4th Linux Mobile Hackday at SUSE Prague

A lively day at the office

SUSE Prague hosted the fourth Linux Mobile Hackday last Thursday from eleven in the morning until the late afternoon. David Heidelberg organised the event and twelve people joined. The hackday took place one day after the very busy SUSE Open House, so the office felt quiet at first. The group quickly brought life back into the space and created a friendly “let us hack together” atmosphere. Three SUSE employees joined the session along with Richard Rahl from the openSUSE community. We were also happy that Professor Píša visited the event.

Hands on Linux phone hacking

David brought many phones and encouraged people to try Linux on different devices. Attendees installed postmarket systems such as Fedora and openSUSE. Most of the work went well. Avinesh from SUSE mentioned one small issue on Leap 15.6. Petr Hodina also showed Fedora running on an M1 Mac mini, which drew a lot of interest.
The original topics for the day included work with Linux phones, u boot and EFI bring up on Snapdragon 845, progress on the QCM6490 platform used in the Fairphone 5, kernel and device tree work, patch review, upstreaming and packaging of tools for mobile distributions. People also used the open hacking space to explore their own ideas.

Growing hardware collection and future sessions

David hopes to expand the collection of test phones and welcomes donations, even devices with broken screens. My Zflip4 with a damaged display came up during the discussion, but that model is already available. A Zflip5 would be a great addition and would help diversify the set of devices. We would also like to make an open call for anyone who has an unused phone at home. Even a device with a broken display can still run an aftermarket system and offer plenty of value. These phones are powerful enough for many experiments and the IoT space offers almost limitless opportunities.

These half day sessions take place every three to five weeks and SUSE is more than happy to host them. The Linux Mobile Hackday series keeps growing and brings together a small but active community.

A big thank you to everyone who joined us, an extra shout-out to those who helped share the invitation and bring more people in, and special thanks to David for reaching out about hosting the event.
SUSE is always happy to support initiatives like this and looks forward to future sessions.