Tzafrir
@tzafrir@cohens.org.il
A picture I took yesterday at a demonstration in #Jerusalem:
https://tooot.im/deck/@tzafrir/114455460519068781
The text in Hebrew is a pun: הקטאר הטרויאני: the second word is the adjective "Trojan". The first word, קטאר, means Qatar. But sounds like the related word קטר: locomotive[*]. The colors are those of the Qatari flag. The silhouette is that of Prime Minister #Netanyahu.
Later on there were two actors, one with a fact mask of Netayahu and another dressed as a "Qatari Emir". I wrote before about this local #Qatargate:
https://cohens.org.il/social/tzafrir/p/1743448078.070798
Protesters are upset that while Qatar is considered to be a patron of #Hamas and generally of quite a few extreme Islamist groups, the Israeli government chooses it as a partner all too often.
[*] A bit of etymology: the word stems for an ancient word that is related to steam. As it happens, the the Arabic word for "train" is similar: قطار, vs. the name of the country that is قطر. It seems both words were coined in the era of steam trains.
So what did Netanyahu do in the face of a wave of protests: start a war. launched an attack on the #Gaza Strip. And later launched attacks on #Lebanon and intensified attacks on #Syria.
It did help to partially quell the protests. It did somewhat break their momentum and they failed to create a general strike or something close to it.
Note: this is certainly not the single goal of the recent attacks. It is also an excuse for some parts of the government of the more lunatic nature (BTW: Katz is not lunatic by nature. He just follows Netanyahu's orders to cooperate with the lunatics).
Netanyahu is known for not caring about hiring people with lax morality (e.g.: Natan Eshel) and even criminal behavior (e.g.: Ari Harow). The crux of this affair is that some of his closest aids also ran a side gig, and in their side gig (among other jobs) did some PR work for Qatar. A country Netanyahu himself occasionally considered an enemy.
And then we get the separate issue of Eli Feldstein. He was investigated on a different affair. And then it turned out that he could not get a government job because he failed to pass a security clearance. Netanyahu still wanted to hire him. So he looked for someone else to pay his salary. And that someone ended up being a lobbyist for Qatar in the US government.
There is also another document mentioned, that is very likely faked: I'm not going to elaborate on them, but they were republished by Memri after being published by some dodgy French sources.
So far the main issue for Netanyahu is potential financial misconduct (which could potentially amount to allegations of bribe). The real problem is that Netanyahu not only did not help the investigations: he immediately tried to fire the head of the secret service (who was running it, because the police are a bit lax nowadays). So basically he behaves as if he has something to hide.
However, the government (rightly so) wants people to return to their old homes and has announced that they will stop paying at the end of June. There's also a considerable "early birds" bonus for those who return by March 1st.
The town of Metula (along with two or three other villages: Manara and Avivim, not sure of others) had considerable damage from the war and will not be ready in time for that. The current plan for both Metula and for Manara is that by September most houses will be sort of ready. Some will require much more work.
Originally it was planned that those three municipalities will have their own special terms until the place is fit. Lately the government, wanting to cut spending, decided to skip that. This is he crux of the protest.
There are certainly many people from those places and all around the North who will not want to live next to the border again. After seeing how it was bombarded for more than a year and what plans (backed by enormous stashes of arms) the Hezbollah had there. But it seems most people will return.
I have so far not switched to it because it will take time. My initial impression is that it is much closer to a Just Works[tm] phone that I can actually recommend people to use. I guess I'll report about that later once I started using it.
There are two things I'm concerned about:
First off: mainline kernel: The phone is based on an Android kernel and a translation layer. This is simpler in the short run, but is more difficult to support in the long run. In the booth, the developer mentioned some plans (though nothing concrete) to switch to mainline kernel. I hope this works out.
But more importantly: what is the relation between this project and the rest of the #MobileLinux community? The @furilabs@fosstodon.org booth at #FOSDEM25 was in building AW (next to some interesting embedded stuff) and not next to the three other Linux-mobile booths. They were hardly mentioned in the Linux On Mobile talks track .
The phone itself seems to use something that is quite an up-to-date #mobian (#debian) system. I still need to figure out if I can also use it as a developer phone.
Anyway, it's good to see more people making Linux phones proper products. I really hope that their improvements will be shared with the rest of the community where applicable.
One basic issue is missing some basic documentation. There is no simple drawing of the phone to note which thing is which. It took my quite a while to realize how to replace the SIM card. Yes, maybe it is me, but I think you do aim for the masses, and adding such a thing somewhere on the web site does not cost much and reduces cost of support.
=== Doesn't yet work: ===
Podcasts: I imported my podcasts to kasts from my old phone. Next time I tried to start kasts, it crashed. I failed to get any useful information from the core dump. gnome-podcasts is currently not in Debian because of some new rust dependencies. It's work in progress but I'm not sure it will make it to Trixie. And anyway, it's not as good as kasts.
Screen on USB-C: Worked nicely on Pinephone. Doesn't work on this one. Not a must-have feature, though. And of all the Linux mobile interfaces, phosh is really not well-adapted to using it.
=== Extra Settings ===
I dislike random long interface name on my laptop and want to give more predictable ones. I tend to do that using .link files in /etc/systemd/network (not related directly to networkd). For instance, I have a file there to rename "enp61s0u2u4" (from my docking station) to "ethhome". I have various pinephones, and I could tell between the different ones using the property (See output of 'udevadm info /sys/class/net/
') IDSERIALSHORT. With the FLX1 I can easily give a name to an interface name for a single phone, but would not be easily able to tell the difference between two different ones.
