Messages

16

Cosmo Communicator - Android / v22 is coming this week

« on: May 30, 2020, 05:03:09 am »

I really wish they'd open up the architecture a bit...

Why would not they open architecture completely? This is a device that supposed to support linux without android. Where is this linux community they keep referring to. It is more like secret society. Nothing like open source community

I would also love to know that. 17 days back they have published in update:

We have not updated you on Linux for a while, but we have also been working in the background on some features.
 
We are working on the following features:

* Suspend and Resume - on open / close

* Initial Voice Call telephony support
 
Both have now been implemented and are being tested.

I would like to help, if nothing else with testing, my device was bought to get rid of android and now it is on a shelf waiting for better (linux) days.

Where or who is this community?

I'm afraid that this forum, geminipda group on telegram and matrix is all there is (about 100 people total). You can get telephony support with

Code: [Select]

apt update
apt upgrade
apt install dialer-app ofono ofono-ril-binder-plugin pulseaudio-module-droid-hidl audiosystem-passthroughFor the suspend newer kernel is needed (http://gemian-buster.thinkglobally.org/jenkins/job/cosmo-linux-kernel-4.4-binaries/lastBuild/architecture=arm64,distribution=buster/ one from here should work, though I managed to brick my wifi connectivity doing that so it's risky, had to reinstall gemian, but used newer rootfs img file from here: http://gemian-buster.thinkglobally.org/jen...20-05-08.img.gz (just replacing the img file in the customos installer folder on sdcard) after which installing the kernel worked (or maybe it was already included, uname -r gives the same version so hard to tell)) with it:

Code: [Select]

apt install gemian-lock repowerd xss-lockThe newer rootfs after update/upgrade included both though from the get go, so might not even need to manually install them

17

Cosmo Communicator - Android / v22 is coming this week

« on: May 21, 2020, 01:31:15 am »

From the latest update, issued on 20/May:

[blockquote]Android Firmware – V22 firmware update

We now have a release candidate V22 firmware version and if all is well with the OTA updates we will release it withing the next week. Thank you for waiting for this firmware update.[/blockquote]

So if we're REALLY lucky it should drop some time on or after Monday 25th  

which year?

18

Cosmo Communicator - Android / Cosmo Keyboard for gaming - help needed

« on: May 21, 2020, 01:29:33 am »

i am wondering if anyone has been able to setup retroarch to use the keyboard... im finding in impossible, but i am in over my head there.

Probably best to ask the developer? In apps that were ported to android from desktop (vlc? wesnoth port) keyboard works as the porters never bothered to remove the code (usually sdl keycodes), for pure android apps they probably never added the keyboard option in the first place?

19

Cosmo Communicator - General Discussion / Latest updates on Indiegogo

« on: May 11, 2020, 10:32:44 am »

New update is out

Cosmo Android V22 firmware

We are still testing the V22 firmware for remaning issues.

We will have a further update on this by the end of this week.


 
Linux Update
 
We have not updated you on Linux for a while, but we have also been working in the background on some features.
 
We are working on the following features:

* Suspend and Resume - on open / close

* Initial Voice Call telephony support
 
Both have now been implemented and are being tested.

Thought we signed up for the testing, but still hyped

20

Cosmo Communicator - General Discussion / Latest updates on Indiegogo

« on: April 30, 2020, 01:22:24 am »

It's up, sadly no news about linux

We have been testing the V22 Android firmware for Cosmo. We have received the updated GMS approval from Google. We have also updated the security patches up to early April. We will continue testing and we hope to release the new version next week.

21

Site Suggestions, Requests, and Updates / RSS feeds now set to include all the posts

« on: March 31, 2020, 12:09:20 pm »

Hi,

on a request of an user I have now set the following setting for all the RSS feeds on OESF:

RSS Export Includes First Post of Topic -> NO

This should mean that, from now on, on RSS all the posts from each thread are sent, not only the first one of each thread (unless I have wrongly understood what does that option do).

I have opened a poll to understand if this change is welcome or not, I'd ask to everyone who's using the RSS feeds to vote here.

Thanks
Varti

Do you have an example? Does it mean that you can now pull whole thread as an rss xml?

22

Cosmo Communicator - Sailfish OS / Sailfish on Cosmo - some Information from Jolla ..

« on: March 30, 2020, 12:23:57 pm »

Only last year they started (finally) upgrading core components, until then pretty much everything was ridiculously outdated, with a lot of unpatched security issues. Even though they slowly seem to be catching up now, there still is a lot of outdated middleware on there, some of which may not be updated because of them still trying to avoid GPLv3 software on the device. The browser engine probably also is still pretty old, and a good entrance onto a device.

SailfishOS security is pretty much "it's too obscure to bother", if somebody were to look they'd find quite a few problematic spots.

It's true for every device, but obscurity plus the fact even first jolla phone from 2013 is still getting updates is pretty unique

You're still getting updates because the way the OS and the build/release process is designed makes it easy to support it. You're not getting updates for the hardware adaptation layer and the android runtime, though - both of which are a security nightmare by now for the original phone.

Making this possible had an initial trade off making a few things harder to implement, especially when additional devices started being introduced, and it was a rather annoying continuous discussion back in 2015 if we shouldn't ease up on requirements and drop the original Jolla.

On the plus side you can freely compile/install newer and fixed versions of all(most?) packages on device (like openssl from openrepos) without waiting for jolla, hal/android is the same situation as with android devices, you are lucky to get updates for a year at most. It will be interesting to see how purism guys will fare with their rolling release and daily updates, sooner or later bugs or breakages will slip through for sure, then again they are not aiming at corporate or gov clients and that might be acceptable for an enthusiast device/OS

23

Cosmo Communicator - Sailfish OS / Sailfish on Cosmo - some Information from Jolla ..

« on: March 29, 2020, 06:10:32 pm »

I have a question for you. I honestly don't know the answer. Why are people so hyped over Sailfish OS even if it has security issues like you said?

Open source security fallacy. People have heard that open source can be more secure, but don't understand under which conditions this is true, so it just becomes a "it's more secure because most of it is open source". This is helped by early Jolla advertising highlighting privacy - which was true as long as you didn't add any additional services - and people mixing up privacy and security.

The underlying framework (mer) is fully open so can be audited (and I'm sure russians chosing it as their OS for government devices did that and for the UI too, as they have access to all the code) and relying on android drivers+libhybris makes it more secure than normal android device as most android exploits will not work out of the box and would have to target sfos device specifically. But the hype for me is mostly the UI with full linux under the hood, so you end up with a device that is pleasant to use and can hack on it properly without some android-type-bandaids (you can chroot into other distros too if you like I guess)

Only last year they started (finally) upgrading core components, until then pretty much everything was ridiculously outdated, with a lot of unpatched security issues. Even though they slowly seem to be catching up now, there still is a lot of outdated middleware on there, some of which may not be updated because of them still trying to avoid GPLv3 software on the device. The browser engine probably also is still pretty old, and a good entrance onto a device.

SailfishOS security is pretty much "it's too obscure to bother", if somebody were to look they'd find quite a few problematic spots.

It's true for every device, but obscurity plus the fact even first jolla phone from 2013 is still getting updates is pretty unique

24

Cosmo Communicator - Sailfish OS / Sailfish on Cosmo - some Information from Jolla ..

« on: March 29, 2020, 10:53:32 am »

I have a question for you. I honestly don't know the answer. Why are people so hyped over Sailfish OS even if it has security issues like you said?

Open source security fallacy. People have heard that open source can be more secure, but don't understand under which conditions this is true, so it just becomes a "it's more secure because most of it is open source". This is helped by early Jolla advertising highlighting privacy - which was true as long as you didn't add any additional services - and people mixing up privacy and security.

The underlying framework (mer) is fully open so can be audited (and I'm sure russians chosing it as their OS for government devices did that and for the UI too, as they have access to all the code) and relying on android drivers+libhybris makes it more secure than normal android device as most android exploits will not work out of the box and would have to target sfos device specifically. But the hype for me is mostly the UI with full linux under the hood, so you end up with a device that is pleasant to use and can hack on it properly without some android-type-bandaids (you can chroot into other distros too if you like I guess)

25

Cosmo Communicator - Linux / Docker install causes unrecoverable NMI

« on: March 05, 2020, 12:12:36 pm »

If i install docker on the Cosmo it NMI reboots during the software installs. Not sure why guess it's a missing library I've followed the instructions from here selecting the arm64 build.

https://docs.docker.com/install/linux/docker-ce/debian

Unfortunately I can't capture the log files as i am unable to restart the debian image once it fails and have to flash the image back.

I have had this running on an ODRIOD before so i know it should work.

Has anyone got any ideas how i can debug? does any know why it force reboots?

Sorry i'm a noob really.

Thanks

Elevennails

You could try armhf version, not really sure how good the support for arm64 is from libhybris side (jolla doesn't support it yet afaik and they are(were?) the biggest contributor to libhybris, so very likely it's still lacking)

Thanks gave it a go didn't work loads of missing libraries

I wonder if it'll be possible to get a full armhf version of gemian on cosmo, jolla has been bugfixing libhybris with this in mind for 7 years now and no way few people from planet will get it as polished (main reason SFOS is still 32bit system, it's a huge undertaking), but very likely just not possible if china provided arm64 driver blobs, we're probably stuck with kwin crashes for long time

26

Cosmo Communicator - Linux / Additional keyboard layout

« on: March 05, 2020, 05:23:15 am »

After adding another keyboard layout, besides default English, Fn combinations do not work anymore.
I added Russian layout to the list. Now I can switch to Russian and type Cyrillic letters, but Fn combinations do not work even in English layout! I can't even type "-" or "=", so the keyboard goes almost unusable. When I remove extra layout, leaving only default English, everything goes back to normal.
Yes, I set keyboard to "Planet Computers Cosmo Communicator" on Hardware tab of Settings, but didn't notice any effect.

Well, that is interesting. I experience a similar problem with the german keyboard. The Fn combinations produce double character sequence. E.g. when pressing Fn+k to get a '-', I get sk instead.

When I remove the german layout, I can use the Fn key again.

So, the situation is not good, but improved.

Only one layout at a time seems to work, so you should be able to remove us (uk?) one and have the german or russian one working (though make sure it is working correctly, polish one was broken for example)

27

Cosmo Communicator - Linux / Docker install causes unrecoverable NMI

« on: March 01, 2020, 07:47:18 am »

If i install docker on the Cosmo it NMI reboots during the software installs. Not sure why guess it's a missing library I've followed the instructions from here selecting the arm64 build.

https://docs.docker.com/install/linux/docker-ce/debian

Unfortunately I can't capture the log files as i am unable to restart the debian image once it fails and have to flash the image back.

I have had this running on an ODRIOD before so i know it should work.

Has anyone got any ideas how i can debug? does any know why it force reboots?

Sorry i'm a noob really.

Thanks

Elevennails

You could try armhf version, not really sure how good the support for arm64 is from libhybris side (jolla doesn't support it yet afaik and they are(were?) the biggest contributor to libhybris, so very likely it's still lacking)

28

Cosmo Communicator - Linux / Debian amnesia ...

« on: February 29, 2020, 05:46:01 am »

Hi there

I am exploring "mouseless" my cosmo. I managed to configure my keyboard-layout at the console via : setxkbmap -model planetcosmo -layout de
Also I registered my wifi-password. Everything is lost after reboot - where can I edit these values permanently (with nano)?

Thanks foryour help.

Wifi settings are not lost, it's just by default saved for a given mac which gets randomized on each reboot, in NetworkManager settings for the connection manually clear the field 'Restrict to device' and it should automatically connect after reboot

29

Cosmo Communicator - Linux / MAC address changing during reboot

« on: February 29, 2020, 05:42:54 am »

Hello, path seems to be /mnt/vendor/nvdata --> /mnt/vendor/nvdata/APCFG/APRDEB/WIFI
I don't know if the same tweak applies to this file...

This has the MAC address reported by android on mine, but the ones it's getting seem random. For automatically connecting to wifi it's enough to clear the 'Restrict to device' field in NetworkManager settings. macchanger seems to work, so if you have mac filtering on your router a shell script to 'ifconfig wlan0 down/macchanger -m aa:bb... wlan0/ifconfig wlan0 up' should do it (apt-get wireless-tools and macchanger first as needed). Not sure yet how to properly and once and for all replace NetworkManager with connman for mobile data, as it seems to revert to NetworkManager after reboot (and probably also is causing the random mac ignoring the file you mentioned), but still haven't got a nano sim to test it properly

30

Cosmo Communicator - Hardware / How to revert Cosmo Linux Beta to factory android?

« on: February 22, 2020, 03:04:12 pm »

I would like to start from fresh (I have Cosmo Linux Beta installed), but I dont have any official image to flash. I have seen this https://www.oesf.org/forum/index.php?showto...mp;#entry294205 but I dont recognize the format of image and I dont want to flash it using wrong tool (or wrong settings). Can someone please help me out?

Just repartition back to 'Whole 128GB for android' as you did for the linux beta? That should leave you with a fresh clean base

Thank you for trying to answer. The issue I have is that I dont know how to reflash android partition and as far as I have looked into beta files there is no android rom image inside, only bootloader that in case of selecting rooted boot injects su into android. I would like to flash vanilla rom to start with finding out when sim card stops responding.

Just repartition it from the same menu you installed linux beta? If you repartition it to 'whole for android' it should flash it for you with the same android you got originally