The PinePhone is a great mobile Linux device that runs a lot of great software! Phosh, Plasma Mobile, SXMO, Lipstick and even older software like Luna and Hildon. The PinePhone bakes in the Mali 400 MP GPU, which is quite slow for today's standards. Especially since it’s considered “super low end¹.” The issue is that new software doesn’t run very well on the PinePhone, it’s slow and sluggish running software like Phosh or Plasma Mobile. Even taking into account the large amount of work that has been put into bringing up the PinePhone to be usable as possible as a daily driver phone.
One way of solving this issue is using software that’s optimized for the PinePhones hardware, enter Maemo Leste. Originally Maemo 5 (Fremantle) was a mobile operating system created to run on the Nokia N900 close(ish) to when the Mali 400 MP GPU released (a year apart). This is great, since a lot of software around the time was supporting the GPU with the now older hardware accelerated interface libraries such as Clutter!
Clutter is a graphics library for creating “hardware accelerated user interfaces²” using OpenGL/ES 1.1/2.0, in this case Hildon. Clutter was especially important in the mid 2000’s since the mobile GPUs at the time were low powered. Thankfully, Clutter is well optimised for these older GPUs such as the Mali 400 and is another crucial part of getting Hildon run better on the PinePhone.
Does old really mean better?
From observations, Hildon runs a lot better than some of the more modern mobile interfaces. I’ve filmed a quick demo of the interface here to demonstrate the interface and it’s responsiveness.
This is all well and good that it runs better, but at what cost? Mixing decade old software with more modern software isn’t the greatest brew sometimes. Especially since some of that software was reverse engineered.
Back in 2017 an effort was made to port Hildon (the interface) to PostmarketOS, but it was soon enough needing a new maintainer, leading it to being removed shortly after. A lot of old software needed to be packaged up such as all the Hildon libraries and GTK+2. Which is quite the daunting task. Another issue is that a lot of things don’t work through the user interface yet. Such as connecting to Bluetooth devices or checking the status of the modem. You can still do all that on the PinePhone but you need to use the command line.
On the contrary, the newer Lima drivers offer more software compatibility and stability than the closed source driver². Creating a much better experience from this low powered GPU than it probably could have a decade ago.
Enabling the beowulf-devel repository
To install some applications that are currently being tested, you’re going to need to add the “beowulf-devel” repository. To do this we’re going to install Leafpad from the app store. Then type “sudo leafpad /etc/apt/sources.list” and copy/paste the last line and add “-devel” to the end of beowulf like so.
Once this is done, finally run “sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade” in the terminal to update the system.
We’re going to need this to install the applications we’ll be looking at in the next section.
Current Calls/SMS app status on the PinePhone
Since the end of 2021 a call app (sphone), a messaging client (conversations) and an address book was announced to make making calls and sending texts easier than having to use the command line, how close are we to basic usability?
Sadly I wasn’t able to get either Sphone or Conversations to work on the PinePhone through installing them through the devel branch nor compiling them myself. Sphone gave me a “ofono is not ready” message, but I couldn’t figure out what the issue was.
Conversations was a little confusing, it just gave me a black screen saying “all” at the top left. I couldn’t find any way to compose a message. I also tried compiling it from source but I hadn’t any luck either.
The app support
The app support for Maemo Leste is pretty decent. The app store has a few map applications, text editors, vpn plugins and lots of other little things. Along with that, you have access to the entire Debain/Devuan repository of packages which includes Firefox, Gimp and alike.
Closing thoughts
I think Maemo Leste has a lot of potential to be a really solid system for the PinePhone as it continues to improve. Especially when you pair it up with the PinePhone keyboard. This older software compliments the true performance of the older GPU and it’s nice to see the phone run it so well. I really enjoying using the interface. It’s nice and clean even after all these years. Also a reminder that a new Maemo Leste community update is brewing as of the time of writing, so we should see it soon with lots of great announcements. So keep an eye out on their website.
And one last thing before you go..
If anyone would be interested to work together to help bringup and maintain Hildon in PostmarketOS, please hit me up on twitter or give me an @ at carbontdcaffine.
References
¹ https://www.anandtech.com/show/12501/arm-launches-new-mali-g52-g31-gpus-new-display-and-video-ip
