Members
- alho2 - @alho2
Getting started
Where to get Images
Nightly builds can be found on FTP which are released and rebuilt every night. These are currently based on latest stable release of Fedora and/or next release beta .
Due to the nature of the nightly builds, there is no guarantee about expected system stability.
There are images for both Phosh and Plasma-Mobile in the Nightlies repo.
Current Status
Fedora Mobility has a reasonable amount of mobile focused packages available in Fedora Rawhide. Packages groups include:
- A functional touch desktop environment, Phosh.
- A compatible touchscreen keyboard, squeekboard.
- A Calling application for making/receiving phone calls, Calls
- Numerous other Fedora applications such as Calendar, Maps, Contacts etc
Plasma-Mobile is now also available for the PinePhone, with all Gear apps ported.
Fedora recently added support for building aarch64 FlatPaks so we will be looking at what applications can be packaged as FlatPaks to make them easily consumable.
As of currently, some core packages are maintained in Copr. Work is done to get all patches upstreamed. You can find an overview of packages that use downstream patches (and what they patch) here.
Reporting Bugs
We have a few different places to report bugs and request features:
- For bugs in packages we use the Fedora package bugzilla. Please add the Tracker Bug as a blocking bug to the bug report so we're aware the issue relates to Mobility.
- For issues with the images, new package requests or RFEs we use the Fedora Mobility issue tracker.
Desktop environments
Several option are available for mobile capable desktop environments. Phosh is the default environment for and most well supported. Plasma mobile images are also available on the FTP server. For Gnome-mobile-shell there is a copr repository included but is currently out dated.
Phosh Environment DNF Group
Just like there are Package Groups for *Workstation*, *KDE* or *Development Tools* that pull in bundles of packages related to each other, a Package Group for Phosh is required.
Phosh is a Phone Shell developed by Purism. It is based on GNOME and currently provides the default desktop for all Mobility images based on Fedora. Phosh is required because the default GNOME doesn't work well on devices with form factors as small as Smartphones and isn't optimized for touch inputs.
Plasma mobile
Plasma mobile 6 is available as a package in the main Fedora repository. This can be readily installed and used by selecting Plasma mobile in the lightdm greeter.
There are some Plasma mobile images available. However these are generally not as up to date as the Phosh images. For the current status, ask in one of the communication channels.
Future plans
Roadmap to Fedora Spin
The group is currently working on getting an official Fedora Spin going. There is no strict schedule at the moment, as the situation is evolving dynamically. This section tracks the progress and what needs to be done towards this goal.
Official Kernel with Networking
The builds are currently reliant on a custom kernel built by megous that includes a variety of patches. The patches are slowly accepted by the upstream kernel devs, which is required for them to land in the official Fedora kernel.
The biggest missing part as of currently is a working WiFi/BT driver for the Realtek RTL8723CS chip in the Pinephone, as well as some bits regarding GPS in the ModemManager.
Official Image Infrastructure
Images are currently generated by collections of shell scripts (see above). In order to become an official spin, the images must be generated with more official tooling. As it isn't intended for the user to boot a live .iso on the phone, Image Factory will be used to generate the PinePhone images.
Currently there is no Mobility-specific kickstart file to use with Image Factory yet.
Repositories
Available code is being worked on and linked to on Fedora Mobility Special Interest Group Gitlab.
