Growing Plasma Mobile: Goal: Build a Plasma Mobile image for users to test
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Description

According to T7771, what most users want is to try PlaMo out. Although Plasma Mobile cannot be installed on many handsets, and is not ready to be used as a substitute of what users run on their devices (and we must make this explicitly and abundantly clear every step of the way), we should provide a simple way for users to run what we can call a "preview" version of PlaMo on their desktops.

This would entail:

  1. Building an image for VirtualBox, qemu, etc. that can be run out of the box.
  2. Writing a simple step-by-step tutorial on how to run the image.
  3. Writing follow up articles on things to try.
  4. Writing a set of instructions on how to deliver feedback.
  5. Publicise everything to the world.

2, 3, and 4 above can also be (or be accompanied by) video tutorial.

paulb created this task.Jan 18 2018, 10:32 AM
paulb triaged this task as Normal priority.

As you have some work done with point 1 above, I am assigning this to @bshah. If you think this is more suited to someone else or don't have time, pass it on; or give it back to me when 1 is done.

paulb renamed this task from Growing Plasma Mobile: Goal: Build an Plasma Mobile for users to test to Growing Plasma Mobile: Goal: Build a Plasma Mobile image for users to test.

We at postmarketOS already provide a relatively straight forward to use a Qemu VM with Plasma Mobile.

git clone https://github.com/postmarketos/pmbootstrap
cd pmbootstrap && ./pmbootstrap.py init # Choose qemu-amd64 from the device list, and plasma-mobile from the UI list
./pmbootstrap install
./pmbootstrap qemu --image-size 2G

After running above commands a Qemu VM will launch which boots Plasma Mobile. Due to some bug we haven't figured out yet right now it requires one restart before Plasma shows up properly, but this would do the job.
This process works on any Linux distribution with Python3, OpenSSL and Qemu installed.

One can also run armhf and aarch64 VM's this way by choosing qemu-vexpress or qemu-aarch64 at the init step respectively. Note that it'll be way slower that way, but it'll work.

paulb added a comment.Jan 19 2018, 9:38 AM

Thanks @PureTryOut ! This is very useful.

paulb added a comment.Jan 19 2018, 4:39 PM

@PureTryOut: This

./pmbootstrap install
./pmbootstrap qemu --image-size 2G

Should be

./pmbootstrap.py install
./pmbootstrap.py qemu --image-size 2G

Correct?

paulb added a comment.Jan 19 2018, 5:06 PM

@PureTryOut, after following your instructions, this what I get when running the virtual machine:

What am I doing wrong?

I tried out the script on openSUSE Tumbleweed and also noticed that the .py is missing and also got the endless SDL segfaults. I waited several minutes before I closed the window.

paulb added a comment.Jan 20 2018, 8:53 AM

I tried out the script on openSUSE Tumbleweed

Good point @gregormi: I am using Tumbleweed also.

Just for completeness: wanted to check the script, too, but I have openSUSE Leap, so yeah xD

That's hilarious. I'm on Tumbleweed as well (most of my systems are either Tumbleweed or Leap, and just a few specialised ones are Gentoo). So why don't we already have it packaged in openSUSE? :D

https://i.imgur.com/ebw95kW.png

Working on ISO image right now.. :-)

bshah moved this task from Todo to Implementation on the Plasma: Mobile board.Jan 20 2018, 2:47 PM
bshah added a comment.Jan 20 2018, 2:49 PM

Work in progress..

In T7779#124502, @paulb wrote:

@PureTryOut, after following your instructions, this what I get when running the virtual machine:

What am I doing wrong?

Not sure why that breaks (it's a graphical unlock method for the full disk encryption (FDE) we provide) but for now a workaround is to just remove FDE. Do this by using ./pmbootstrap.py install --no-fde

paulb closed this task as Resolved.