Plasma Mobile Developer Guide

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

General Linux-based development environment
Plasma Mobile emulated environment
Mobile device running plasma mobile

For most tasks you will not need an actual mobile device running Plasma Mobile. Moreover, although you may contribute to Plasma Mobile using any kind of linux-based development environment , we strongly suggest to use the Plasma Mobile pre compiled image, since such an environment will make the development much easier and facilitate the testing of your work on a machine that emulates a mobile device.

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 Ubuntu-based distributions (e.g. KDE neon), just execute:

sudo apt install qemu-utils qemu-system-x86

TODO: Add instructions to run the vm

Mobile device running plasma mobile

Currently, you may run Plasma Mobile on an actual mobile device, either by installing postmarketOS or using Halium as hardware adaption layer.

Using postmarketOS

PostmarketOS is a touch-optimized, pre-configured Alpine Linux-based distribution. Currently, postmarketOS has been ported to many devices. Ensure that your device belongs to the relative list and proceed to installation, following the installation instructions provided by postmarketOS team. When asked during installation, just select “plasma-mobile” as the user interface:

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. Currently Halium has been ported to many devices. The Plasma Mobile team provides a Neon-based rootfs which can be used along with the Halium builds. 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.

To run Plasma Mobile using Halium as hardware adaption layer:

Ensure that a source manifest manifest exist for your device.
Download the Neon-based rootfs image
Get the source manifest for your device
Follow the Halium documention detailed instructions to install Halium