Arnaud Ferraris

Over the past 3 years, Mobian has grown from a one-person hobby project to one of the main actors in the mobile Linux community.

As we're preparing for the upcoming release of Debian 12 (bookworm), and the first Mobian stable release (shortly) following it, we want to share our plans for this transition and the future of Mobian and Debian on mobile devices.

Back when Debian 11 (bullseye) was released, both the Mobian project and the mobile ecosystem were still young and lacked maturity. We therefore chose to stay an in-development, rolling-release-like distribution based on Debian testing.

Fast-forward 2 years, Linux-based mobile phones have become more and more usable, the ecosystem has gained a lot of maturity and the Mobian team has been working towards reducing our delta with upstream Debian, both through upstream contributions and by maintaining Mobian packages directly in Debian.

We feel it is now time to switch to a more usual (at least in the Debian world) stable+testing release and development scheme, and will detail during this talk how we plan to do so. We will more specifically emphasize our past and present contributions to Debian, as well as our goals and plans for the next development cycle (trixie).

The Mobian project was initiated a few days prior to FOSDEM'20, back when the first PinePhones (BraveHeart edition) were arriving in the hands of developers and enthusiasts. From a single-person weekend project aimed at running Debian on one specific device, to one of the major mobile Linux distributions, let's board into a journey through the past, present and future of Mobian!

Mobian started as a collection of hacks and scripts for running Debian on the PinePhone. Initially published as "Debian+Phosh" on the PINE64 forum, all packages were manually (cross) compiled and uploaded to the developer's personal web server.

Over time, it gathered a strong community of users and developers and ultimately gained recognition from the wider mobile Linux community, to the point where it partnered with PINE64 to release a "Mobian Community Edition" PinePhone. Over the course of its 2 years of existence, the project implemented tools to ease development and automate deployment, and added support for more mobile devices, such as Purism's Librem 5, but also Surface Pro tablets and a few Android phones such as the OnePlus 6 and Pocophone F1.

This talk will walk you through those 2 years of development, highlighting the project's contributions to the (mobile) FLOSS ecosystem. We will also emphasize how its members work, as part of the DebianOnMobile team, towards its ultimate goal of becoming irrelevant by making Debian a reference distribution on mobile devices. Finally, we will give you an update on the project's current status and plans.

Now that Arduino, Raspeberry Pi & other development boards are widely available, anyone can envision creating an intelligent and/or connected object. But which tools do the FLOSS community provide to help us in this kind of project ?

Any IoT project will generally start with "off-the-shelf" modules, but as soon as things become serious, it will be important to integrate all of the electronics into a single "HAT" or "shield", and finally build a fancy case to hold it all. This will require using electronics development tools, as well as mechanical design software, before finally coding the embedded software.

This talk will walk you through an example workflow, which will help you bring your ideas to the real world. Along with a few tips & tricks, we will introduce a range of "libre" EDA and CAD software that can be used to assist you during the design and implementation of your project.

À l'heure où les Arduino, RaspberryPi et autres offrent un accès facilité aux cartes de développement, chacun peut se lancer à moindre frais dans un projet d'objet intelligent et/ou connecté. Un premier projet sera généralement constitué de modules "sur étagère", mais dès qu'il prendra un peu d'envergure, il sera souvent souhaitable d'intégrer toute l'électronique dans un seul et même "shield" ou "HAT", nécessitant l'utilisation d'outils de développement électronique. L'aspect mécanique ne sera pas à négliger, tout comme le développement du logiciel embarqué. Lors de cette conférence, nous vous présenterons certains des outils libres disponibles pour mener à bien chacune de ces taches, puis nous montrerons comment ces derniers (notamment FreeCAD, KiCAD, gcc et avr-libc), ont été utilisés lors de la réalisation d'un shield lampemètre pour Arduino.