The progress is not as fast as all of us hope for, but development continues steadily. Recent work includes improvements to the device lock implementation, moving the platform towards openSUSE and OBS, various fixes and cleanups across Glacier components, Qt 6–related updates, and successful testing on new hardware.
Device lock improvements
There were several fixes and improvements in the device lock implementation. Glacier Welcome is started on first boot and allows the initial setup of the device lock code. The devicelock-plugin is a daemon that handles password verification. In addition, nemo-qml-plugin-devicelock provides an API for communicating with the daemon.
Glacier Home detects whether the service is running and locks the device if it is not. The Glacier Settings application includes a plugin that allows users to change the device lock password. The entire device lock flow was reviewed and thoroughly tested.
Moving towards openSUSE
It turned out that Manjaro Linux ships some outdated components, such as Meson, GObje
... Show more...The progress is not as fast as all of us hope for, but development continues steadily. Recent work includes improvements to the device lock implementation, moving the platform towards openSUSE and OBS, various fixes and cleanups across Glacier components, Qt 6–related updates, and successful testing on new hardware.
Device lock improvements
There were several fixes and improvements in the device lock implementation. Glacier Welcome is started on first boot and allows the initial setup of the device lock code. The devicelock-plugin is a daemon that handles password verification. In addition, nemo-qml-plugin-devicelock provides an API for communicating with the daemon.
Glacier Home detects whether the service is running and locks the device if it is not. The Glacier Settings application includes a plugin that allows users to change the device lock password. The entire device lock flow was reviewed and thoroughly tested.
Moving towards openSUSE
It turned out that Manjaro Linux ships some outdated components, such as Meson, GObject Introspection, Mesa, and others. Because of this, fixing all dependencies just to rebuild Lipstick would require significant effort. Using openSUSE proved to be a more practical approach.
As part of this transition, several packages in OBS (Open Build Service) were updated, including: ngfd, libprolog, libtrace-ohm, ohm-plugin-misc, lipstick-glacier-home, systemd-user-session-target, and nemo-mobile-session, and others.
At the moment, installation is only possible manually. openSUSE provides a concept called patterns, which should eventually allow installation of all required packages and apply additional system settings automatically. Work on this is still in progress.






Currently, the installation process involves installing openSUSE JeOS (Just Enough OS), adding the OBS repository, and installing the required packages. After that, several manual configuration steps are still necessary.
These steps will likely include ensuring that the mce daemon is running, providing configuration files such as /etc/eglfs-config.json, and making sure the correct user groups exist (see
github.com/nemomobile-ux/arm-p… and
gitlab.manjaro.org/manjaro-arm…).
In the end, Lipstick was successfully brought up on openSUSE:
youtu.be/-2mEQRadVa0?si=aVOJzA…
Other fixes
There were many important changes and fixes across the stack.
A memory leak in the Glacier Home search plugin was fixed.
Maliit was updated to the latest version, and the Nemo keyboard plugin was adjusted to the new Controls naming and updated to use the Qt 6 version of Maliit. As a result, the on-screen keyboard works again.
Drawer levels were removed from shared controls and from Glacier Settings to make the interface cleaner and simpler. Glacier Settings now also shows the Bluetooth plugin only when the BlueZ daemon is enabled, and the same applies to time settings when timed daemon is not running.
Glacier Weather was split into a daemon and a UI component, and the code was reorganized and cleaned up accordingly. This allows weather information to be updated in the background.
Finally, GeoClue was replaced by a custom implementation called locationd. The new implementation is cleaner and should enable more advanced features, such as support for Mozilla Location Services.
Last but not least, Nemo Mobile was successfully started on the Beresta devkit.
GlenRambo
in reply to 20dogs • • •Wow. Two FP posts in a night. Paste of my comment.
Faiphone is being frog marched out of Australia. Each telco is shutting it down and blocking IMEIs. Sucks for the people that imported them.
Cant even use it as data only. So unless you use it as puerly on WiFi it's going to landfill. 😔.
rumba
in reply to GlenRambo • • •International sale might work
Any chance the Aus govt might step in?
narinciye
in reply to GlenRambo • • •GlenRambo
in reply to narinciye • • •Search Telstra 3G shutdown. They were the first to block all in 2024 (and can confirm still blocked) Optus is now blocking on the 10th March. There's one telco left in AU. Everyone else sells one of these three.
Much discussion in this FP5 thread. forum.fairphone.com/t/3g-netwo…
Despite what people say the phone works and has all requirements for the network, VoLTE calling and emergency calling. The telcos tho don't want to take a risk with "unknown" modems. So they disable network.
🇦🇺 3G network closure - Australia
Fairphone Community Forumrumba
in reply to GlenRambo • • •termaxima
in reply to 20dogs • • •atcorebcor
in reply to termaxima • • •ozymandias117
in reply to atcorebcor • • •Graphene modifies AOSP for much more security.
E.g.
- you can disable USB data at a hardware level
- Receives Kernel updates even faster than Google's phones
- uses a different memory allocator, hardened_malloc
- changes the way zygote launches apps, so ASLR actually works
- doesn't allow apps to ptrace themselves
- disables JIT per-app
- disable network access per-app
I dont think e/OS is as security oriented, more privacy oriented
atcorebcor
in reply to ozymandias117 • • •LedgeDrop
in reply to atcorebcor • • •From a user's perspective, when you install an app, you can:
There are a bunch of other, security features it provides, but from a "normal user" experience, the ability to take control of your data is probably one of the most impactful.
It is possible to do similar things with other CFW, but AFAIK, graphene is the only one to cleanly integrate it as a polished feature of the ROM.
edit: fix formatting
atcorebcor
in reply to LedgeDrop • • •rumba
in reply to atcorebcor • • •If I've got my story straight. (and if not, someone here will surely correct me)
For Graphene to deliver the advanced security provided by their OS, they need features found on newer processors and want more timely firmware updates. Google currently delivers on both needs.
FP is behind on hardware, prob cost cutting to make modular costs more affordable.