mobian // Mobian's Blog

The European Union must keep funding free software Aug 2, 2024 - 4 min read Multiple Linux mobile related projects (such as e.g. postmarketOS or phosh) have benefited from the NGI funding. The following is an open letter initially published in French by the Petites Singularités association. Read more...

Highlights of 2023 Jan 14, 2024 - 6 min read

Time flies when you are having fun. 2023 was no exception, and we find ourselves in 2024 already! Time to take stock what happened last year (and perhaps also what we attempt to achieve this year).

The Paperweight Dilemma Oct 10, 2023 - 7 min read

Mobian started as a hobby project, triggered by the excitement of finally being able to hack one’s mobile phone at will. It is fair to say that the device that made it possible back then was the original PinePhone. However, after running once again into the same difficulties we experienced over and over, we’re wondering whether maintaining support for this device is still worth the effort…

Mobian Security Update #1 Aug 31, 2023 - 2 min read The Mobian Team have recently released a security update fixing a local vulnerability caused by a bug in our Bookworm images. User Action Required Mobian users must install the following package in order to address the issues described in this post. Read more...

The Bookworm has landed! Jun 10, 2023 - 7 min read

Debian has released “Bookworm” and so has Mobian!

According to schedule and on time Debian has managed to put out the Bookworm release. Congratulations! In step with that release, Mobian is herewith officially releasing its first stable release, codenamed … tadaa … “Bookworm”!

The non-free-firmware repository Mar 11, 2023 - 2 min read

PinePhone and PinePhonePro Owners (and others), please change your config

PinePhonePro users might get nagging messages about packages being held back right now…

TL;DR: Please add the non-free-firmware section to the Debian repository line in /etc/apt/sources.list.

These months in Mobian: February/March 2023 Mar 10, 2023 - 3 min read

March isn’t even over yet and we are already summing up what has happened in both February and March. Dang, are we fast…

Porting Mobian to New Devices Mar 7, 2023 - 5 min read As Mobian (and Mobile Linux in general) has gotten more popular, many folks have started to ask if Mobian supports their particular phone. While we wish we lived in a world where installing Mobian to a new phone model was just as easy as installing Debian to a new laptop, things are (unfortunately) much more complicated than that. Read more...

Off-topic: The importance of efficient tooling Jan 25, 2023 - 6 min read

You’re probably aware of the existence and hopes tied to the rise of the RISC-V architecture, which means we should prepare for future (yet hypothetical) RISC-V Linux-based mobile devices.

The first step in this journey being the ability to build binary packages for this architecture, we purchased a StarFive VisionFive v2 SBC with the goal to turn it into a (Debian-powered, of course!) GitLab CI runner. And that’s exactly where the tools developed to build Mobian came in really handy!

A look back in the mirror... And a glimpse of the future! Jan 8, 2023 - 9 min read

2022 has been an extremely busy year for Mobian developers, and a lot has happened throughout this period. As we’re entering a new ~~development cycle~~ year, now is a good time to look back at what we achieved in 2022.