Plasma Mobile Developer Guide

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The development environment needed depends on the area of Plasma Mobile development you want to contribute. There are three kinds of development environment:

General KDE development environment
Plasma Mobile emulated environment
Mobile device running plasma mobile

Nevertheless, in case that you don't need an actual mobile device running Plasma Mobile, we strongly suggest to use a Plasma Mobile emulated environment, since such an environment will facilitate the testing of your work.

Plasma Mobile emulated environment

Get the Plasma Moible precompiled image

At first, you have to download the precompiled ISO image. TODO: Add link

Run the virtual machine

To use the precompiled ISO, QEMU should be installed. QEMU is a free and open-source hosted hypervisor that performs hardware virtualization. In KDE neon, just execute:

sudo apt install qemu-utils qemu-system-x86

Mobile device running plasma mobile

Currently there are two possible ways of testing Plasma Mobile on an actual mobile device,

Using postmarketOS
Installing Halium and a KDE neon-based rootfs

Using postmarketOS

PostmarketOS is touch-optimized, pre-configured Alpine Linux-based distribution which offers Plasma Mobile as one choice of several available user interfaces. There is a list of devices that can run postmarketOS, and you can find instructions on installing postmarketOS on your device at their wiki page.

When you follow the instructions to install postmarketOS, remember to select “plasma-mobile” as the user interface when asked:

Available user interfaces (5):
* none: No graphical environment
* hildon: (X11) Lightweight GTK+2 UI (optimized for single-touch touchscreens)
* luna: (Wayland) webOS UI, ported from the LuneOS project (Not working yet)
* plasma-mobile: (Wayland) Mobile variant of KDE Plasma, optimized for touchscreen
* weston: (Wayland) Reference compositor (demo, not a phone interface)
* xfce4: (X11) Lightweight GTK+2 desktop (stylus recommended)
User interface [weston]: plasma-mobile

Using Halium

Halium provides the minimal android layer that allows a non-Android graphical environment to interact with the underlying Android kernel and access the hardware. The Plasma Mobile team provides a Neon-based rootfs which can be used along with the Halium builds.

To run Plasma Mobile using Halium as hardware adaption layer, download the official image, based on KDE Neon. This image is based on the dev-unstable branch of KDE Neon, and always ships the latest versions of KDE frameworks, kwin and Plasma Mobile. Currently Halium has been ported to many devices.Just get the source manifest of your device and build your own images. Check Halium documention for detailed instructions about building and installing Halium .