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This month's update will focus on some hardware that I've used recently.
Okay, while this device isn't quite a decade old, it was my first introduction into postmarketOS. This month, I worked on basic sxmo support for this device (making the buttons work, etc). First I had to flash an updated bootloader. Yeah, that was the glaring issue that caused me to think the device was broken for the last 3 years.
It boots mainline linux, which makes it a good device for postmarketOS, but it has some basic glaring issues, such as broken audio output. After getting it to boot and enabling the buttons, I discovered that my device has a faulty touch sensor, so I'll probably treat this as another SBC rather than using it as a mobile device... Still might be cool for testing and possible kernel work.
With Pine64 entering the e-reader scene, I thought it would be a good opportunity to dust off my old e-reader. This e-reader was originally designed to run Android KitKat, and it served me well for a couple months... I've found a downstream kernel that should work on this device, but I'm not really sure how to get started: I know that the downstream kernel is missing the getrandom syscall, so backporting that is probably the first step.
It's already a pretty slow device, but I wonder how much of that came from installing much android bloat. Maybe the next step is to figure out how to flash a new firmware using fastboot? Online forums suggest using a proprietary tool, or copying update files to part of the SD card, but I think that's a little risky... It's just not too easy of a job.
I've been using 'foot' as my main terminal instead of alacritty. This gives me some problems when SSH-ing into certain machines, as TERM is set to foot (rather than xterm-256color), and bash (or another) doesn't know what capabilities foot has. Maybe I should come up with a script to copy termcap files on SSH.
This is still my dependable cellular device, running Android 7. I use this for gemini-browsing, with Grande (my unmaintained fork of the deceased Ariane). I stumbled across some internet posts with a build of Grande, saying that it crashes immediately. So, it does have a crashing issue: whenever it tries to load a page and it can't, it crashes. This can probably be solved by recompiling it with a more dependable homepage... wait, the default capsule is this one? Maybe that user tested it when my capsule was down? Eh, it's buggy. If you wanna patch it, I'll gladly test and merge.
I'm also having some issues with my crontab apparently not running... have no clue about this.
I received the Lora backplate addon. JF (codingfield) is supposedly working on a library to work with this, but it hasn't been released yet. From my testing, all I've been able to do is mess up my i2c rate, and drain my battery (or maybe that's just crust being broken again). For the time-being, I've switched back to my original backplate.
To my list of devices, I added the PineTime smartwatch. Because of its incredible battery life (several days), I plan on using this as a complement to my PinePhone.
I think I need to find something new to put my energy into. The last 6 months have certainly been interesting.
Income would be nice, though I guess staying close to my family is a higher priority for me right now.
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