Sailfish OS update from Jolla
It’s again fortnight newsletter. I’m pleased to see our writer group expanding. Today we have a new writer in the roster – Patrick (@pherjung). He expressed his interest to summarize previous week’s community meeting some time back and now we’re here – we have a new Community meeting summary section. If I don’t recall incorrectly, I met Patrick in person for the first time during the last year Sailathon – something not programming related was on his mind regarding contributing to Sailfish OS. Please express our thoughts and ideas as he wished. Surely, Ville (@vige) and Damien (@dcaliste) delivers as well as usual. The Harbour news starts to be something that we expect to have each fortnight. Similarly, @dcaliste is a backbone when it comes to Repository roundup. Hats off all 
.
This is exactly where we should be steering Community News towards. This is a community update for you, Sailfish Community. I like how we are currently doing this! Doing together and being transparent. Please also do express our views, share ideas and opinions at the comment section.
I don’t have much to add to this. I’m just pleased and feeling that you, Sailfish Community, are picking up what are we after when asking to contribute and share your thoughts and ideas. We’re clearly evolving which is very good – feeling excited and supppper happy .
Let’s give a floor to @pherjung and others. Please enjoy!
Community meeting summary
This is my first community meeting summary, so please let me know if you think the format is good or if you have any other ideas on how to improve it. 
At the last community meeting on 9 October, there were nine community members and four Jolla employees present. Various questions were asked and the meeting went really well!
First question
The first question was about the number of supported devices and whether the list is still up to date.
Jolla says that the list is up to date and that unsupported devices will remain on it. It is interesting to note that the kernel determines the update cycle of a device and lifetime of them.
With seven models and their various variants, it is takes effort to keep Sailfish OS working without breaking anything, as they have to pay close attention to the kernel or AppSupport version on each device.
Note: support for the XA2 and X10 will probably end Soon™, as their old kernel version and mixed 64/32-bit flavour are causing issues. Maybe after 5.1 but they didn’t tell.
Second question
The second question was related to open-sourcing and expectations of Jolla.
Currently, Jolla isn’t measuring anything that could influence their decision to open source more components – it’s more like a subjective of the component or earlier components.
The next component to be open-sourced has been hinted at and maybe the Accounts project is the one, the community is particularly interested in the code related to Nextcloud
Good to see that the first app to receive a pull request is Notes, although Weather could have been the first, as @tohaturok found out how to use the OpenWeather API instead of the Foreca one. As mentioned, the Notes app was the first to receive a PR. It hasn’t been merged yet, but the idea is to use mKCal as a provider, written by @dcaliste.
Third question
The next question was about the possibility of setting a lock pin for the Android app.
Unfortunately, this is a complicated topic and more time is needed for investigation. It’s not easy to make quick progress.
Fourth question
It was worth trying, but there are still no updates regarding the new Jolla phone.
Fifth question
Regarding the roadmap, Jolla needs to decide which tool to use. The tool itself has to be interactive. Sailfish Community need to accept that nothing is set in stone and be prepared to see some points removed. It should also be noted that a roadmap is a planning tool that requires significant resources to maintain.
Sixth question
Regarding the X10 V, a user has requested updates. The camera and battery indicators are now working, although there were some difficulties due to the vendor blob. This made it difficult to fix the camera. There are still some issues with the fingerprint sensor, which requires the protocol to be reverse-engineered and the communication on the device to be monitored using various tools – difficult one and Jolla might not be able fix.
As some of you may have noticed, new blobs have arrived and have already been tested and integrated. It is worth noting that using AOSP does not make the project easier and actually increases the difficulty. If you’re interested in understanding this better, some hints are provided by @rinigus here: New binaries / blobs for Xperia V and IV : What is happening actually? - #180 by rinigus .
General discussion
Another interesting discussion, as announced on the forum, is the successful build of Qt 6.8.3 by @piggz and others. Some apps are already working, such as Tokodon.
Harbour news
SFOS Forum Viewer
SFOS Forum Viewer - which is the client for this forum - received updated Italian translations.
Ielig Web
Ielig Web is a web browser which we covered in the newsletter back in 2023
The app has reached version number 1.0 - which is a milestone on itself! I don’t know if there is more meaning to the number, but the changelog says that the browser now supports import/export of bookmarks in a HTML format as used in Chrome and Firefox. The settings page has been redesigned - all settings are now in the “tools” page. And finally there is “fixing the usual errors”.
Country Quiz
Country Quiz is a quiz game about the states of the world. We covered it in the newsletter last year.
The updated version 1.1.0 has added a new expert mode for those who find the veteran mode too easy. In this mode you don’t get the list of choices but you actually have to type the name of the country - or at least the first few characters of the name.
There’s also bug fix for question count on language change, and updated translations for Finnish and Swedish.
Chum news
Sadly, there are no new update. Feel free to comment this news and promote your project. Don’t hesitate to speak about your willingness to start a new project.
Repository roundup
A lot of work behind the scene happened to allow three major upgrades in the system: a future move to GCC 15, one to RPM 4.19 and a Python change for 3.11. These upgrades are still pending at the moment, but blockers are handled one by one.
Bugs, issues and features
issue-tracker, a repository to gather technical issues, rainemak worked on a README that could be used in various front-facing repositories, like thejolla-cameraone, to explain how to report bugs or ask for feature requests in such projects.
Main interface
sailfish-browser, the browser application itself, nephros modified the search field behaviour not to be cleaned after getting results, so one can modify it easily in case of spelling mistake, necessary refinement in the search… This goes to 5.0 update as well.yamui, minimal UI tool for displaying simple graphical indicators, keto added options to control text offsets, wrapping, and bold font. He also added an option to act on other keys than power key. This is needed for boot mode detection on certain devices.
Network, communication and telephony stack
systemd, a system and service manager, keto disabled DNSSEC by default. It was creating issues in some environments and is also disabled on Fedora and Suse.
Low level libraries
messagingframework, the email Qt framework, pvuorela is doing a large job of cleaning, refactoring and modernising the code upstream. This sometimes requires to accept minor API breaks, like for the enum storing the local storage id or the removal of Fwd classes. dcaliste added upstream support to store and handle email aliases.mkcal, storage backend using SQLite for calendar entries, pvuorela adjusted the code for the changes in the mail library API, and also in the QML bindings.augeas, a library for changing configuration files, mal updated it to 1.14.1.nspr, platform independence for non-GUI operating system facilities like threads, file and network IO…, mal updated it to 4.37.net-tools, basic networking tools, includingifconfig,netstat,route, …, mal upgraded it to 2.10.nss, network security services from the Mozilla foundation, mal updated it to 3.117.
Developer’s corner
mal and direc85 are preparing the upgrade of gcc to version 15, by backporting, upgrading, or fixing packages having build issues with this new version:
- in
telepathy-gabble, - in
fakechroot, - in
testrunner-lite, - in
libassuan, - in
gnupg2, - in
graphite2, - in
gawk, - in
createrepo_c.
mal and direc85 are also updating various packaging practices to allow the upgrade of rpm:
libsoup,cups,libcanberra,pigz,openssl1.1,libusb,autoconf213,calligra,bzip2,meego-rpm-config,glibc,python-rpm-macros,rpmlint,sdk-setup,rpmlint-mini.
Some other changes:
ed, the GNU line editor, mal updated it to 1.22.2.binutils, command line tools, mal updated it to 2.45.llvm, the machinery to build compilers, rubdos fixed some incorrect paths on aarch64 in the branch for the upcoming llvm 20 update.python3, the popular and widely used programming language, mal is proposing an upgrade to 3.11.14.
Hardware adaptation
hybris-initrd, the device boot image base, keto added handling for soft failures in factory reset, and support for building combined normal/recovery boot image for devices without separate recovery partition.
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 – thank you @pherjung for stepping up. 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 23rd October. Please note that you can also join via Matrix bridge.
Remember to follow us also in Mastodon jolla (@jolla@techhub.social) - TechHub