Sailfish Community News, 15th May 2025 - BeaconDB

[rainemak]

Sailfish OS update from Jolla

A lot of things have happened since the last proper fortnight. Previous newsletter was only about Vappu greetings form the Jolla crew. So, it’s a month since longer newsletter.

Right before Easter we rolled an update for Sailfish OS 5.0 (5.0.0.67). We have few fixes & improvements in the pipeline that we could deliver as an update for the Sailfish OS 5.0. Branching of Sailfish OS 5.1 probably happens on summer time frame. After branching, we’d need a month or two for ironing out issues that are blocking the release. Projection of the Sailfish OS 5.1 readiness would be towards autumn.

You, Sailfish community, are occasionally asking status update of Sony Xperia 10 IV and 10 V. Like communicated already few times, with the new blobs for Sony Xperia 10 IV and 10 V, we need to adapt NFC, GPS, sensors and VoLTE from HIDL to AIDL. So getting those working will require time and development efforts. @flypig wrote back in August 2021 a nice summary about libgbinder that opens up also HIDL and AIDL. If there are community members who would have understanding of the changes needed and would like to contribute to the Xperia 10 IV and/or 10 V, please raise your hand . Somebody from the Jolla Crew could probably help you to get started.

Sailfish Community News, 12th August, libgbinder, 4.2.0 L10n

Subscribe to future posts here Sailfish OS update from Jolla We’ve looked at a range of topics in these newsletters, including news about some of the new ports that community members have been working on recently. The porting process require careful knowledge not just of the device and device drivers you’re porting to, but also the way Sailfish OS interacts with them. It’s all very low level and not an area that everyone is familiar with, so doing a deep dive into the hardware adaptatio…

One last interesting thing is that BeaconDB indeed looks like the way to go forward to re-enable A-GPS for Sailfish OS. The coverage is not great everywhere but the community around BeaconDB is contributing back coverage data. If you wish to take a head start, here are instructions on how to enable it on Sailfish OS. Maybe is it not really needed to have separate “user-agent” for Sailfish OS and Sailfish OS community but creating some kind of a “Stumbler” app for Sailfish OS would be awesome . There are few open source apps listed in the BeaconDB website on the contribute section – maybe we could port one of those to Sailfish OS. Goes without say, but having a native coverage data reporting app would most certainly lower the barrier to send coverage report to BeaconDB, contribute back and improve it over time.

Energy from the Community

SuperTuxKart (Beta) for Sailfish OS

[header-banner] To my surprise, when trying to build and run SuperTuxKart on a SFOS device, it almost immediately worked. And after some tweaks it actually feels quite playable. So I proceeded to package for Chum. It is currently available on Chum:Testing for the adventurous. Initial setup I did not have major problems on Jolla C2 launching and operating the GUI. However, @poetaster reports ome problems, and I could reproduce on X10III that on first launch it does not work property. If yo…

Very nice initiative. There was also a vivid discussion between @nephros and @poetaster in the topic. If you haven’t yet noticed this topic, please give a look or even give a try.

Repository roundup

Web browsing

• gecko-dev, Mozilla’s Gecko web rendering engine, mal backported required fix to build with newer Rust version.

Network, communication and telephony stack

• telepathy-ring, Ofono plugin for Telepathy, mal made the ringback tone work for modems that require it after an outgoing call has entered the alerting state. This is an additional step required to propagate the information along the software stack, after the addition in the binder code (getting the information from the modem in Android layer) and in oFono (the low-level telephony framework).
• amber-web-authorization, a QML module allowing applications to perform OAuth1 and OAuth2 requests, b100dian fixed an issue with the refresh token not working.
• libsocialcache, a library and a QML plugin that is used to manage cache from social networks, pvuorela fixed a download issue observed with OneDrive provider, when the download object is an image but the download URL does not match the MIME type of an image.
• bluez5, the Linux Bluetooth stack, mal moved to version 5.82.
• messagingframework, the email Qt framework, dcaliste moved a patch on QMailAccountListModel upstream. pvuorela removed trailing spaces in code, updating the patches.
• libphonenumber, a library for manipulating international phone numbers, mal updated it to 9.0.5.

Low level libraries

• mkcal, storage backend using SQLite for calendar entries, pvuorela renamed the environment variable allowing to setup the calendar database location. The new variable is named MKCAL_STORAGEDB, instead of the too generic SQLITESTORAGEDB. Notice that the old variable is still active if the new one is unset.
• mlite, the configuration storage library, JamiKettunen contributed a fix to allow the code to compile with Qt 5.12. Some modifications were only compatible with 5.14.
• maliit-framework, the code handling the keyboard, pvuorela updated it to latest upstream.
• sensorfw, sensor framework, jmlich fixed a compilation issue.
• libarchive, a library to handle compressed formats, mal updated it to 3.7.9.
• libxml2, an XML parsing library, mal updated it to 2.13.8.
• grilo, a framework for discovering and browsing media, pvuorela updated it to 0.3.16.
• qtgrilo, a framework for discovering and browsing media, Qt bindings, pvuorela fixed an issue with albums still being listed while containing no tracks after removal of them.
• qtbase, the Qt framework, and the networking part in particular, mal fixed an issue while compiling with recent glibc.
• tinysparql, desktop-neutral metadata database and search tool, formerly known as tracker, it has been renamed upstream. pvuorela updated it to 3.9.2. tracker-miners was also renamed and became localsearch after the update to 3.9.
• tzdata, the time zone data (and some other geographical data), mal proposed to update it to 2025b.
• dbus, the famous interprocess passing daemon, mal proposed to update it to 1.16.2.
• taglib, an audio meta-data library, mal proposed an update to 2.0.2.
• libopenal, a library providing capabilities for playing audio in a virtual 3D environment, mal updated it to 1.24.3.
• json-c, a JSON implementation in C, mal updated it to 0.18.
• libsolv, a library for package dependency solving, mal updated it to 0.7.32.
• libid3tag, a library handling ID3TAG in multimedia files, mal updated it to 0.16.3.
• libical, serialise and deserialise ICal file format, mal upgraded it to 3.0.20.
• openjpeg, a library for image processing with wavelets, mal updated it to 2.5.3.
• nss-pem, PEM file reader for Network Security Services, mal moved it to 1.1.0.
• libwbxml2, Library to parse, encode and handle binary representations of XML documents, mal updated it to 0.11.10.
• yaml-cpp, a YAML parser and emitter for C++, mal updated it to 0.8.0.

Developer’s corner

• busybox, a single binary which includes versions of a large number of system commands, mal proposed to bundle bc and dc which are command line calculators.
• nemo-qml-plugin-dbus, the QML bindings for DBus, pvuorela completed the documentation for the DBusInterface QML class.
• cmake, the (other) build system, mal is working on upgrading to version 4. This implies to fix first many repositories which use deprecated versions or features:
  • in mapplauncherd,
  • in libaudioresource,
  • in sailfish-office,
  • in sailfish-utilities,
  • in libsystrace,
  • in graphite2,
  • in yasm.
• openssh, the OpenSSH implementation of SSH protocol, mal updated it to 10.0p2.
• createrepo_c, C implementation to create RPM repositories, mal updated it to 1.2.1.
• gtest, Google C++ testing framework, mal updated it to 1.17.0.
• doxygen, the code documentation tools, mal updated it to 1.13.2.

Please feed us your news

Hope you enjoyed reading this fortnight!

This is a community update, and frankly we can’t always keep up with all the exciting stuff happening in the Sailfish community. Plus, the less of this we have to actually write ourselves the better. So please help us out by posting your Sailfish news updates to the forum as a reply to this post. We’ll collate as much of it as possible into one easily digestible post for the next update. This is your news!

Please do also join us at our community meetings on IRC, Matrix and Telegram. Next community meeting will be on the 22nd May. Please note that you can also join via Matrix bridge.

Remember to follow us also in Mastodon jolla (@jolla@techhub.social) - TechHub

[nephros]

@rainemak

Maybe is it not really needed to have separate “user-agent” for Sailfish OS and Sailfish OS community but creating some kind of a “Stumbler” app for Sailfish OS would be awesome .

So a prototype of this in my fork of LiveTrack (by @jaykijay and available in the Jolla Store) can be seen here.
I chose to extend LiveTrack primarily because I already use it with NextCloud PhoneTrack, and it therefore had the required plumbing and UI already in place.

I’d appreciate some eyes looking over it for correctness, esp.of the submissions, because it’s a bit had to judge whether you are submitting garbage to BeaconDB - which we definitely do not want.

Unfortunately it looks like Harbour rules would forbid this fork to be entered into Jolla Store.

I also tried to visualize the BeaconDB map (see branch beacondb-map) using the QtLocation/QtPositioning Map QML type, but I can’t figure out which Plugin and PluginParameters to use to get the actual beacondb overlay.
I believe some hints can be found at #91 - Displaying the map coverage layer in OSMAnd or QGis? - beacondb/beacondb - Codeberg.org but I’m not familiar enough with OSM and QtLocation to make a lot of sense of it.

Any hints (or even PRs) would be much appreciated.

[lightstar]

Happy to hear about the BeaconDB integration. I’m already driving around Vienna with my bike and S24 with Neostumbler to make it a better place for my C2. The C2’s GPS is currently too unreliable to scan the area correctly. I hope there will be an update for it…

[nephros]

@nephros

@rainemak

Maybe is it not really needed to have separate “user-agent” for Sailfish OS and Sailfish OS community but creating some kind of a “Stumbler” app for Sailfish OS would be awesome .

So a prototype of this in my fork of LiveTrack…

All that being as it may, I still think a better/slicker approach would be to have a plugin/extension to one of the existing daemons.
Either GeoClue, or Ofono can be extended to make a “stumbler” plugin which could then be activated somewhere through settings or so when Positioning is turned on.

Of course, if SFOS could go to GeoClue2, all that would not be an issue because that has everything built-in already.

[rainemak]

@nephros

Unfortunately it looks like Harbour rules would forbid this fork to be entered into Jolla Store.

Let’s try to tackle this Harbour rule issue. We should really have this in the Jolla Store.

[Mister_Magister]

nah, not worth bothering, nobody uses jolla store

[nephros]

@rainemak

@nephros

Unfortunately it looks like Harbour rules would forbid this fork to be entered into Jolla Store.

Let’s try to tackle this Harbour rule issue. We should really have this in the Jolla Store.

Lovely offer! Your call though whether MCE and Ofono access could be allowed…

Harbour Validator Snippet

QML files
=========
INFO [/usr/share/harbour-livetrack/qml/cover/CoverPage.qml] Uses Sailfish Silica Components (only reported once)
ERROR [/usr/share/harbour-livetrack/qml/LiveTrack.qml] Import 'Nemo.Mce 1.0' is not allowed
ERROR [/usr/share/harbour-livetrack/qml/CellSource.qml] Import 'org.nemomobile.ofono 1.0' is not allowed
INFO [harbour-livetrack] Please see our FAQ here: https://harbour.jolla.com/faq#QML_API
FAILED

Mce is not strictly required, but it’s nice to be able to detect Power Saving Mode and react to it.

[lightstar]

If you want to reach novice users who are accustomed to installing from an official app store (including providers such as banks that potentially want to provide their app via a trusted source that does not need to be configured or set up by the user), you must make the effort.

[lightstar]

Troll, right? It’s the classic chicken-and-egg issue. If you don’t provide a working alternative, the product won’t be used/adpoted. You can keep messing around in the style of ReactOS and disappear or seriously work on an alternative that is suitable for the masses and ready for serious business.

[davidrasch]

he’s not a troll, he’s just grumpy. Trolls don’t make real contributions

[CLMA31]

Great mentality! As someone who is tech noob Jolla Store would always be first place to look

[Mister_Magister]

All you have to do is to compile them with app. If your app provides them then there’s no issue, if libs is all you need

[mips_tux]

Thanks …a lot fo thanks for all these works !
But what’s new for the usb audio output bug that currently prevents me from connecting my DAC on my x10iii ?
Then, can we expect an upgrade from android 11 to 13 for the x10ii and x10iii with 5.1 ?