Sailfish OS update from Jolla
It has been while from the previous major Sailfish release 4.6. The rollout of Sailfish 4.6 started with the first Community Beta (CBeta) release April 2024, from which it was rolled out for all supported devices during summer 2024. In Sailfish 4.6 we did total six updates for CBeta out of which four were pushed to Early Access, and eventually to public releases for all. The Sailfish 4 series naming was based on Finnish Unesco world heritage list and the last release was called Sauna, something also designated on the heritage list. Sauna is something that we enjoy very much here in Finland. Tampere is nowadays made known as the Sauna Capital of the world. One of the famous Finnish saunas is actually here at Tampere – it’s called Rajaportti and it’s the oldest public sauna in Finland still in use.
Source: Rajaportti Gallery
That brings us to Tampere and Tampella, the first Sailfish 5 release, and the next naming scheme which is Tampere based – this is also the first major release from the new Jolla. The Sailfish 5 roll out was started with first release for the Jolla C2 back in October 2024 after which we have been maturizing core features and ironing out many critical issues also together with you, the Sailfish Community. Along the way we have also created adaptation and baseline for the Jolla Mind2 – including the first Sailfish Core release. Both Jolla C2 and Jolla Mind2 will drive the roadmap for the Sailfish 5 – together with you. A few years ago we polled our major releases vs updates and result was pretty clear – this year we’ll continue on the same track and target to release 2 major releases and few minor update releases. So far in Sailfish 5, we have done four update releases since October (this upcoming being the 5th) that have been mainly targeted for C2 and the development of Jolla Mind2, and now we are rolling the Sailfish 5 to all supported devices.
Back to the naming, the first Sailfish 5 release is called Tampella. It’s an old factory area across the river to our Tampere office. Since Sailfish 4.6 the release contains close to 300 varying size improvements, modifications, changes and features, and over 200 bug fixes.
Copyright Karri Huhtanen
Feature highlights
- Sailfish Browser engine updated to Gecko ESR91 and work ongoing towards ESR102. This was a major joint community effort and I believe ESR102 will be too. Hopefully we generate more content to the Flypig’s Gecko blog.
- Android AppSupport upgraded to Android 13 level (API level 33) is a major milestone – first made available in C2 and later to other devices, target being that we get migration from AppSupport 11 to AppSupport 13 done for the next bigger release
- Support & fixes for microG 0.3.6 enablers implemented & fixed (to enable opt-in use of Android apps dependant on GMS) – Please find instruction for Installing microG on Sailfish OS and please do not hesitate to update the installation instruction wiki
- Support for Wiregard VPN added. Install it manually on 5.0.0 - see this comment
- Landscape Home, enablers for notch and rounded corners added (accommodate C2, M2 and some community ports). Find this from Settings → Display → Rotating homescreen
- Application specified orientations take the highest precedence
- Orientation lock is the second one in the precedence order – Top Menu toggle or Settings → Display → Orientation will hold the lock accordingly
- Finally if above are not affecting, home screen rotates – surely whilst peeking you should always see the home in the correct orientation
- Capability to block selected incoming calls added
- Support for Jolla C2 Community Phone & Jolla Mind2 Personal AI Assistant added
The public Sailfish 5 release should be rolling to all users in coming days.
Highlights from last week community meeting
We had very vibrant and lively discussion on the various community communication methods and channels – continuation to the FOSDEM 2025 BoF. Excellent take away raised by @nephros is that we should also discuss about “processes” instead of the tools and methods. Let’s continue this discussion.
Repository roundup
Web browsing
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gecko-dev, Mozilla’s Gecko web rendering engine, mal fixed an issue making impossible to enter search terms in the address bar. -
qtmozembed, Qt bindings for the Gecko engine, pvuorela proposed to move code related to the virtual keyboard height directly where it is used insailfish-browser. -
qtdeclarative, Qt implementation of QML language, szopin removed the user-agent filtering from XHR requests, since it’s now allowed by the spec and allowed by Qt since 2020. This allows to specify a custom user agent in XHR requests sent by QML with theXMLHttpRequest()method.
Network, communication and telephony stack
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buteo-sync-plugin-carddav, a plugin for synchronising contacts, lduboeuf fixed an issue in the plug-in, not notifying the daemon on authentication error. pvuorela cleaned up the spec file used to generate the RPM package. -
buteo-syncfw, the framework handling synchronisation, dcaliste added the synchronisation status codes to the QMLSyncProfileWatcherobjects. pvuorela clarified the method used to get the status of external synchronisation: Buteo plug-ins are responsible of the periodic synchronisation of their sources, like calendar or e-mails. But some sources may take back this responsability, like the e-mail in case of always up-to-date IMAP folders. -
nemo-qml-plugin-connectivity, QML bindings for network connectivity, LaakkonenJussi serialised WireGuard addresses and allowed IPs to strings so they can be inserted in the settings of VPN models. -
connman, the connection manager, LaakkonenJussi added support for configurations in a sub-directoryconf.d. A fix for Mullvad configuration files was set up. LaakkonenJussi also worked on exposing tethering client IPs over D-Bus and added corresponding informations inlibconnman-qt.
Main interface
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lipstick, the home screen code (open source parts), pvuorela fixed a memory leak on right mouse button click. -
mapplauncherd, the daemon responsible to start applications faster thanks to preloading, sertonix fixed building withninja. pvuorela corrected a wrong cast between signed and unsigned integers.
Low level libraries
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timed, time and alarm handling daemon, pvuorela fixed potential memory leaks. -
ngfd, the non graphical feedback daemon handling sound and vibration feedback, pvuorela fixed compiler warning with Clang. -
libtasn1, the ASN.1 library used in GNUTLS, mal updated it to 4.20. -
sailjail, a wrapper around firejail, pvuorela fixed potential issues detected by static analysis. -
mce, a framework exposing hardware status of display, buttons…, PureTryOut updated the build system for systemd files to be installed following the PREFIX. pvuorela fixed a memnotify call. -
dsme, device state management entity, pvuorela and spiiroin fixed a memory leak. -
openssh, the OpenSSH implementation of SSH protocol, mal updated it to 9.9p2.
Developer’s corner
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openssl, utilities and library for cryptography, pvuorela cleaned up the spec file, removing the now unused Perl dependency. mal updated it to 1.1.1w. -
ninja, a small build system with a focus on speed, mal avoided a dependency oncmaketo ease the bootstraping of the stack (cmakecan useninja). -
issue-tracker, a repository to gather technical issues, rainemak created this repository and enabled the issues on it. As discussed in the last community meeting, this allows the community to create and discuss technical issues related to components of Sailfish OS.
Please feed us your news
Hope you enjoyed reading this community newsletter! As always, please do not hesitate to share your ideas, thoughts, or suggestion for future newsletter topics – let’s keep on working together. 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 27th February. Please note that you can also join via Matrix bridge.
