Sailfish OS update from Jolla
It has been super busy two weeks for both Jolla and Venho.AI teams. A lot of excellent progress have been made during these two weeks. You can read progress related from usual Damien’s repository roundup both Mind2 and C2. Like always, David shares his views on apps, looking back at the apps from 2024. What an amazing community we have with you Sailfish Community – hats off. Together we do great things!
Last week we had an excellent grand opening event of the Jolla AI factory at Salo IoT campus. We had over 100 visitors, including the city Mayor, during the event, great discussions and nice media coverage such as Turun Sanomat (article behind paywall). Before the event Antti and Sami hosted a live web stream presenting and discussing about the Mind2. If you have missed the stream please watch here. In connection we also announced that the Mind2 pre-order customers can now start to claim their units for delivery!
Turun Sanomat - KIRSI-MAARIT VENETPALO
On Wednesday 17th December, we released 5.0.0.43 for Jolla C2 enabling VoLTE support for C2. We’re still working to get mobile cellular data fully working with AppSupport for C2. This relates to the telephony stack changes that we communicated earlier – new plugin needed. Camera API 2 and getting video recording working for Jolla C2 goes to early next year – Camera API 2 shall help all supported devices. Video recording is clearly one of the missing things that you are waiting for your daily driver – understood and we hear you.
There are still issues to be sorted out to release Sailfish 5.0 for all supported devices. Due to upcoming Christmas break, it is difficult to promise schedule. Similarly, long waited commercial releases for Xperia 10 IV and 10 V are not finished – maybe some of you got too positive impression from fortnight two weeks ago. Personally, I’m using Xperia 10 V along with C2 but Xperia 10 V has still issues that we have to sort out – I do not use camera, can live without fingerprint but battery status indication is a problem for me.
Some of you are still waiting for your Jolla C2 device back from the repair service and the reverse logistics has been more problematic, and taken clearly longer, than expected. Unfortunately in few cases the logistics company had returned the package back claiming not reaching our office - while we always have personnel in the offices (during regular office hours) even such mistakes apparently can happen! We also had some headache with the local customs regarding the “Sisäinen jalostusmenettely / Inward processing” but it looks we’ve finally figured out a smoother process. You can be rest assured that we’ll do our utmost best to get repaired devices back to you.
Finally, we want to wish you all Merry Christmas! Enjoy and relax with your loved ones and enjoy well deserved Christmas break. We’ll continue community fortnight after Xmas break Thursday 9th after that returning to the normal rhythm with community meeting.
Once again Merry Christmas for the whole Sailfish Community!
Repository roundup
Still many fixes appeared in the repositories to address issues reported with the new C2 device. They have been made available to C2 owners with regular minor updates of the 5.0.0 release. Besides, one can notice that direc85 working on the Go language is now basing his pull request on GCC 13. This version of the compiler suite is not yet in the repository but it may become available at some point…
Network, communication and telephony stack
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wpa_supplicant, a set of tools to allow connections to WPA protected wifi networks, Laakkonenjussi added patches to address the non-stopped scheduled scan by sending the results after a timeout and stopping the scan itself. According to the pull request message : it seems to make the black network-issue on C2 to disappear. -
nfcd, the daemon for near field communication, pvuorela removed reading the locale from the oldnemo/locale.confdirectory.
Multimedia
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droidmedia, Android media wrapper library, mal added missing functions to compile on top of Lineage 21. -
libsdl, a multimedia library, mal upgraded it to 2.30.10. -
gstreamer, a multimedia framework, mal upgraded to the latest upstream version 1.24.10. The various plugins were also upgraded accordingly. -
gecko-camera, a plugin-based library for Gecko to simplify video capture, mal fixed some issues reported bycppchecktool, and also ingst-droid.
Browser stack
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qtmozembed, Qt bindings for the Gecko engine, mal fixed tab view generation when in landscape orientation.
Main interface
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sensorfw, sensor framework, spiiroin added a work-around for C2 accelerometer freezes (making orientation locked). For reference, this freeze may happen when gyeroscopes are disabled. Enabling again the gyroscopes with a different data rate, reenables again the accelerometers. -
ngfd, the non graphical feedback daemon handling sound and vibration feedback, pvuorela corrected a warning about not being able to connect to the session bus. He also fixed a crash when usingffmemlessto play a sound, thanks to nephros reproducer. -
minui, a library for minimal UI framebuffer applications, pvuorela implemented two fixes : one picked from upstream that waits for page flip completion before callingdrmModePageFlip()again, another one that implements retries whendrm_init()fails. -
lipstick, the home screen code (open source parts), pvuorela added a way to control when a back event is sent to the UI.
Low level libraries
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ssu, the seamless software updater, pvuorela fixed failing unit tests and other clean-ups. -
shared-mime-info, the Freedesktop MIME info database, pvuorela fixed packaging issues introduced when moving tomesonbuild system, resulting in a lot of file under/usr/share/mime/without owner. -
libuser, a user and group account administration library, pvuorela updated it to 0.64. -
pulseaudio, the sound daemon and much more, jusa allowed to read configuration files from a subdirectory (default.pa.d). It makes it easier to provide additional configuration files from different sources. -
PackageKit, a D-Bus abstraction layer that allows the session user, pvuorela fixed a crash and a memory leak. -
dsme, device state management entity, spiiroin fixed the arguments exposed in introspection in the function inhibiting shutdown. -
nemo-qml-plugin-systemsettings, QML bindings to access system parameters, pvuorela replaced a blocking D-Bus call with an asynchronous equivalent to get the maximum brightness supported by the device. -
mesa, graphic libraries, mal backported a patch to create symlinks for DRI. -
alsa-lib, the library to handle the sound using the ALSA interface, mal updated it to 1.2.13. -
wayland, Wayland compositor, mal updated it to 1.23.1. -
wayland-protocols, Wayland protocols that adds functionality not available in the core protocol, mal updated them to 1.38. -
qtbase, the Qt framework, and the networking part in particular, mal switched to useprivate-codewhen using wayland-scanner in the scripts used by CMake to detect Wayland capabilities and did the same inqtwaylandalso. This lokks like a new requirement after upgradingwaylandto the latest version. -
ssu-sysinfo, tools and libraries for getting ssu information, it is possible that device hardware has changes that software needs to take into account. spiiroin introducedssusysinfo_pcba_version()function that reads version information from/sys/firmware/devicetree/base/modelfile.
Developer’s corner
pvuorela updated packaging spec files in various repositories, favouring macros like %make_build, removing deprecated ones like %defattr, removing group declaration or updating source URL:
- in
libngf, - in
libresourceqt, - in
sensorfw, - in
libdres-ohmandlibtrace-ohm, - in
ohm-rule-engine, - in
libiphb, - in
telepathy-mission-control, - in
telepathy-ring, - in
buteo-sync-plugin-webcal, - in
sailfish-access-control, - in
qtscenegraph-adaptation,
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fingerterm, the console application, pvuorela avoided warnings for devices without corners (value is undefined in such cases). -
rust-cbindgen, utilities to create C/C++11 headers for Rust libraries, mal proposed to update it to 0.23.0. -
busybox, a single binary which includes versions of a large number of system commands, rainemak enabledrealpath(a utility to resolve the absolute path of a file). -
fingerterm, the console application, pvuorela fixed size calculation in landscape orientation. -
gcc, the GNU compiler collection, direc85 is working on enabling Go language by compiling the required binaries. This new pull request is based on GCC 13.
App roundup
As we head rapidly towards the end of 2024 and find ourselves plummeting headlong into 2025, now would seem like a great time to review the year in apps. In 2024 we looked at 77 app releases spread across 23 newsletters. That’s only a tiny portion of the apps that were released or updated for Sailfish OS during the year, but it nevertheless gives an indication how active the Sailfish developer community is.
With this many apps you can imagine I spend a fair bit of time installing and then cleaning up my phone. But it’s not always the case that I’ll remove an app after testing it out. Sometimes I’ll hesitate before removing it. Sometimes an app is so slick, so nicely implemented or so useful that I won’t be able to bring myself to uninstall it.
So after taking a look at all of these apps over the last 12 months, which are the ones still firmly installed on my phone? I thought it would be interesting to share with you the four apps from 2024 that I’ve found most wonderful amongst those I tested.
Back in February we were enjoying news about Jolla Reborn and the events that took place in Brussels at FOSDEM; and I was enjoying listening to music on my Sailfish OS phone using FlowPlayer. Originally created by Matias Perez (CepiPerez), at the time I said that the infrastructure support and maintenance were now being handled by olf. I was happy to be corrected by olf in the comments!
it should read: …with the support infrastructure overhauled and maintenance coordinated by olf. I.e. I merely coordinate the maintenance of FlowPlayer and FileCase, most of the maintenance work of both fully depends on others, thus contributions are absolutely required.
It’s always worth repeating that with so many of the open source apps covered here over the years, the main developer is often supported by an army of contributors. Some may be longstanding contributors to a project, others may be contributing the odd issue or bugfix. Either way, we all benefit massively from all of these contributions.
But back to the topic at hand. At heart FlowPlayer is a replacement for Sailfish’s standard Jolla-developed Media app. It lets you organise and enjoy music from the collection stored locally on your device, as well as supporting streamed online services. What I love about FlowPlayer is that it’s a genuine replacement. It sticks to what the Jolla Media player does well and builds on it, as I explained at the time:
Visually the app sticks heavily to the aesthetic of the default Jolla Media app. This immediately makes it feel familiar, a sense you’ll get even before you’ve fired it up just from looking at the icon. But it offers more visual flourish than Jolla’s app and a host of additional features, making for an appealing upgrade over the default player.
All in all I’m impressed with how FlowPlayer manages to offer genuine benefits over and above the default music player, but without diverging too heavily from its classic look and feel.
What was true then remains true now. Back in February FlowPlayer had reached version 0.3.2-rc5. Since then there have been four further releases and it now stands at version 0.3.6. Improvements since then have included better codec support, proper SailJail configuration, updated translations, cleaner code and refined settings management. All in all this app goes from strength to strength.
While Music players are a very personal thing, it’s worth giving FlowPlayer a try, especially if you already like the default Media app. FlowPlayer is available from OpenRepos and Chum.
The next app is one I discovered only for the first time in 2024 even though it’s been around since 2019. I regret not having found it sooner. While it provides only a minimal user interfaces (it creates a shortcut in the Settings app but otherwise doesn’t even have its own icon in the app drawer) it’s nevertheless an incredibly powerful tool.
The app is Screencast from coderus and if you’ve not installed a copy I strongly recommend it. It’s similar to Chromecast except without the need to install any new hardware on the device you’re streaming to. As long as the device you’re casting to has a browser and a network connection, you can mirror your phone’s display on it.
The app works by firing up a local webserver on your phone and exposing a streaming video of the display through it. Network connections don’t typically offer HDMI-levels of latency or bandwidth, so the app allows you to down-sample the video to compensate if necessary.
It’s an app that I’ve found genuinely useful, allowing me to present slides directly from my phone. As I said when we looked at it back in September.
It’s a brilliant app that’s both very slick in its design and rock solid in use. I’ve used it myself for live presentations where — as we all know — if something can go wrong it will go wrong. Despite this Screencast worked flawlessly with impressively effective results.
It’s yet another app that I’ve used repeatedly during the year and which I expect to make even more use of in all sorts of ways in 2025. The current version, which remains at 0.3.1, is available from OpenRepos and Chum.
A list of the best apps wouldn’t be complete without something from Mark Washeim (poetaster). Mark develops and maintains such a vast collection of Sailfish apps, from stop motion to music to games. While several of Mark’s apps are fixtures on my phone, the one that really caught my attention this year is Tooterβ, the surprisingly full-featured native Mastodon client.
The continued chaos surrounding X only made Mastodon more relevant during 2024. A federated platform that’s not controlled by any one organisation feels like a good fit for Sailfish OS and so it’s turned out, with increasing numbers of Sailfish OS users joining.
And despite it’s continued status as beta software (or maybe that’s just the name now?) Tooterβ provides genuinely solid and stable access to Mastodon. All of the main features — viewing toots, images and videos; boosting; favouriting; following and replying — are ably supported by the app.
When we featured it back in October I described it as being first-rate and after months of use I stand by this claim.
If you’re a Mastodon user then Tooterβ is a first-rate app for interacting with the fediverse.
At that point in time it had reached version 1.1.9 and in the few short intervening months there’s already been at least one further release bringing it to version 1.1.9.3 for improved media viewing. It’s not an app that requires obvious improvement in terms of bug fixing, but the equivalent online Mastodon client periodically introduces new features so it’s great that the continued development of Tooterβ means it will be keeping up.
The latest version is available from the Jolla Store, OpenRepos and Chum.
Finally for our annual roundup it’s perhaps an obvious choice, but one that is no less relevant for it. We featured SFOS Forum Viewer from szopin just earlier this month when it was at version 1.10.1 and since then it’s already received a further six — yes six — updates, bringing it to version 1.13.0.
As the name suggests, it’s a native viewer for the Sailfish OS Forum. And it really is superb. It integrates using the underlying Discourse Forum API to allow not just viewing, but also interacting with posts in the forum, including marking favourites and posting replies.
Since earlier this month tagging has been extended, support for polls added and error handling improved; many of these improvements have come from nephros and other contributors, so it’s great to see it building up such a solid contributor base.
Once again, I stand by my conclusion from earlier in the year:
If you don’t already have SFOS Forum Viewer then it comes highly recommended
This excellent app is available from the Jolla Store or OpenRepos.
There’s only space to include four apps from 2024 in the newsletter today, but I’ve enjoyed so many apps this year, it’s sad not to be able to include more. With all of the many app developments we’ve seen in 2024, alongside the new Sailfish hardware in the form of the C2 and the updates to Sailfish OS itself, it makes me optimistic for 2025.
Let’s hope Sailfish developers find time to continue improving their code over the Christmas period while enjoying the festivities of the season! I’m sure I speak for many Sailfish OS users when I say “thank you” for all of the work the community puts in to making Sailfish OS such a glorious operating system with such amazing apps.
Please feed us your news
Thank you all for this year and Merry Christmas! Please do not hesitate to suggestions for future topics - feel free to write them in the comments below.
Next community fortnight will come out 9th January 2025 after new year. From there we move to the regular schedule meaning community meeting will be 16th January 2025.