Since people are sometimes slightly surprised that you can go onto a
multi week trip with a smartphone running free sofware so only I
wanted to share some impressions from my recent trip to Prizren/Kosovo
to attend Debconf 22 using a
Librem 5. It's a mix of things that
happend and bits that got improved to hopefully make things more fun
to use. And, yes, there won't be any big surprises like being stranded
without the ability to do phone calls in this read because there
weren't and there shouldn't be.
After two online versions
Debconf 22 (the annual Debian Conference)
took place in Prizren / Kosovo this year and I sure wanted to go.
Looking for options I settled for a train trip to Vienna, to meet
there with friends and continue the trip via bus to Zagreb,
then switching to a final 11h direct bus to Prizren.
When preparing for the trip and making sure my Librem 5 phone has all the
needed documents I noticed that there will be quite some PDFs to show
until I arrive in Kosovo: train ticket, bus ticket, hotel reservation,
and so on. While that works by tapping unlocking the phone, opening
the file browser, navigating to the folder with the PDFs and showing
it via evince this looked like a lot of steps to repeat. Can't we have
that information on the
Phone Shell's lockscreen?
This was a good opportunity to see if the upcoming
plugin
infrastructure for the lock screen (initially meant to allow for a
plugin to show upcoming events) was flexible enough, so I used some
leisure time on the train to poke at this and just before I reached
Vienna I was able to use it
for the first
time. It was the
very last check of
that ticket, it also was a bit of cheating since
I didn't present the ticket on the phone itself but from
phosh (the
phones graphical shell) running on my laptop but still.
This was possible since
phosh is written in
GTK and so I could
just leverage
evince's
EvView. Unfortunately the hotel check in
didn't want to see any documents .
For the next day I moved the code over to the Librem 5 and (being a
bit nervous as the queue to get on the bus was quite long) could
happily check into the Flixbus by presenting the barcode to the
barcode reader via the Librem 5's lockscreen.
When switching to the bus to Prizren I didn't get to use that feature
again as we bought the tickets at a counter but we got a nice krem
banana after entering the bus - they're not filled with jelly, but
krem - a real Kosovo must eat!).
Although it was a rather long trip we had frequent breaks and I'd
certainly take the same route again. Here's a photo of Prizren
taken on the Librem 5 without any additional postprocessing:
What about seeing the conference schedule on the phone?
Confy(a
conferences schedule viewer using GTK and libhandy) to the rescue:
Since Debian's confy maintainer was around too, confy saw a bunch of
improvements over the conference.
For getting around
Puremaps(an application to display maps and
show routing instructions) was very helpful, here geolocating me
in Prizren via GPS:
Puremaps currently isn't packaged in Debian but there's
work
onging to fix that (I used the flatpak for the moment).
We got ourselves sim cards for the local phone network. For some
reason mine wouldn't work (other sim cards from the same operator
worked in my phone but this one just wouldn't). So we went to the sim card
shop and the guy there was
perfectly able to operate the Librem 5
without further explanation (including making calls, sending USSD codes
to query balance, ).
The sim card problem turned out to be a problem on the operator side
and after a couple of days they got it working.
We had nice, sunny weather about all the time. That made me switch
between high contrast mode (to read things in bright sunlight) and
normal mode (e.g. in conference rooms) on the phone quite
often. Thankfully we have a ambient light sensor in the phone so we
can make that
automatic.
See
here for a video.
Jathan kicked off a
DebianOnMobile sprint during the conference
where we were able to improve several aspects of mobile support in
Debian and on Friday I had the chance to give a talk about the state
of
Debian on smartphones.
pdf-presenter-console is a great
tool for this as it can display the current slide together with
additional notes. I needed some hacks to make it fit the phone screen
but hopefully we
figure out a way to have this by default.
I had two great weeks in Prizren. Many thanks to the organizers of
Debconf 22 - I really enjoyed the conference.
Almost a month ago, I went to my always loved Rancho
Electr nico to celebrate the 30th anniversary of
the Debian project. Hats off to
Jathan for all the work
he put into this! I was there for close to 3hr, and be it following up an
install, doing a talk, or whatever he was doing it. But anyway, I only managed
to attend with one of my (great, beautiful and always loved) generic Debian or
DebConf T-shirts.
Today, when going through a box of old T-shirts, I found the shirt I was
looking for to bring to the occasion. A smallish print, ~12cm wide, over the
heart:
And as a larger print, ~25cm wide, across the back:
For the benefit of people who read this using a non-image-displaying browser or
RSS client, they are respectively:
Debian Celebrates 30 years!
We celebrated our 
