October 16th this year marks 60 years of what is known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. A tense two weeks in which it seemed like the United States and the USSR might engage in full-fledged nuclear war. Reports of that time talk about a lot of tension, a lot of concern, worries on a day-to-day basis whether this would be the end of humanity as we know it. Of course it wasn't and we learnt a lot of lessons from that. But this is not just a story of 60 years ago, it's also a story of today. We have these concerns still remaining in our mind at this point of time. We'll be discussing all this in this episode of Mapping Fort Lines. We are with us Prabir Prakash. Prabir, Cuban Missile Crisis of course now finding a place in history books. Now a lot of people talking about it because it's the 60th anniversary and when you read the reports you can really feel the palpable tension, people thinking about what would happen on a day-to-day basis. So 60 years down the line could you just maybe take us through what really happened because there are some convenient narratives about how the USSR and its expansion is smooth etc etc. So could you just maybe first take us through how we understand it today? Well I would really describe first three things regarding what I remember of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis because we were, I was at school at the time, quite a serious student of the school, class 11 or something. And I still remember this was co-term, this was India, China also having on the Himalayan borders a major war, a border war that was taking place. So we had two crises so to say to talk or think about at that time and frankly speaking for a lot of people in India the Himalayan crisis overtook the Cuban Missile Crisis though the second was a possibility of ending human civilization. The second point is of course that the current scenario with respect to Ukraine and the fact that the United States President himself is talking about that a nuclear threat has been made but if you look at what Putin has said whether it should be construed as a nuclear threat or not and if you look at all the other threats which have been coming from a number of other players should be really talk about this as a nuclear threat particularly when Zelensky has talked about a pre-emptive strike against Russia. So that's the second part of the story. The third part of the story which you also you have referred to is that while it's looked at the Cuban Missile Crisis but what is conveniently forgotten is the fact that there were also nuclear missiles position in Turkey quite close to Russia and so within another time and also in Italy and these were not public at that point people did not know the nuclear missiles had been positioned. Neither were they aware that post Cuban Missile Crisis one part of the settlement was withdrawing also these missiles from Turkey. So this is the background within which we'll have to see it. You are absolutely right. The world not only was as we know publicly close to war and something which could have ended in a nuclear exchange but also there were physical times physically where we were very close to an accidental war. The tragedy was it was not an order given by either the President of the United States or the Prime Minister of Russia, Soviet Union but it were really accidents that could have led to a nuclear exchange. Of course accidents have happened all along with nuclear weapons that we know but these were particularly important because they're taking place at a time where you really are rather thin margins of a war starting. So that was particularly dangerous and the fact that we were at least the three occasions where we can talk about a nuclear war being triggered accidentally all within those two weeks that you talked about I think that's very important to remember today because we seem to be stepping into similar kind of scenario without even the kind of concerns that people had in 1962. In that context of course an important thing like you mentioned is that despite tensions rising to a great high there was actually negotiation and dialogue that took place even in that very tense moment when these two powers were almost on the verge of war and there were talks, there were negotiations between people who seemed like enemies without where there was no space but we look at the situation today and we are again in a war like we have pointed out Russia is in a war with NATO, it's not Russia and Ukraine really but we see a complete absence of dialogue and rhetoric at an unprecedented high that's happening right now so how do you sort of analyze what has led to this situation like what we call the Cold War 60 years ago even then there was scope for dialogue, there was scope for some kind of exchange whereas now we see that the war has been going on for so many months and there is nothing happening at all. You know one of the things I think that the world has become completely blasé about the possibility of a nuclear war we have lived with nuclear weapons for so long we believe that nothing is going to happen so therefore a conventional war can take place NATO can pump in as much weapons as it wants into Ukraine different kinds of weapons quite possibly be involved in blowing up the North's stream one and two pipelines quite possibly being at least instigator if not the one super actually did this blowing up the Kerch bridge which Russia had said is a really red line for them so all of this does not seem to have penetrated the consciousness of either the people or the leadership that actually these are nuclear weapons states the NATO has nuclear weapons, the United States of course and Russia has nuclear weapons and therefore any exchange that starts between NATO and Russia could conceivably tip over into a nuclear exchange so this is one part of it and you are quite right why is it that we don't think of it in the same way we did it in 1962 and I think the two lessons which have not been learnt is one which you have talked about that the lines of communication were kept open by both sides and there was continuous negotiations could you bring this whole thing down ratchet this whole thing down and reach some kind of an agreement and it was two weeks within which this agreement was reached so therefore that is one part of it the second part of it we really have not internalized how close we were to war, nuclear war and I'll give you three instances one of it, each of it is tragic comedy but one of it is really more comedy than even considering the fact we are so close to nuclear war that a bear tried to enter one base and triggered of what is called an intruder alert normally it shouldn't have caused any problem except that it was wired to another base 200 miles away and the wiring was not done right this is always how human failures can lead to dangerous positions and therefore it did not trigger an intruder alert it said that you have to immediately be airborne and prepared for combat which meant that Russia, Soviet strike force was actually coming across Canada if you will, over the North Pole and therefore the aircrafts had to fly and somebody realized this was the wrong order checked it up and then there was no way to recall the captains of the aircraft so he took a jeep and actually positioned it on the runway and stopped the flight the second one we know about is regarding the nuclear submarines in which one of the commanders of the submarine was on the verge of firing a nuclear weapon and his political officer include but the Flotilla commander was Archipof and he said no, no way you go to fire a nuclear weapon we need to surface and check before we do it and that's how the nuclear weapon was not fired and we have another case where we also know that when we stake a command was given to fire nuclear weapons and it's only because it was checked and then found that this was wrong order and the person concerned apparently was retired but he might have retired the whole world before that this also shows how nuclear exchange by just sheer accident, stupidity human error, wrong wiring in this particular case any of these cases we can come to the brink of extinction and I think that is why the need to think of what's happening in Ukraine not simply as a war between NATO and Russia but also something which is dangerous in the future of our civilization But Praveen, specifically in the context you were talking about there have been reports of Putin's threats you mentioned a bit about it but could you just elaborate a bit more? You know this is the whole issue the Putin what he has said that if Russia's existence is threatened as a country they can use any weapons that is at their disposal now this is the formal position of the United States in any case in fact they go further they can use all weapons including weapons of mass destruction if they feel that there is an attack on them likely which is what's called a preventive war so it's not a response to nuclear weapons it's what is called as that they can use it as preventive war now there is no provision in international law of a preventive war nor is there any potential possibly any provision for a weapon of mass destruction being used in that form the only question which the International Court of Justice left open is if the existence of a country is threatened do they have the right to use nuclear weapons or not at which point International Court of Justice said we can't comment on that unfortunately that is the provision which is used in order to justify nuclear weapons being held by countries but the point is that this position is what in fact has been predestinated by Putin if you take it that if Russia's existence is threatened that they can use nuclear weapons is anybody threatening Russia's existence at the moment so this whole argument that Putin has talked about using nuclear weapons I think is really something which is I would call as red herring if you will or something by which you are really ratcheting up the nuclear tension and then you start talking about protein has threatened nuclear weapons protein has threatened the use of nuclear weapons nobody is actually going back and reading what is he has said in what context it's been said and unfortunately the media is at the moment completely one-sided the international media seems to be completely one-sided whether whatever happens to the military war on the ground certainly the United States and its allies are certainly winning the media war that is very much very much clear so we are really hearing if you read the news you only hear one side of the story most of the world cannot even access RT and other Russian agencies because most of them have been blocked and in any case if you read a number of these channels which give the Russian side they are all supposed to be fake news sites so we have this whole also the media onslaught which spins this thing in a very different way you have President Biden saying things you have NATO leaders saying things and then it appears that we are in the threshold of a nuclear war all because protein has apparently threatened it which is certainly not at least the case that we can see from reading the transcripts of what he has said moving on to our next question question we have often addressed on this show I mean the number of nuclear weapons has come down in the decades since 1962 we have still the Russia and the US together I think have about 13,000 nuclear weapons there are constant issues like the Iran issue for instance where the talk of nuclear weapons is Israel for instance is continuously raised temperatures on that we have tensions in the Korean Peninsula so have you also seen considering what we have been through over the past many decades a complete failure as a global community in addressing the issue of nuclear weapons I would add to your list also the India Pakistan issue because the nuclear powers and we have tensions on our borders as well as India China so yes we are very much a part of this nuclear tensions in that exist in the world I think the basic as I said there is no peace movement today and the real issue is that it came on the agenda of the world because there was a global peace movement that is what is one missing element today and that is one which forced a lot of the countries then to address it through negotiations and finally the realization that this is something that would not that is not a usable weapon therefore all other weapons are okay but this weapons there is really no need to see how many times we can blow up the world so this mutual assured destruction model which is that each side then has more weapons to counter if 80% 90% of its weapons are taken out in the first strike therefore the second strike then if there are anti-missiles therefore the second strike can also be about it so this is how this whole thing gets ratcheted up and we are entering the cycle again if you remember that the one of the consequences of all those movements demanding started actually with the neutron bomb no to neutron bomb no positioning of nuclear weapons in Europe at Western Europe which all of these movements which were there at that point of time the issue really was that nuclear weapons are not a weapon that can be used therefore it should not be a weapon that should be used as a tactical nuclear weapon and therefore having anti-ballistic missile shield essentially makes it possible for you to think you can win a nuclear war with the first strike and taking out the returned strike with your ABM weapons so anti-ballistic missile shields were considered not something which would help bringing peace and only one set of anti-ballistic missile shields were actually accepted in the treaty that was signed by the US as well as Soviet Union at that point and later on Russia but unfortunately what happened was that the George Bush really withdrew from that it started with Clinton but formally George Bush withdrew out of it George Bush too withdrew out of it and then we have the further things that happened when Trump withdrew out of the intermediate range ballistic missile treaty and the current one the only one that we have now is a peace treaty the start to salt one salt two the only one that exists at the moment it's also nearing its end in 2026 so what is going to happen is not clear it is known that the United States is going to spend nearly a trillion dollars upgrading its nuclear missile nuclear weaponry we don't know how much Russia is going to spend so we seem to be entering again the cycle of winnable nuclear wars and I think that's that mindset that we can strike and win is the one which is really the most dangerous at the moment and we hear nuclear proponents in the United States openly saying that if we do A, B, C, D then we can win the nuclear war all we need is better missile shields and then we are through I think those are the kind of things which are really really dangerous thank you so much for being so there we have it we have spent decades living under the shadow of nuclear weapons but we are no closer to eliminating it to removing the danger than we were in 1962 we will be discussing many such issues in future episodes of Mapping Fault Alliance until then keep watching NewsClick


So it's 1500, it's time for the next talk by Merlin and Bart and I'm really looking forward to this talk because it's not as I perceive the project not only about a regaining control over your smartphones which is of course very good but it's also to be able to keep your phones longer even if there's no further support from vendors anymore that's what also I also like but let's get more first-hand facts from Merlin and Bart enjoy. Does it work? Yeah works good okay so I'm Merlin on Merlin this is Bart I'm gonna briefly tell you what we're gonna be talking about then we'll introduce ourselves and we'll roll right into the contents. So this is better so our talk is titled status of the smart phone how to liberate your device by running actual Linux and software you control so we're gonna briefly introduce ourselves first then I will talk about why why we need the Linux on the smartphone like why do we need it I think the answer is obvious but maybe it isn't so we're gonna discuss that for a while then I'll talk about some hard and hardware problems and potential solutions to that then Bart will give you an overview of all the existing software out there like all the different efforts that people are undertaking he'll talk about post market less and I'll take I'll talk about my mom and by that time we should get the questions so my name is Merlin or Merlin in Dutch I studied at the University of Amsterdam I did computer science I do work for the Internet Archive Archive work they did the way back machine the archive web pages and books and CDs and other cool stuff and in my spare time at night I work on my molester I am also a board member of the Amsterdam Hacker space have been for a while and I run tour exits and work on other free software projects so my name is Mark Rivers I'm mostly known as purely out on the internet I work in post market West and also because of us Mark West I'll also work on Alpine Linux I'm still studying I'm living in the Netherlands and my school sadly is a bit dominated by the provider with no scouts so I'm the only one that's trying to liberate school and yeah okay so why should you run Linux on your smartphone there's a couple of reasons for it first of all so I how many of you are running iOS or Android just raise your hands iOS or Android how many of you are running Android most of you are running Android right so Android runs Linux of some kind but it's not really new Linux how much of you how many of you are running Linux US it's like 5% of the people that just raise their hands so most of you use Android that was installed by your vendor which could be Motorola or Google or some other hardware vendor and if you look at what we do on our laptops like how many people if you were running Linux on your laptop right did you install it yourself yeah okay but we do this on our servers we do this on our desktops we do this on our laptops but we don't do it on our phones and there are many reasons for that and we'll get to some of those reasons but first why would you want that so obviously if you run your software on your phone on your laptop you have full control you you are you are you already happening you decide what runs you decide what distro you want you decided you want no more KDE or Wayland or Xorg or Sway or whatever you want to run and I think that's very important I think that's what draws a lot of different crowds and you know binds us together in the fact that we can work on all these different things and it gives you to and we have the freedom to modify whatever we want so we can change the software we can fix stuff we can work as a community to make all this better and with the smartphones we really can't with Apple it's just they work on something and that's it maybe you can report a bug then you'll hear something in a couple months Google does some some of the code is open source but they work in a closed way so every now and then they just drop code and that's kind of it so there's no way that we as a community here can work together currently there's some efforts to do that but they're not super well known yeah and of course if you if you have an Android phone right now you're dependent on your manufacturer if Motorola supports Android until 6.0 then if you Android 7.0 is released or their security fixes you have to wait for them to fix it or flashlight as you ask if it supports your device and there's no support and they usually they make you get a new device every couple years which is not ideal because you know I'm still using my Nokia and your hundred and have been for the last 10 years and it still works fine and very often Android has basically iOS as well had to have spyware built in to some point that the point is you know like if you have your phone you know it's tracking you in some way and you have to figure in all these different ways of tracks you have to deny permissions for everything it gets very tricky and I think the right way to do it is to start with a device that doesn't track you at all in any way and then start reasoning about how you can make it not track you very often there's a lot of bloatware super large apps and lock-ins of different communication platforms and I think that's not not a good thing for the community as well okay so what does it mean if we want to be in control we don't want to be dependent on a manufacturer what do we need so I think the essential pieces of a Linux smartphone is that it has mainline Linux support and for those of you who don't know mainline Linux means that you can go to Kernel.org the website of Linux you download the latest release and you can build a free device and it works more or less there might be some issues but it just works and for most of your Android devices you can't do that it won't be supported in Linux because the vendor just made some changes and maybe if you're lucky you can get the changes as the last talk covered and that's kind of it so if you want to work together on Linux we need this to be there and we don't we want most of the drivers to be open source so that we can improve the drivers make them better and we need a bootloader without restrictions so if you run a very Android bootloader or something else as long as they allow you to boot Linux your own version of Linux so it doesn't it's not signed by some cryptographic key and you can just do it yourself that's probably good enough it will be ideal if the bootloader is completely open source from the start but that might not be completely realistic and of course if you have Linux and a bootloader you need something other than the kernel to actually do stuff with your phone so we need usable user space that's free and open source and ideally there will be many distros and many UIs like we have right now in our laptops but there's quite some problems so if you put your laptop with Intel you just kind of insert the whatever your distro is maybe you want to CD or USB stick and it puts to a bootloader and it just puts to a desktop or UI and you can do things on the phone this doesn't work that way. Hardware support on ARM is different there's no BIOS that sets everything up and then loads a bootloader and then the bootloader will go to Linux and Linux looks at whatever the BIOS provides provides it on what's at whatever's in the PCI bus to allow the drivers this is not there on ARM there's no currently very good infrastructure to do that there's some progress has been made but for a lot of devices that doesn't work so that's harder you have to often compile your own kernel with the right options as you can just plug in something and hope it works and of course most of the devices that I said have vendor on the only kernel so they take take Linux on a certain point they add some things and that's that's kind of it they never contributed back the bootloader sometimes even lock down and specifically bootloaders here you have to configure them manually often compile them as well because they have the same problem they don't know what hardware is in your device and they can't detect what what they should support to even render something on your screen and there's so many devices there's so many different Android phones and there's so many different Chinese ones and different large United States manufacturers and another problem is power management power management on the desktop and laptop is pretty good with Linux nowadays if you're lucky you can get eight or nine hours in your laptop if your phone lasts only eight or nine hours in your pocket it gets warm it's not a very good like you need we need something better and with the 64-bit ARM some of what I said before got a little better so there's some way to detect what drivers you have if you have a EFI bootloader then you can kind of do it but it's still some problematic so these are a lot of problems there's some solutions that we as a community can or some things we can do as a community to hopefully make this a little less painful we can focus only only a couple devices so take a couple of Android phones or whatever phones that are not that hard to support or are GPL friendly manufacturers that kind of stuff will be good or if people are manufacturing new devices they should pick a system on chip that is well supported by Linux already so system on chip is basically the computer and graphics card most of the things integrated in a simple small thing that is on your phone and there's actually a company doing that or several companies doing that we'll cover them in a bit and I think the way to actually get Linux support proper is not to rely on Android and an Android kernel by vendor to provide some drivers and then rely on it so there's some good projects at abstraction layers around Android and Android drivers so you can run your own Linux stuff on there but it doesn't get as any closer to actual mainline Linux on our phones so there are two companies working on new devices right now the first one is pine 64 they have a stand in the AW building today I think they might have a stand until five so after the talk finishes you can still go there and they are showing off their phone and tablet with various OS's that currently are in alpha state are kind of working right now so if you're excited to go there and specifically they are working on something called the pine phone maybe not surprising it features an all-winner A64 SOC system on chip and it has very good mainline support and this is not necessarily because of the company all-winner but because for the last couple years people who visit foster and have been working very actively to support the devices because you can find them in a lot of single board computers so if you know Raspberry Pi there's a lot of other boards like that like there's only makes boards and pine 64 they make boards with all internships in there and you can use them as a small server at home or as a media box so mainline support and Linux is really good the driver support is getting a pretty decent there's 2 gig 2 gigabyte of RAM emmc and a quad core CPU and there's an open source 3D driver for many years specifically 3d in the whole ARM space has been a big problem and I don't I think four or five years ago someone here lived the started working on the lima driver for the Mali 400 GPU he did a lot of work he did a big talk here on the K building a couple years ago and then stopped working on it and then others picked it up and now today we actually have a driver that works on way on the next org so that's awesome and another cool thing that the pine phone features are kill switches so if you want to only turn off your microphone you just flip a physical switch and then the line of your microphone no longer runs your phone so there's no way to whatever you say will be recorded by the moment you can do the same for Wi-Fi you can turn off your cameras you can do the same for Bluetooth so that's that's kind of neat if you want like some extra privacy features it features the worldwide 4G slash LTE modem so wherever you go to just work and they will likely when the phone is finished allow you to pick a distribution that kind of works on the phone and then they'll pre-install it for you so it's kind of cool I'll let Bart continue and it costs so 150 euros approximate thing the other so the other company is Purism is making the leaping 5 this might be more known to the community the device is actually based on a different sock than the pine phone is it's a bit more powerful as well the kill switches are actually on the outside while the pine phone they're on the inside of the phone so it's a bit hard a bit easier actually to flip the switch the mainline support is also pretty good it still runs on some out of three patches but they're actively being worked on and being upstreamed from purism they're working on the distribution pure OS which is the main focus for the leaping 5 probably gonna run it out of the box and at the moment they have the chestnut addition ships that just means it's one of the first batches that has shipped they work in several batches meaning the first batch has basically an early version and there might be some little issues with it and the next batch has those issues fixed and then some issues might occur there the next issue next batch has those issues fixed just an addition is basically for the the brave heart of the people that don't really mind having some issues and don't mind working around them I think right now the price is $800 but it's changing a bit so it might not be accurate and depending on the region you're at it uses a different modem I think especially USA versus Europe and Indian but it's basically just a prominent in the phone and hopefully we'll see a lot of people next year using it instead of their Android phones so to give an overview of the currently various efforts to put Linux on mobile there are a lot of distros out there at the moment just to start somewhere we have Katie Neon it's made by the Katie project it's already used on desktop a lot it just basically based on genome of a sorry Ubuntu with the newest KDE stack on it a case of mobile they put the newest versions while the mobile components Katie on it to make it work on current phones just not the pine phone in the the Libre 5 but on regular Android phones they use Libhibris which is a technique to make Android drivers and stuff work on regular Linux systems and it's basically the main the main development distribution for Katie on mobile and the next one will be a wanted touch this is probably the most completed distribution at the moment out there it works a bit differently than most distributions the base system is read-only and they install packages with they call the click system and if they update the system it's just reboots into the recovery modus installs a new version then reboots into it instead of running say apt-get update it comes with unity 8 on most devices at the moment it uses again Libhibris to work to make the drivers work but they're quite far advanced as well with the pine phone and Libre 5 to make it work with mainline drivers and without Libhibris and if you want to run a Linux on mobile system like this year and you want some apps to run Ubuntu touch is probably your best bet then we have Nemo mobile based on the originally on mirror nowadays that's basically selfish OS it basically takes selfish OS but replaces the proprietary components of it with free and open source software that mainly come down to the user interface and applications that come with it it basically runs on every device that selfish OS runs on it just replace the of put a repository of them on top of it install the different packages and it will run now we have Luna OS it's based on the older web OS which was made by LG they originally discontinued the efforts to make web OS and then the community decided to fork it make Luna OS nowadays LG has picked up web OS again so Luna OS is nowadays working with LG to bring the all the components back together make sure it stays open source and it's based on modern techniques and hardware again it uses Libhibris to work instead of mainline drivers but they're working on the pine fun as well in which case again they'll use the mainline drivers properly then we've asteroid OS it's a bit different it's not really smartphone OS but more a smart watch OS it's again use Libhibris it's made for the smart watches which basically at the moment run Android watch it's a regular Linux system I think it's based on Yokto or open embedded I'm not entirely sure the UI and stuff is again based on mere which is updated in a different direction then AOSC it's made for more of the the eastern Asian market it's main focus is on plasma mobile runs on mainline only it doesn't run on any other devices that do not have mainline so it's basically at the moment mainly the pine foam and Libhibris 5 and then with pure OS this is made by purism the company that makes the Libhibris 5 it's mainly focused on running on the Libhibris 5 although also on the other Libhibris products so the laptops this pure OS will ship with Porsche I'm not sure how to pronounce properly but it's based on the GNOME stack they use GNOME technologies and they run GNOME applications but adapted so they are made responsive and will resize them to various phone sizes this pure OS is made to only run a mainline kernels because only made to run a Libhibris 5 really but in theory you can run on any phone that has mainline and it's a fork of Debian then with Manjaro they popped up recently showing they have interest in making a mobile version as well as Manjaro ARM project they focus at the moment on plasma mobile but they're based on ARC so in theory you can anything that ARC can run and also it's made to run only on mainline kernels and at the moment they're working on mainly the pine foam and then we have Nix OS last year they got funding by Nelnet to work on it so they now a full-time developer it's a standalone OS works a bit differently the package manager is quite interesting I can recommend you look into it it runs on the pine foam as well but they're also trying to get it on run on existing Android devices in which case again they use Libhibris the desk or the interface it will come with is not set of stone yet they're working on multiple interfaces so you can probably eventually run plasma mobile in it and force and unity and hopefully lots of others so post-market OS that's what I work on in my opinion the best one but probably will others disagree and this was announced on the 26th of May 2017 by Oliver Smith he had worked on it in private for a year by then he made some basic tooling to work on it and at that point he thought was ready to show it to the world when he made the original blog post that announced the project it's only supported two devices or at least booted on two devices but basically now we boot up to one hundred seventy-three devices it sounds like a lot but it's probably not even half of all the Android phones out there quite a lot do note we say support but doesn't mean you can pick up the phone install post-market OS on it and expect to make a call and have fun with it it's more most device or more in like a respirator by state you have working Wi-Fi if we're working screen and you can run some interesting application it but don't expect that you can make calls or send us mess with it we do have a few devices that's what you can make calls with or at least close to make calls with but most of them will not be the case well post-market is based on Alpine Linux it's probably mostly popular distro for Docker containers and on server installations but it will also work fine on the on laptops desktops and in our house phones we chose Alpine Linux mainly because it's really tiny the base installation without the kernel that is it's only six megabytes big so that's basically a booting system once you add the kernel and because we work we chose this because of size because we work with a lot of change routes we every time we do something we make a change route do some stuff in it we remove the change route and that happens a lot and if you do that like six times a day you don't really want to wait every time the whole in distribution is installed because our system is only only the basis anyway it's only six megabytes big this is an issue the change routes are made and this are made and removed again inferior within seconds and the development is quick because of it we're basically a distro for repository on top of Alpine Linux so we use all the packages from Alpine Linux and although we have our own custom stuff sometimes we do try to upstream as much as possible Alpine Linux and where possible also custom patches to the various projects that are out there we are like next to us basically we are interface agnostic meaning we currently focusing on plasma mobile but we also ship foch we had unity in the past unity eight and we'll ship hopefully ship it again in the future but we also ship with Hilden from main molester and hopefully in the future also Glacier UI and any other UI that might pop up so we try to give the choice to the user you can use our system but it doesn't mean you have you have to be forced to one interface or another like several four don't expect most devices to install it on the system on and then expected to call we're basically an alpha state you can boot the system you can ever mess around with have fun and except for a few devices you probably won't use as a phone in our case but the Raspberry Pi is also cool basically so you can use it like that and we are we have our chat channels on matrix and I see please join when you feel free we need both end users and developers we can use all the help hope to see you there back to my lane thank you does it work yeah I think so okay definitely works right okay so I'm gonna tell you a bit about what I've been working on which is me molester I hope I pronounce it correctly I'm not from Finland and I heard people pronounce it differently me more I'm all I say memo hope it doesn't offend anyone it was developed by Nokia a long time ago Nokia was in the smartphone business an internet tablet business maybe even before Apple made their first iPhone maybe it was around the same time and they have been working on me more for a while they had various internet tablets they had the end 770 the end 800 and 810 those row internet tablets you can use them for navigation but they had no cellular modem in there and then they made the end a hundred that I still use today and that a lot of people working on that OS and it was based on Debian and by that I don't mean that they literally use the Debian repository but they use APT the package manager the depth package format and a lot of the base system was the same they actually sold a lot of devices they sold I think well a lot at least I think it's a lot they sold a couple hundred thousand no can and hundreds at least so a lot of people who don't typically visit foster them actually use that device probably for a couple years and it's still being maintained by the community there were actually a lot of people using it was kind of dubbed the hacker phone because no can and hundred had a radio transmitter and receiver in there so you could put in your car and it will transmit radio on your car radio and you can just listen to that and a lot of cool features and then community maintain it for a long time but now there's not a lot of not a lot of maintenance anymore but the cool thing is that they still have a lot of packages on main mode at work with maps calculators useful stuff okay and I've been using it ever since as I said and the big problem is that not everything in main mode 5 which is the main what they made for the no can and hundred is open source if it was it will I'm she I think it would have kept on living for a long time ever since they made it and not you know being hiatus stated for a while and big parts in that open source that's a problem so I've covered some of it like what why are we doing this I love the OS and I still want to be able to use it that's a personal reason for me and this phone the hundred is becoming very old so I need a new device on which I can run the same or similar software which actually gives me news that's the next on my phone and I just wanted to be fully open source because this one is not so and it's been used by a lot of ordinary users the UI might look a little arcane at this point I'll show you a screenshot later I think it's actually very usable still but it doesn't look anything like iOS and Android now look look like and main molest is entirely community developed so over the years a lot of community members have worked and they've come and gone and there's currently three or four people actively working on main molest and we started about two years ago and there's a lot more people joining and testing and and fixing minor things but there's like three or four core developers so it's not that many and I really like the fact that we're community developed because there's no corporate backing and there's no special interest nobody wants to run their specific cloud in our device or we're not pre-installing any specific cloud software or whatever and there's no specific direction that will take it just because the company wants to do things that make sense financially and it's compatible with these existing software so as opposed to I think every single mobile dish for you names they all around Wayland right and we're doing one that still use x11 you can hate it or like it the code works on x11 it was open source there was no reason for us to make that work on Wayland right now and it uses a gtk 2 3 and qt and there are some parts of the gtk but it's mostly theming and some and some wages but it also means that if you want to run let's say something crazy Libre Office you can just install it and it will actually just start in the device it probably won't be very usable because there's all these buttons and menus but it will look stylishly the dialogues will be styled and they kind of integrate in the system if you take more simple applications they'll probably just run and I think that's a big feat because if you were if you base your work on top of Debian and and and that one as I'll talk about in a bit then there's 20 000 packages in repository that you can all just install and use and some of them might be a little clunky but they might also be very good and everything that we do is open source everything that we write now is gpl and if there's some open source license that was not gpl before then we just run with it if nobody wrote something that was not not gpl another thing that I really like is that the apis for memo are developed with mobile in mind so they thought about power management they think about things like there's a proximity sensors if you put something to your ear the screen needs to go off and the touchscreen shouldn't work anymore right because otherwise you're pressing buttons or if you're in a darker room then the brightness should adjust itself to ambient level there's a compass in the area if you flip the phone it needs to go to poor greater landscape mode that kind of stuff and all the apis are there so if we're working on making all this work we have a a fixed point we just follow what the apis we re-implement them and it all kind of just works it uses only on the end 100 actually use like 80 megabytes 150 megabytes is the default I think on on 64 bit devices and there's a lot of applications out there that were community developed and if we keep the same apis mostly then it's just a matter of recompiling them when they work so that's I think that's really cool and allows us to keep focus so what do we do we ported code and we updated apis we looked at some code programs that were not open source and we tried to figure out how they worked and re-implemented them if they were demon we just looked at the interfaces and we tried to just make that work and we build everything in Jenkins so we have we have git repository currently on github and Jenkins just builds whatever we committed built it for us and adds it back to the devian repository and installing memo is as simple if you if you want to do it you can just install devian or dev1 because we don't use systemd but someone's working on systemd support if you really want it but you just add a single line and you install our meta package and that's it it just works on top of devian I think that's I think that's really cool and our aim is to make it work for people here at fosdm at for hackers for open source enthusiasts and not necessarily for the end user will maybe get there but we're not there now and real cool thing is that I think somewhere mid last year we submitted for funding for now net which is a a non-profit in the Netherlands and we actually got 40 000 euros in funding so we get to get paid for for some of the work we do this is what it looks like on the n900 you can see that I was testing some python binding so the the binary clock shows up there the actual clock is not a binary clock I was just testing a replacement clock applet it's connected to the kpn network provider in netherlands on 3g the battery is full it's on wi-fi the 4 says the wi-fi signal is pretty strong it's currently muted for sound and it tells me there's that the application manager thinks there's an update available so what do we have now it's alpha quality at best um if you if you got super excited I'm sorry once it works and I can make phone calls I'm gonna start using it as my main device I'm gonna keep on dock footing it and I hope others will do the same right now it runs on the nokia and then hundreds the motor road droid four in the pine phone I haven't mentioned the motor road droid four before it's made by Motorola and it's one of the last physical keyboard phones they made so the nokia and then there's a physical keyboard and that one does too and it has a pretty good chip power management wise and someone I think two people have been working super actively on mainline support for years and now it actually works really well so the wi-fi works the modem works power management works you can get a couple days of power on that thing so I think that's really cool um and we use virtual machines for development so you can run qmu vmware virtual box and you can just have the desktop environment in your virtual machine log in over ssh and do your development um we still need to get some core components in place the main thing lacking I think right now is a phone UI because we are actually able to make some phone calls using the command line but that's not how you want to answer your phone or or make a phone call right um I think it will probably be a couple months honestly until we get to that point but I'm still pretty excited and as I said before there are demo devices and at the point 64 is at an aw and I think they'll be there until five so maybe you've already seen them and I'm really hoping that the power management were really good because in okay and 100 last for maybe a week a week and a half if I don't use it that much I don't I've never seen that on an android phone um so these are the devices we support and there's a link up there with more devices that are not that well supported but they kind of work like I said we reach out to folks in a couple and last but not least if you're really interested in power VR we just did the 3D driver on the Nokia 100 and the Motorola Droid 4 the state was terrible and we've been working on it with other people for a year and a half and now you can patch mainline Linux a little bit and it will start the user space is still closed source but Texas Instruments is actually building new binaries for us um so it's actually looking pretty good we'll leave it to Bart. As a conclusion um well as we showed there are various UI's various distributions available basically everybody everybody's choice is available and possible um but all of them do need work we need a lot of help we nowadays we do have devices to run them on so please get a device get into the the various chat channels ask what you can do we don't just need developers we also need end users we need people to write documentation and with somewhere everybody can do that um hopefully this year probably first half of the year maybe second half of the year expect phones to actually show up the pine phone will work the Libre 5 will by then work and hopefully next year most people here will be able to run such a device and be able to call with it have fun with it um just make sure don't be don't be afraid to ask questions we're all great people we always appreciate every help we can get all the help we can get and um we hope to see you in the various channels and forums and all the places we we are um hope to welcome you into our community uh lastly yeah resources quick links main molester is available on free note on ruc with the hashtag memo dash lester uh postmarked is available also on free note uh with hashtag postmarked to us we're also on matrix the channels of bridge so it doesn't matter which you choose um please join have a look at our websites for more information and um hope to see you next year and if you're interested in more technical details for me most specifically i did a talk a couple months ago in bulgaria an open fest which is another great open source event like this and it's about an hour long i did link is here i'll make sure that the slides are on the foslin website somehow and it's more technical and in-depth than this talk it's up there any questions with so many distributions being available um is there some plan to have to have something like flagpacks can everyone please leave quietly or shovel quietly because i can't hear please repeat with so many distributions available thank you um is it possible that you can run say i don't know flat pack or snap on it to um develop a package for one of the distributions of for all of them or do we have to basically build an apk for alpine adept for debian based ones yeah yeah so i guess the question is if with so many distributions available do you want to package the app for all the different distributions or can you use snap or flat pack i guess yeah um depends a bit on the distribution most distributions of data mentioned do support something like flat packer snap you can package them in flat hub and it will you can install and run them under your device not all distribution might necessarily support out the box but often it's just a app's get install flat pack and it'll work yeah yeah hi um so i i didn't hear anything about halium are you working together with the halium guys to get uh okay okay are you working somehow together with the halium guys to get you know i could not hear what you were saying please repeat you didn't hurt anything okay um so yeah are you working together with the halium guys to get the stack or android mobile phones yes now okay yeah are you working together with the halium guys halium guys okay so the question is are we working together with halium i think halium is using uh android as a base and it's like an abstraction around halium uh android to make things work better on android devices um i think a lot of distros are but mimo is not because we really want to focus on mainline only and i don't want android modem abstractions or graphics driver abstractions or anything else like that maybe people in the community have done it they've used it to make main mols to work on android phones uh we might support that in the future but right now we we don't we don't do that in case of post market to us um we have i think three or four devices actually losing using halium slash deep hybrus um most of them don't but we definitely appreciate the effort if somebody ports halium and our systems with so yeah we should port this do we have more questions thank you uh is it true that uh for the choice of the hardware for uh not pine for the other one for prism you only can choose the battery from the uh prime prism wendor so you're locked in with that battery changing the battery sorry if you want to change the battery you want the battery uh gets damaged and you want to change it yeah so you are locked in with a with a prism you can't buy a third wendor so that depends a bit on the device you said you said uh about changing batteries right you asked talk about changing batteries yeah so that's depends on the device on the n100 you can change batteries without problem uh the pine phone uses a standard samsung battery so you can just buy those stock batteries and replace the battery in your pine phone i'm not sure if you can replace it while the device is on you can do that with some devices too if you powered them over usb swap out the battery that kind of stuff that can work i i can't hear you on the prism smartphone you can't buy from another wendor the battery locked in with that with the hardware yeah the main problem with batteries is i guess the voltage and the size of the battery most phones even though manufacturers say you should not replace the battery you can just get any other in the world work fine if i if we take the pine phone um the they basically already set from the store they do support replacing battery you can get uh i think against the j7 battery and it will work fine in the pine phone in case of leapham 5 i think they use it custom form factor so be a bit hard but the device itself is not the reason there's no hardware limitations on the battery it's just a form factor and if the voltage is good should be fine what's the policy for binary blobs in post market os what's the policy for binary blobs in post market os do you really care about them or just whatever uh the question is if we care about binary blobs in post market us yeah um we prefer not to of course when in some case some binary blobs or at least firmware is needed to get the device running um we do ship at least provide the firmware um when possible but there are some efforts to replace a provider firmware provider blocks with open source variants we try to use it wherever possible for example the the mali GPU in the pine phone it has binary blobs but we try to use messa instead um that doesn't mean if it's actually needed to get the device running yeah we sadly we have to but we do package it now okay thanks any more questions i have a question about my melasta uh doesn't support the old board with the original n900 firmware doesn't support what deal would with the original software from n900 um currently we haven't made it work with the otter software that's on the old n100 like if you for example take their binaries you just want to run it on a melasta right um it doesn't work i've tried it a couple times some simple binaries work but other things start to go very wrong uh it uses a different api it uses uh it's rml not arm hard flow so the floating point stuff's different that can still sometimes work um i think if you try hard enough you might be able to make it work but we haven't tried that hard so good do we have any more questions thank you very much