Announcing the Mobian project

[AGGMINING]

Dear all,

It's been a little more than 3 months since I started hacking a Debian image for the PinePhone, by (manually) adding new software and fixing bugs step by step. Others have joined me in this effort, and a small team has gathered and did a great job at allowing the PinePhone to be used as a daily driver, at least as long as you don't have extravagant expectations such as "decent battery life" or "working camera"

We keep moving on as we're announcing the Mobian project, aimed at bringing Debian to mobile devices with as much upstream components as possible. We're focusing first on the PinePhone of course, but we plan to extend support to other devices, the next ones on the list being Purism's Librem5 and the PineTab (that is, as soon as we gets our hands on these )

Still, Mobian is not a distribution, but only an overlay to Debian, bringing you instant access to tons of existing packages, while making things easier for us as we try to keep as few custom packages as possible. This means working with the goal of upstreaming almost all of our work to Debian, and this is already going on quite well, as the base phosh packages (phoc, phosh, squeekboard and a few others) should reach the archive soon, and work on bringing phone-specific apps (such as calls and chatty) to Debian is well under way.

With this focus change in mind, we spent the last few weeks creating an infrastructure for the project, both to ease our work as developers, and to provide better user-facing services. The Mobian project now has:

• its own website
  
• a public Matrix channel
  
• a dedicated Gitlab group, including:
  • a project-wide issue tracker
    
  • a revamped (and mostly under construction atm) Wiki
    

With this announcement comes the first PinePhone image available for download.

Most of the work has been going on under the hood, as nearly all patched software have been updated to their most recent upstream version and rebuilt for several architectures (x86-64, arm32 and arm64) in order to ease porting to other devices in the future. There are also a few (small) cosmetic changes, including renaming the default user from "debian" to "mobian".

This release also enables gnome-initial-setup on first boot, fixes wifi stability by disabling power saving in the driver (which should make your battery a bit unhappy, but greatly improve your connectivity), and brings a whole lot of small bugfixes.

New images will be automatically built on a daily basis starting next week, so you'll see fewer release announcements here as I plan to only highlight when major progress is being made, but the releases will keep rolling, and you'll keep the ability to upgrade your system using apt
(although not this time, as you'll understand switching to this new infrastructure requires you to start from a fresh image)

Of course, we're always welcoming new contributors, as there is still plenty to do: improve hardware support, package new software, improve existing ones to fit the PinePhone's screen, improve the wiki, help with our infrastructure and CI, and so on...

Enjoy!