Wallpaper by Dablim (CC-BY) - TMO - Screenshots

penguinphone

Motivation

Dissatisfaction with the current world of smartphone software. This project is slowly heading towards a full GNU/Linux userland for smartphones with the following objectives.

• Compatibility with normal Linux programs. Firefox for example should just work out of the box.
• Minimalism: Minimal dependencies, minimal lines of code. More Lines of Code always mean more bugs!
• Fast Prototyping: Get a working system fast. Use more bloated components and replace them later, if necessary.
• Forward Compatibility: X11 is slowly dying, make everything Wayland compatible
• Tested Code: Try to use tested code, where possible. If feasible, write testsuites for componentes, that we build on.
• Modularity
• Lots of optional configuration options for the user
• Contributing to upstream OSS projects
• Security: Provide an as-secure-as-possible system. Enjoy these buzzwords: Full disk encryption, support existing state-of-the-art cryptographic communication software, reproducible builds, libreboot running (this should only take a few hundred years), warning the user that phone calls and SMS are fully unencrypted etc. (Please note, that no security related software has been written yet for penguinphone.)

Status

Right now, i3 is somewhat extended to be usable on a smartphone. The code is tested, highly efficient and we have a nice environment for further development. See the screenshots for details.

Requirements

• X.org (to be replaced with Wayland)
• i3 >= 4.11 (to be replaced with Sway once it is compatible enough)
• Font Awesome (...because it was packaged in Debian, Arch and Void and the Unicode codes can be looked up easily)
• Elementary (Toolkit from the Enlightenment Desktop)

Test Environment

Unlike most modern smartphone operating systems, you don't need to run a fully bloated virtual machine for development. Just install all the dependencies from above on your desktop Linux, and Xephyr (which is packaged on most distributions) to run another X server inside your regular X server. Then clone and compile:

git clone https://github.com/robotanarchy/penguinphone
cd penguinphone
make testenv # compiles everything and runs Xephyr

For serious development, installing valgrind is necessary. Inside the running penguinphone environment, you can run the testsuite with make testsuite.

Real Hardware Installation

• Install an up-to-date, real Linux distribution (not you, Android! Check the Requirements from above) on your smartphone. For the N900, that would be debian900 (If you get it working with others, let me know!). The installation is not that easy, you can brick your device and what not, so you should probably run the Test Environment (see above) first.

• Install the dependencies. For debian900:

# enable backports (see http://backports.debian.org/ for more info)
# this is required, because we need the latest i3 version
echo 'deb http://http.debian.net/debian jessie-backports main' \
  > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/jessie-backports.list
apt-get update

apt-get -t jessie-backports install git i3-wm fonts-font-awesome \
  xinit libelementary-dev libelementary-bin terminology feh

# recommended programs (optional; psmisc contains killall)
apt-get install tmux htop xinput-calibrator psmisc ntp unclutter scrot

• Clone the source code and compile it on the device (takes a few seconds only!)

su user
cd ~
git clone https://github.com/robotanarchy/penguinphone
cd penguinphone
make

• Copy the config/xinitrc to ~/.xinitrc and customize it (keyboard layout for example)
• Start X11: startx
• If your touchscreen is inverted or otherwise not working, run xinput-calibrator and copy the output to your xorg.conf
• Run elementary_config (when the X server is started with penguinphone, click on the rocket on the top right and choose Elementary Config). Increase the finger size and scale to what you like.