Luca Weiss

From Amsterdam to Tbilisi by train

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 01:50:00 +0100

In July 2024 I went on a great summer trip, going from my home in Amsterdam, Netherlands to Tbilisi, Georgia (თბილისი, საქართველო). While for sure I was looking forward to the destination, at least half the trip (by time and by what I saw) was the journey itself and the places on the way - I went by train (and more, read on!).

While I’ve done longer trips in the past, for example Amsterdam to Thessaloniki in Greece (where a small part also made it onto my blog), this was by far the longest and furthest I’ve travelled like that. And apart from a trip to Taiwan it was the furthest I’ve ever travelled away from home.

My website and blog is available via Gemini

Sun, 18 Aug 2024 22:45:00 +0200

Gemini is a neat piece of technology. The Gemini protocol somewhat comparable to HTTP and the Gemtext file format comparable to HTML. But it’s simple. Like so simple that writing a client or server is actually doable.

All popular web browsers (Chromium and its skins - and Firefox) have their roots in the 1990’s and there hasn’t been any new web browser becoming usable in many years. Not because people haven’t tried - I’m sure many people have - but because the standards around the modern web are so gigantic that it’s just not feasible to develop a web browser from scratch.

An eSIM manager for Mobile Linux

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 13:15:00 +0200

For a while eSIM management on Mobile Linux, such as postmarketOS, was just a dream. Now it’s real!

Background

Nowadays many smartphones and other devices have a so-called eSIM - or eUICC - built-in to the device. This eSIM is essentially a chip on the PCB of the device that allows an end user to download a SIM profile - essentially all the data of a SIM card - to said chip and then the modem of the device can use that chip the same way as it would use any physical SIM card you insert.

The little NAS under my bed

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 11:00:00 +0100

In April 2023 I’ve built myself a new NAS box to replace a rather old HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen8 at my parents place. Since I don’t really have any good space in my apartment it needed to fit under my bed and be reasonably quiet.

After hearing good things about the ODROID H3+ I’ve decided to order one with a case, hard drives and everything else necessary to fulfil this purpose.

Taking the Grimaldi Lines ferry from Brindisi to Igoumenitsa

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 11:00:00 +0300

All information as of July 2023.

Taking the Grimaldi lines ferry from Brindisi to Igoumenitsa (Ηγουμενίτσα) as a pedestrian sounds easy enough. You can easily book the tickets online (don’t forget about the Interrail discount if you have a pass) but after booking it becomes a little bit more tricky.

Step 1: Get to the ferry terminal

You will want to go to the bus station named “Costa Morena” (OpenStreetMap, Google Maps). The bus line “AP” from STP Brindisi is going there, according to the current schedule (valid from 2023-05-23) it appears to run every 30 minutes during the day. A ticket is €2 per person, you can pay by cash in the bus.

Mounting Android Retrofit Dynamic Partition images

Thu, 30 Mar 2023 22:50:00 +0200

Android devices launching with Android 10 and newer use a feature called Dynamic Partitions which essentially combines the system_a, vendor_a and product_a (and all the _b) variants into a single partition simplifying the actual partition layout while making it more flexible. Think of it like a single physical partition which contains multiple logical partitions, like with LVM.

This feature is available on newly launched devices, devices launched with earlier Android versions still have to cope with the rigid partition layout on-disk. For this Android has introduced a way to retrofit dynamic partitions onto exiting the existing partition layout.

iTunes protocol handler on Linux with Wine

Tue, 04 Sep 2018 16:19:00 +0200

Today I have tried adding my PayPal account to my iTunes (installed with Wine) Account but discovered, that adding my PayPal account as a payment method didn’t work. After inspecting the network traffic, I found that my browser (Firefox) was redirected to an itmss:// URL, but Firefox didn’t know how to handle that and did nothing. To get it working yourself, follow the next steps:

Assuming you already have iTunes installed and are using Firefox, open about:config in Firefox, accept the prompt, right-click and select New -> Boolean. In the dialog enter network.protocol-handler.expose.itmss as preference name and select false as value. After that, restart Firefox.

Signing boot images for fastboot

Fri, 16 Jun 2017 08:55:00 +0200

If you have ever seen the error FAILED (remote: bootimage: incomplete or not signed), here’s the solution (at least for the Fairphone 2 😉):

Download the BootSignature.jar file from my server (or compile it yourself from the LineageOS 14.1 tree with the command mka BootSignature).

curl -O https://public.lucaweiss.eu/BootSignature.jar

Download the make_key tool from the LineageOS GitHub.

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/LineageOS/android_development/cm-14.1/tools/make_key

Make the script executable

chmod +x make_key

Generate the key with

Install and configure EFIDroid on the Fairphone 2

Tue, 01 Nov 2016 15:27:00 +0100

About EFIDroid

EFIDroid is a relatively new multiboot solution for mobile devices. It is based on the EFI implementation by Intel (EDK2). For more information and support, please visit to the Fairphone Forum thread.

How to install (FP2)

Download the EFIDroid Manager app from Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.efidroid.efidroidmanager.
Go to Install/Update
Click Install:
It should be successfully installed!

Add a new ROM

Before you do any of this you should download a ROM .zip file (for example FP Open 16.09) and put it on your SD card (/storage/sdcard1/ and !!NOT!! /sdcard!).
To add a ROM click the FAB (Floating Action Button)
Choose in the screen /data/media/0/multiboot as location.
Enter a name for the ROM
You can leave the partitions as they are (Schema LoopSystem + BindOther) and press the tick in the top right corner.
Now you can see that your newly created ROM is in the list.
Then reboot

Add a system to the new ROM

Once you are in the UEFI, you can navigate around with volume down to go down, volume up to go up and the power button to confirm your selection.

SDDM login with a Yubikey on Arch Linux

Sat, 23 Jul 2016 11:56:00 +0200

If you are wondering how you can login with a Yubikey into your system with SDDM, here are the steps:

Step 1: Install yubico-pam from [community].

Step 2: Edit the file /etc/yubikeys and insert text in the following format:

<username>:<yubikey_token_id>
# eg
luca:cclcclcclccl

If you don’t know what the token ID from your yubikey is, just open a text editor and press the button on your yubikey to create a one time password (=OTP). Then take the first twelve characters from that string, which is your token id. If you are too lazy to count, you can also press the button multiple times and take the part that stays the same at the beginning.

Fixing the Unity3D 5.3 startup error on Linux

Fri, 18 Dec 2015 19:23:00 +0100

If you experience this error with the newest Unity3D Build on Linux, just do this one simple step:

Create the folder ~/.local/share/unity3d and you are good to go!

Now have fun with Unity!

In more detail, the “main” error message in ~/.config/unity3d/Editor.log is

CopyPackageFile failed, unable to copy /opt/Unity/Editor/Data/Resources/Packages/unity-editor-home-0.0.7.tgz to /home/luca/.local/share/unity3d/Packages/unity-editor-home-0.0.7.tgz

CopyPackageFile failed, unable to copy /opt/Unity/Editor/Data/Resources/Packages/unityeditor-cloud-hub-0.0.1.tgz to /home/luca/.local/share/unity3d/Packages/unityeditor-cloud-hub-0.0.1.tgz

Cross-compiling native Linux applications for Android

Sat, 12 Dec 2015 20:23:00 +0100

Here’s how you can cross-compile “normal” Linux applications for Android!

Note, that I cannot give you any help in following this. It worked(tm) when I wrote this but don’t know about now.

For the android_configure script download this script, place it in your ~/bin folder and (if not already) add ~/bin to your PATH variable.
To create a standalone toolchain use something like the following command (run from your NDK root-dir):

build/tools/make_standalone_toolchain.py --arch arm --api 21 --stl gnustl -v --install-dir /home/luca/Android/standalone-toolchain

Ncurses

Add ac_cv_header_locale_h=no to your android_configure script to the line export CC (example: export CC=${CROSS_PATH}/${CROSS_COMPILE}-gcc ac_cv_header_locale_h=no)

Google Play Services with Android 6.0 Marshmallow and Genymotion

Thu, 10 Dec 2015 12:24:00 +0100

So, I think you want to install the Google Play Store & Services with an Android 6.0 Marshmallow Emulator?

To do that, follow either the long or the short version.

You need the following three files:

Short version:

Download all three files.
Create an emulator with the Nexus 5X image and start it.
Flash Genymotion-ARM-Translation_v1.1.zip and reboot.
Flash gapps-L-4-21-15.zip and reboot.
Sign into your Google Account.
Flash benzo-gapps-M-20151011-signed-chroma-r3.zip and reboot.
You are finished!

Long version:

SSH on Android

Tue, 03 Nov 2015 10:40:00 +0100

Installing the SSH binary on Android (for use with adb shell):

Install SSHDroid

Launch SSHDroid and accept the superuser request

Then make sure you have your Android device connected with access to adb!

$ adb shell
$ su
$ mount -o rw,remount /system
$ cp /data/data/berserker.android.apps.sshdroid/dropbear/ssh /system/bin/ssh

Deploying Unity WebGL with Apache

Sat, 31 Oct 2015 12:25:57 +0100

Have you had troubles getting your exported Unity WebGL project to work?

GET /Release/UnityConfig.js 404 (Not Found)

GET /Release/fileloader.js 404 (Not Found)

GET /Release/1446299115.js 404 (Not Found)

I got the instructions here:

Export your Unity project as WebGL (probably already did this).

Move every file from the Release folder into the Compressed folder. You can now delete the Release folder. Your folder structure should look like this:

.htaccess
index.html
Compressed
* many files (.datagz, .jsgz, .memgz)
TemplateData
* many image files, 1 .css & 1 .js file

Enter sudo a2enmod rewrite in the terminal (to activate the rewrite Apache module).

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Just a guy who likes programming.

You can find most things I do on different sites:

Projects

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A non-exhaustive list of activities around open-source software. You can find links to some of the code forges I’m active on the About page.

Embedded

postmarketOS

postmarketOS is a Linux distribution for mobile devices and more. It’s based on Alpine Linux and can be installed on smartphones and many other mobile devices. I’m part of the ‘Core Contributors’ of the project, and part of the infrastructure team which manages the hosting of the website, wiki, Matrix server etc. Amongst other things I’ve ported postmarketOS to many devices, including all generations of Fairphone (1, 2, 3, 4 & 5), several Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 devices, several Snapdragon 400-based smartwatches, and in the past I’ve also worked on the PINE64 family of devices (such as the PinePhone, PineTab, etc).

Talks

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

FrOSCon 2026

Title: Automated testing of a phone operating system
Location: TBD, Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Sankt Augustin, Germany
Date: 2026-08-15 / 2026-08-16

FOSDEM 2026

Title: Mainline kernel for Fairphones - 2026 update
Location: UB4.132, ULB Solbosch Campus, Brussels, Belgium
Date: 2026-01-31

Conference website

Open Source Summit Japan 2025

Title: We need an open source phone OS - postmarketOS!
Location: Hall A4, Toranomon Hills Forum, Tokyo, Japan
Date: 2025-12-10

FrOSCon 2025

Title: postmarketOS - Digital Independence in Your Pocket
Location: HS6, Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Sankt Augustin, Germany
Date: 2025-08-17

Luca Weiss

From Amsterdam to Tbilisi by train

My website and blog is available via Gemini

An eSIM manager for Mobile Linux

Background

The little NAS under my bed

Taking the Grimaldi Lines ferry from Brindisi to Igoumenitsa

Step 1: Get to the ferry terminal

Mounting Android Retrofit Dynamic Partition images

iTunes protocol handler on Linux with Wine

Signing boot images for fastboot

Install and configure EFIDroid on the Fairphone 2

Table of contents:

About EFIDroid

How to install (FP2)

Add a new ROM

Add a system to the new ROM

SDDM login with a Yubikey on Arch Linux

Fixing the Unity3D 5.3 startup error on Linux

Cross-compiling native Linux applications for Android

Ncurses

Google Play Services with Android 6.0 Marshmallow and Genymotion

SSH on Android

Deploying Unity WebGL with Apache

About

Projects

Embedded

postmarketOS

Talks

FrOSCon 2026

FOSDEM 2026

Open Source Summit Japan 2025

FrOSCon 2025