At first, man thinks he controls the modem.
But after the 20th reboot, man learns the modem controls him.
— Epictetus
So here it is! working VoLTE calls with audio on linux!
What a rollercoaster it has been i’ll tell you that.
The frequency between my previous posts was only a few days, as you can see from the time since my last post this has been a far harder project.
But a successful one!
Now fully powered trough my new imsd project:
https://forgejo.catcrafts.net/Catcrafts/imsd
As i said in a my previous comment no matter what i did the regular modem route wasn’t working, so i had to come up with my own.
This has several advantages however, call audio is now just routed trough wireplumber & pipewire, so its integrated much better.
Both inbound and outbound calls work.
How do i get this???
The patient route is waiting until my patches get accepted upstream, a few already have and are coming in 7.3 probably (pmos runs 7.0 currently still oof), a few will probably take longer, 7.4 or beyond.
but for the ones that want to jump right on ive published everything on my forgejo:
https://forgejo.catcrafts.net/Catcrafts
I will soon be publishing a shell script that does the entire installation soon for easy installation.
Sadly there is no way to just plug in an android and do it, so there are still a few manual steps needed, but i believe the path to adoption is reducing friction as much as possible, so ill do my best to make it as easy as possible to use.
imsd
So what is an “imsd”?
its a full userspace implementation of the IMS protocol, which drives VoLTE (4G) calls.
Normally the modem firmware drives this, but this is quite difficult to work with, now it runs fully via a standard daemon on linux!
Along with several d-bus helpers that integrate it with standard plasma-dialer.
if made a APKBUILD for pmos that is mutually exclusive with 81voltd, and loads imsd instead. so installation should be easy.
Now will this actually work?
That’s where you come in!
I am just one guy with one phone with one carrier.
I can say it works on the Fairphone 6 with KPN. it might work with other carriers and other Qualcomm phones aswell, so potentially this could work for the entire linux phone ecosystem, but i have no way to test that.
If you end up trying it, no matter if it works or doesn’t work, please send me a message or open a PR, then we can make sure it works for everyone!
donations
I really was surprised when people asked me this, i just see myself as a guy doing this in his free time, “why would people want to send donations to me?” i thought.
I still stand by my previous point, i have a job, and this project costs me nothing except for time, i don’t have any costs. So i felt kinda guilty receiving money from people.
But i would much rather spend my time making software that benefits society instead of the B2B stuff i do at my job.
I really feel greedy for saying this, but if you want to send me a thank you then that is now possible at: https://bunq.me/catcrafts
Please don’t feel any pressure to do this, doesn’t matter what i get im still continuing with this bring-up. And if you don’t want to donate to me there are many linux organizations that could really use the support! In my eyes we are all in the same boat with the same goal.
If you do decide to, and i cannot express my gratitude enough if you do, please write in the description that it’s a donation, as this makes tax easier.
What’s next?
Ive got a bunch more stuff coming soon, while i haven’t posted here in quite a while i’ve been plenty busy on the mailing list:
So except some more posts soon.
Bonus round
Having fully working hardware is great, but a phone that has no apps is pointless for most people, so i would like to start a discussion in the comments.
What apps do you need that are preventing you from switching to mobile linux?
@TheMightyCat Oh, this really sounds as a cool update.
It’s a pity screen reader accessibility is not yet a thing on mobile linux at least I can’t find someone making great progress with that.
Wow!! The phone is phoning!!
De machtige kat slaat weer toe!
Hell yeah this is awesome. I don’t have a Fairphone (rocking a Pixel Fold with Graphene atm), but I have deeply enjoyed and appreciated your work on this. Keep on rockin’! 😄
People like you are why the open source community exists, bro.
Thank you so much for your hard work! I can’t wait to be able to run Linux on my Fairphone 6.
“What apps do you need…”
Not a request or suggestion, just a vent… Only the one, that pisses me off about any and every mobile OS equally. A web browser that can be used for maps/mail/whatever other stuff from whatever other service, so I don’t have to use countless pointless apps. Sadly I doubt this would ever happen, the effort to create such a browser that would work perfectly fine and be secure and utilise the hardware features of any phone seems equivalent to just building the OS itself.
Note: I do think many basic apps are perfectly fine and super useful, even more so when they aren’t just a shell for sending everything off to some server datacenter to process your queries.This actually surprises me, on desktop I have the screen space to multitask with everything in my (multiple) browser windows, but on mobile I want cleanly separated apps that do one thing and do it well.
This is amazing and awesome and I’m just jumping in to say great job and keep it going! This is the kind of work that has got to get done to get the balm really rolling :D
As for apps on mobile Linux, I guess I don’t know as I’m not sure which apps I already use on Linux work / work well on mobile Linux.
I’d second Immich, I guess I should look to see if there is a Home Assistant app, but mostly I would need to take a look for equivalents for mobile linux and I’m not sure where to start on that.
Holy Smokes… All during the Mercury Retrograde no less… This is all nothing short of genuinely amazing!! First it was GPS, then NFC, then Audio (with Microphone) and now Calls? Please do correct me but, by the PMOS Graph, that’d just leave the Camera and the IMU left??
All jokes aside, my fp4 suddenly started dying on me and ended up ordering a fp6, so I’ll gladly run some tests! If you have any particular place you’d like us to send feedback or bug reports, please do let me know!
EDIT: Also the lack of Emergency Calls (or at least that’s what it says on the imsd repo) is a bit unfortunate, but, iirc, Emergency Calls work on a different band or system, regardless of SIM. So in a way, it’s also not too surprising, at least for me.
Someone else seems to work on camera support https://nondescriptpointer.com/articles/fairphone-6-wide-camera-linux/
They’re putting mercury in gatorade‽‽‽
They spotted Hercules at the gay parade‽‽‽
Thank you! “Cat’d” really made me laugh
If you have any particular place you’d like us to send feedback or bug reports, please do let me know!
For imsd the best place would be my forgejo, but im not sure how federation works yet on forgejo or if its even enabled on my instance, ive pretty much used it as my technically public but in practice private instance, so i need to figure that out.
In the meantime here on lemmy will also work fine.
and the IMU left??
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260720173411.82979-1-jorijnvdgraaf@catcrafts.net/
;)
Absolute legend! My wallet is itching to get an FP6 with all this news…
Any plans on tackling the camera?
Man, you’re making me want to try and get one shipped to Canada. This is exciting.
ETA: I’d need a matrix.org chat app working with notifications to switch.
I’d need a matrix.org chat app working with notifications to switch.
Fractal is an excellent Matrix client that works well if you are using something like Phosh or GNOME Mobile (GTK based), and FluffyChat is good too (Material You aesthetic).
I hear you. I only wish the Fairphone had a headphone jack and microSD at the very least, but I would be so nice to have something faster than the Librem 5 despite me appreciating the blob free/jailed chipsets
It does have a microsd slot
Another Canadian here, I also am starting to wonder about getting one somehow - a buddy of mine shipped it to a friend in the Netherlands, then they brought it home.
Well if that is the requirement then you’re in luck as fluffychat and nheko are both on flathub!
I’ll admit it’s been over a year since I’ve tried to daily drive my PinePhone. I bridge everything into a self hosted matrix chat and notifications didn’t really work outside of SMS/MMS and calls.
Same, but XMPP and Dino. Matrix? Eh.
Incredible work! I honestly have not been as pumped about technology in such a long time, and it’s mostly due to Linux/Linux phones. I finally got around to fixing a PMOS install on my old phone and been itching to tinker with it.
With that said, how has the battery life been for you? Mines not great, but it could also be there fact that the battery is like 8 years old. And that’s only using WiFi. I’m curious how it does on modern hardware and using cell towers.
It’s less then android, but im sure there are more gains to be made there.
The battery works fine for a day, but if i don’t plug it in overnight its drained.
Holy based. You’re a legend!
About the apps: OrganicMaps and Immich would be the ones i am still missing on mobile linux. Apart from that, most if not all of the other apps I need are already present (Finamp, Signal, Firefox, Thunderbird,…)
OrganicMaps
I believe CoMaps is working on a Linux mobile client (you can install the desktop Flatpak, but it won’t fit well)
Immich
There’s s third-party client called Mimick that works really well on both mobile and desktop Linux!
Thanks for the tip! Haven’t heard of the immich client yet 👀 will try it out when I have some time
Edit: Looks really good! From first looks, it’s to Immich like what flare is to signal, a pretty usable client but still a bit rough around the edges and not fully feature complete.
CoMaps (Organic Maps fork) has a desktop version on Flathub, but it is still not as feature-complete as the mobile version
Yeah, I’m afraid those desktop versions don’t really do the job just yet. But i’ve recently seen someone trying to port the android version of Comaps to Linux, so mayyybe we’re up to something there?
Thank you!
Why specifically OrganicMaps if i may ask?
I do a lot of routing by bike and in my experience, the alternatives just aren’t as good as Organic. Organic has those cool overlays of all bike and hiking routes which Gnome Maps or Comaps don’t. I’ve come to really love and depend on this feature and don’t want to miss it. Additionally, it also shows public transport departures which is pretty handy if you don’t know which exact bus stop you have to wait at to get the bus in the right direction. And their routing got really good in the last years, but I haven’t compared that with Comaps/Gnome Maps yet.
The only alternative would be Osmand, but that app is laggy as hell and eats battery like nothing else. And I don’t like its Ui so much, i find it very cramped. But thats my opinion.
This is awesome, I have a fairphone 5 and hoping some of this work will help the finished development for the FP5!
Sort of related: is there any interest in looking at getting bluetooth support, or bluetooth passthrough to Waydroid? I have a few medical android apps that need bluetooth in the android container to be able to actually use them, and it seems to be stalled in the Waydroid development git discussions.
Thank you!
Sort of related: is there any interest in looking at getting bluetooth support
Bluetooth seems to already be fully working, atleast for audio and mouse and keyboard, i’m not sure how the bluetooth devices you need work but the bluetooth part doesn’t seem to be the issue.
or bluetooth passthrough to Waydroid
I am not planning to work on waydroid, while i think its a good project personally i would rather spend my development time on making the linux apps that people need then getting the android apps to work.
Understood! Like I said they’re medical apps for diabetes, so its not a great thing to try to make a linux-port because you have to do testing and make sure there’s no issues compared to the android version.
The way the apps work with waydroid is they need direct bluetooth access, or they need a pathway for the signals to get passed through to the container, via a fake bluetooth stack.
As far as I’m aware waydroid right now just routes supported things from the host device to the waydroid container, such as networking, audio, and I guess input from keyboards, gamepads, etc. Those devices don’t have direct bluetooth support in the android container, the linux host is just passing things along to the container, there’s just no supported path for a blood sugar monitor, or an insulin pump info to get to the waydroid container right now.
I do suggest making a thread/post about this. Not trying to silence here, but I do believe that,
- A: Waydroid and Bluetooth Passthrough in and of itself, is something that people do want, mostly for gadgets. (I’m hoping ports from Gadgetbridge to Amazfish become a thing soon)
- B: Linux Health apps are few, but they do look decent. I’m sure they’d also appreciate feedback and maybe a dev or two and/or donations; some of them are here; https://flathub.org/en/apps/search?q=Health
so its not a great thing to try to make a linux-port because you have to do testing
Ah yeah i apologize, i kinda glossed over that, i assume there is probably alot of certifcation that needs to be done for these apps?
They’re both open source, but you’re dealing with possibly killing people if there’s a bug with injecting insulin, or reporting blood sugar values wrong, haha so its a feat I’ve steered clear of, myself.
And
Well them being open source does improve the situation significantly, but i agree with your statement.
I could probably get them to run on linux but with no way for me to test and there being such a high risk that is a bit too scary for me.
