo-qml-plugin-dbus, a library that allows complex DBus calls to be made easily from QML code, Zemo-sole has proposed a pull request to add the files needed to allow building of a.debpackage for use with Debian-based distributions. -
rpmlint, a tool used to check for errors when building rpms, martyone has proposed a pull request to haverpmlintignore the dynamic parts of the version number of an application. These dynamic aren’t included in our changelogs since they’re automatically generated by OBS, but without this change cause the rpm validator to output an incorrect warning.
Tools
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shadow-utils, used to manage the the shadow password files, krnlyng had a pull request merged to introduce thenewuidmapandnewgidmapbinaries.
Multi-user support
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user-managerd, a daemon used for managing Sailfish OS device users via DBus, krnlyng has proposed a pull request to guard against user files being removed for the system user.
WiFi
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wpa_supplicant, for accessing WPA and WPA2 protected WiFi networks, Thaodan has created a draft pull request to start the process of upgrading to the upstream version 2.10. -
connman, the tool that manages networking in the background on Sailfish OS, Mukhamedgarif has proposed a pull request that updates the heuristic for determining weak WiFi hotspots. The pull request, which simplifies the existing heuristic, has generated some interesting discussion
Calendar
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buteo-sync-plugin-carddav, a plugin for synchronising contacts, HenkKalkwater has proposed a pull request to fix CardDav syncing with NextCloud servers where the.well-knownindex redirect omits the hostname. This addresses the bug raised on the forum about the issue.
Bluetooth
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bluez5, the Bluetooth stack used by Sailfish, abranson has had his pull request merged to ensure the mpris-proxy service is automatically restarted should it fail. This fixes an issue reported on the forum that caused the controls on audio Bluetooth devices to occasionally fail.
Documentation
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sailjail-permissions, the definition of the sandboxing permissions, flypig has had a pull request merged to update the documentation in order to clarify which apps are sandboxed and which have the default sandboxing profile applied to them. -
Also in
sailjail-permissions, martyone has had a pull request merged that adds advice for app authors to the documentation, explaining how to migrate data when an application first starts using sandboxing. -
Also in
sailjail-permissions, flypig has proposed a pull request to add some explanatory info about the Sharing permission. -
user-managerd, a daemon used for managing Sailfish OS device users via DBus, martyone has had a pull request merged to ensure the documentation index is generated correctly. -
docs.sailfishos.org, the online Sailfish documentation, martyone has proposed a pull request to add to the documentation an explanation of how best to write API documentation for Qt-based Sailfish components. -
Also in
docs.sailfishos.org, martyone has also proposed a pull request that gives more details about sandboxing and permissions. -
And another addition to
docs.sailfishos.org, vigejolla has proposed a pull request to add a nice tutorial on how to debug applications using the Sailfish SDK.
Apps advancing
Way back in the last millennia, when top bit set characters were still a novelty and screen colours could be counted on the fingers of two fingers, coding felt very atomic: once a piece of software was released there was no means to update it, so you had to get it right first time.
That was before widescale Internet access and always-on connectivity. Not only is it now possible to update apps frequently, we all expect them to be updated frequently. App updates aren’t just a way to fix bugs. They’ve become a way to deploy new features, new content, new translations and updated designs. App updates have become an opportunity to bring something new to an existing app.
This fortnight we have four nice app updates to share with you. They present a microcosm of the wider app update experience. Bug fixes, new features, better designs, improved security, new translations and new content can all be found here amongst just these four apps.
Zollstock
We’ve covered Zollstock a few times in recent newsletters. That’s testament to the rapid updates author Samuel Kron (black_sheep_dev) has been pushing out. Zollstock is a neat utility that provides a ruler — the sort that allows you to measure distances — on your Sailfish OS phone.
You might think that a phone isn’t the best way to measure distances: the screen doesn’t go right to the edge, there’s a tricky vertical gap to deal with, different phones have different pixel densities. All of that is true of course, but in spite of these challenges, Zollstock manages to do an excellent job of measuring distances of up to two metres.
The latest 0.2.1 release adds Swedish translations from Tuomas F Nyqvist (lumen), as well as the ability to change the scaling factor. Using an Xperia 10 and a real ruler, I tested the default scaling factor and found it to already be spot on. Which I suppose means that the configured device pixel density is correct. But if there are devices out there where it’s incorrect, even just slightly, they I can see the ability to tweak it being especially useful.
Samuel is a prolific developer for Sailfish OS and its great to see him continue to update Zollstock with new features. His catalogue runs to at least fourteen apps, including Evento for counting down to (or up from) important events in time, Aenigma to keep those restless brain cells occupied with puzzles, and Quartermaster for controlling your smart home. If you like Zollstock or any of his other creations, don’t forget to exercise your right to send him some gratitude in financial form through PayPal or Librapay.
Zollstock is available from the Jolla Store and OpenRepos.
Hydrogen
With Matrix becoming the de-facto standard open source Slack alternative, it’s great to see Thilo Kogge (thigg) continuing to update Hydrogen on a regular basis. The upstream Hydrogen is an Apache-2.0-licensed Matrix client written in Javascript, which runs on Sailfish OS using the WebView. The cross-platform nature of Hydrogen means that all of us Sailfish users can benefit from development that happens across multiple platforms.
The app works very well in practice, although inevitably the cross-platform nature means it loses some Sailfish styling. But it makes up for this in terms of functionality.
The latest update brings the Hydrogen app up to 0.3. From what I can tell, the main change is a switch from using the file:// protocol to using a local python-based webserver backend. The software is still served locally, but using a slightly different means.
This is an important change since it avoids the cross-origin resource sharing restrictions introduced with Sailfish OS 4.4.0. Unlike the previous version there’s now no need to disabled the CORS checks, resulting in overall improved security for the app.
If you spend any time on Matrix you’ll find Hydrogen to be a great tool, currently only available directly from the Jolla Store.
SeaPrint
SeaPrint, the premiere printing solution for Sailfish OS, also gets another update this fortnight. Authored by Anton Thomasson (attah), updates to this excellent app now seem to be getting their own codenames, this 1.2 version being known as “Lobster”. The update fixes a number of issues, including crashes when manually adding or removing printers, and two-stage job-creation which helps improve performance on some HP printers. The app is also now fully translated into Polish, meaning there are now seven languages supported (German, Spanish, French, Dutch, Polish, Simplified Chinese and English).
The app remains a super-simple way to print documents directly from your phone. As long as you have a networked printer, the chances are the app will pick it up directly without you even having to configure it. Use the Share Plugin to send files directly from other apps to SeaPrint, or pick out PDFs or images from your phone’s storage. SeaPrint will then do the rest, performing any necessary conversion of the file and then sending the results to be printed across the network.
While printing directly from your phone really shouldn’t be a big deal in 2022, I still get a kick out of how easy and elegant SeaPrint manages to make it. SeaPrint is available for installation directly from the Jolla Store.
Молитвослов (Prayer Book)
Last time we featured Prayer Book from zyyev was back in April when it gained a number of new features. This latest update, which brings the app from version 5.4.3 to 5.4.4, is more about content than features.
This makes perfect sense given that the main purpose of the app is to provide access to an impressive database of Orthodox Christian prayers, important dates, and information about the saints. The main new addition for this latest release is the addition of new prayers for the family.
It’s excellent to see Prayer Book continue to get updates, and whether you’re an Orthodox Christian yourself, or are just interested to know more about it, then Prayer Book is an excellent install. It’s available from both the Jolla Store and OpenRepos.
Please feed us your news
We hope you enjoy this community news, which continues to evolve. This is your news, and frankly we can’t always keep up with all the exciting stuff happening in the Sailfish community, so please help us out by replying to this post in the forum if you’d like to see something included.
And do also join us at our community meetings on IRC, Matrix and Telegram. Although we had to skip one a few weeks back, things are now back on track and returning to their fortnightly cadence. The meetings are a great place to ask questions, share your ideas and generally discuss anything Sailfish OS related. The next meeting will be on the 18th August April.