Status update 2020-09-05

[ragreenburg]

Hi!

This monthly update is a bit overdue, but with summer seeing a lot of people going on holiday in the northern hemisphere, there hasn't been much progress over this period

Anyway, we got back to work and things continue to improve, although at a slower pace as we already dealt with most of the low hanging fruits. Here are the most interesting features that have been worked on in the past few weeks:

• u-boot has been updated to the latest upstream release and is patch for 3GB PinePhone compatibility, so all images are now compatible with all HW versions
  
• User "root" no more has a default password, which improves security as it will disable root login entirely (you can still set a password of your choice by executing 'sudo passwd')
  
• Default user password can now be changed without the need to use 'sudo': it now accepts any password which is at least 4 characters long, including fully numeric passwords
  
• PinePhone usage as a USB device has been entirely reworked:
  • Internal storages (both eMMC and SD card) are now exposed through the MTP protocol, so you can browse and edit your files directly from your computer as long as they contain a valid filesystem
    
  • Ethernet-over-USB now has DHCP enabled and shares the data connection with the computer, so you can use your phone as a mobile data modem on the go; the phone's IP address has changed to 10.66.0.1 with the latest build (if you upgraded prior to September 5th, it might still be 10.0.0.1 for you).
    
• The volume rocker buttons are now supported out of the box thanks to recent phoc and phosh updates
  
• Thermal management has been tweaked so the CPU almost never gets over 60°C, and the display brightness scale has been improved to allow for a dimmer screen at the lowest settings
  
• Kernel has been updated to the latest 5.7 stable release
  

As usual, today's image is now the reference release, and contains all the latest and greatest improvements

We also have an experimental build using F2FS for the root filesystem, available here, which improves the system's responsiveness and seems to perform quite well overall.
However, we need more testing and feedback before considering it stable, so if you don't store any data you can't afford to lose on your PinePhone, we'd be glad if you could test and report how it works for you (ideally, we'd like have reports from installation on both the SD card and the eMMC, as it looks like it might work differently depending on the storage device).

As you probably know, this is WIP, and a lot is still happening under the hood to make the device more stable and usable on a daily basis. Still a lot to do, but we'll get there eventually, and the more people we are working on it, the faster it will happen

Enjoy!

Thank you for the update. I had a quick question though, I made an app that turns on and off most of the tweaks in the tweaks section of your website but I can't find where the information for if a app is scaled or not is stored. Would you happen to know where I could find that information? For example if I scale Firefox, where does that get stored so Firefox knows it needs to stay scaled?