This update is the first of a series of regular updates on the state of the project.

Only changes that have been accepted and merged in Mobile NixOS are chronicled here. There’s always more work currently in-progress.

Notable changes

Among the changes, and the 10 PRs merged, these changes are highlighted.

initrd: add fbterm modules

When the new mobile.boot.stage-1.fbterm options are enabled, a userspace implementation of a console is started, attached to the output of tty1. As of right now, this is a read-only view of the console.

This is still extremely useful on targets where the kernel-based virtual consoles will not work. As long as the framebuffer is setup, you can use the console to observe what is going on.

Added in pull request #46 by @lheckemann

Documentation and website framework

This was briefly highlighted in the last news item, though let’s describe how the documentation and website generation ticks.

The generated documentation in the repository is always built using the same exact tooling as the website. In fact, the website is only adding files to the documentation directory to build itself.

This gives us the advantage of the documentation being trivial to build locally.

~/.../mobile-nixos $ nix-build ./doc/
these derivations will be built:
  /nix/store/eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-mobile-nixos-docs.drv
[...]
/nix/store/eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-mobile-nixos-docs

~/.../mobile-nixos $ ls -l result/index.html
-r--r--r-- 4 root root 1541 Dec 31  1969 result/index.html

~/.../mobile-nixos/mobile-nixos-website $ xdg-open result/index.html
[...]

The documentation, minus the news items, will open in your web browser, and work just like this website. The styles, the site map, everything is generated 1:1 compared to the website.

The mobile-nixos-website repository holds the machinery that updates the site, in addition to the news items. This is where content specific for the website is written.

You may also want to subscribe to the new RSS feed.

New ports

Three new devices were merged this month.

The Pixel devices should be trivial to adapt to their respective non-XL and XL variants.