Announcing the Mobian project

[a-wai]

Thanks everyone for all your kind words, this is really heart-warming

Have you spoken with some Debian folk on whether all of it could eventually get into official Debian?

TBH, there'll probably always be packages that have to be kept outside of Debian: either because they contain changes that would affect desktop or server users, or because it's too much device-specific, or even because it's not mainlined (yet).
If you look at the gitlab group, here's what I believe will happen:
- everything in the "packages" subgroup will make its way into Debian at some point (but it will take time)
- under "devices", pinephone-linux and pinephone-u-boot will probably be replaced by standard Debian packages once all the required patches are mainlined
- other packages (basically, mobian-* and pinephone-*) will probably never make it to the main Debian archive as they're way too specific

At least that's the current status, we'll keep discussing and hopefully find solutions along the way

Does the project accept donations? i will like to support the project, better in bitcoin if possible hehe

Sure, head over to https://liberapay.com/mobian/ (and yes, we also accept bitcoin)
We'll add a button on the website to make it easier

[dukla2000]

Fantastic news - all strength to you.

I am old enough (or sad enough!) to remember when MP Thompson kicked off Raspbian, in the days when Fedora was mooted as the official Raspberry Pi OS. I have an even better feeling for Mobian

[minkiu]

Hello!

Thanks for this lovely image, it's really a charm to use it, I've two questions:
1) What changes are applied to Firefox, since when I browse the Firefox Addons page it thinks I am not using Firefox?

2) Has anyone tried/succeeded connecting via ssh? I've tried (not really hard mind you) following some guides for debian without much success (most refer to packages that are not in this images, i.e: ifconfig, ufw, etc.)

Thanks!

[chris_02]

Hello!

Thanks for this lovely image, it's really a charm to use it, I've two questions:
1) What changes are applied to Firefox, since when I browse the Firefox Addons page it thinks I am not using Firefox?

2) Has anyone tried/succeeded connecting via ssh? I've tried (not really hard mind you) following some guides for debian without much success (most refer to packages that are not in this images, i.e: ifconfig, ufw, etc.)

Thanks!

1) for firefox the problem existed before this new image

2) for ssh, it is necessary to install openssh-server 'sudo apt install openssh-server' without forgetting before an update 'sudo apt update' and 'sudo apt updgrade'.

[dukla2000]

2) Has anyone tried/succeeded connecting via ssh? I've tried (not really hard mind you) following some guides for debian without much success (most refer to packages that are not in this images, i.e: ifconfig, ufw, etc.)

Thanks!

I haven't tried Mobian yet, but would guess if you want ssh via the USB then install pinephone-devtools.

[pcdoodle]

This will be so cool. I hope the approach is performance and stability over all. I don't like the screen transition animations of ubuntu touch (We need every CPU cycle we can get!) or the side dock (I don't wanna reach over there). Imagine, a server in your pocket! Hope things move along and I'd love to help in anyway I can!

[edge]

1) What changes are applied to Firefox, since when I browse the Firefox Addons page it thinks I am not using Firefox?

Removing the user agent override on about:config yields a user agent string accepted by the Firefox Add-ons page.

[a-wai]

I haven't tried Mobian yet, but would guess if you want ssh via the USB then install pinephone-devtools.

Indeed, and pinephone-devtools brings USB networking as well which is quite useful for ssh'ing into the phone

This will be so cool. I hope the approach is performance and stability over all.

Well, the current priority is hardware support and power management, but over time focus will of course switch to stability and performance (in that order).

Removing the user agent override on about:config yields a user agent string accepted by the Firefox Add-ons page.

Interesting! I haven't thought much about the user agent tbh, so if anyone comes up with a better one (that's recognized as a mobile UA by most website) I'd be pleased to change the default value.

[minkiu]

Hey again,

I knew the Firefox "problem" existed before, that's why I though it was a change added by a-wai; the answer I was looking for is:

Removing the user agent override on about:config yields a user agent string accepted by the Firefox Add-ons page.

 Thanks edge! Resetting it to default did the trick! The key you need to reset in `about:config` is: `general.useragent.override`

I haven't tried Mobian yet, but would guess if you want ssh via the USB then install pinephone-devtools.

 I was thinking more over the wifi, so I'll give chris answers a go first, before trying yours:

2) for ssh, it is necessary to install openssh-server 'sudo apt install openssh-server' without forgetting before an update 'sudo apt update' and 'sudo apt updgrade'.

Thanks chris.

Removing the user agent override on about:config yields a user agent string accepted by the Firefox Add-ons page.

Interesting! I haven't thought much about the user agent tbh, so if anyone comes up with a better one (that's recognized as a mobile UA by most website) I'd be pleased to change the default value.

I wanted to install the User Agent Changer and Manager add-on, but due to the UI on the phone it's hard (impossible I'd say) to "Apply" whatever userAgent you pick, I believe this user agent would be better suited, the Firefox for Android 9 one:

Code:

Mozilla/5.0 (Android 9; Mobile; rv:68.6.0) Gecko/68.6.0 Firefox/68.6.0

or maybe The Chrome one:

Code:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; SM-G975U) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/79.0.3945.93 Mobile Safari/537.36

And something unrelated to all this, I after seeing the splash screen I though maybe the logo could be changed to something of the lines of:


It's an SVG (without font requirement) so you can tweak it in Inkscape, here is the link (GDrive) to the SVG.

Thanks again!

[Boern]

Interesting! I haven't thought much about the user agent tbh, so if anyone comes up with a better one (that's recognized as a mobile UA by most website) I'd be pleased to change the default value.

I think leaving it on the default value and installing the user-agent switcher extension would be better, as some websites (like WhatsApp Web) insist on you using their stupid app when you arrive with an Android user agent. But I guess the Firefox Android user agent posted by @minkiu should allow one to install the extension themselves.