Blog on Fre(i)e Software GmbH

KVM Support inside LXC Containers [updated]

Mo., 27 Apr. 2026 09:44:28 +0000

Yesterday, I had to add support for running KVM virtual machines inside an LXC container. More as a reminder to myself, in case I ever have to do this again, here the simple recipe:

LXC Container Config Adjustment

Enable lxc.autodev and execute hook script to be executed after initial /dev creation (updated 20260428: lxc.cgroup2.* instead of lxc.cgroup.*):

[...]

# Auto-create /dev nodes and add native KVM support to the LXC container
lxc.autodev = 1
lxc.hook.autodev = /var/lib/lxc/.hooks/lxc-hook.kvm-support
lxc.cgroup2.devices.allow = c 10:232 rwm
lxc.cgroup2.devices.allow = c 10:238 rwm
lxc.cgroup2.devices.allow = c 10:241 rwm

[...]

[added 20260408] On the internet, you can find a recipe that simply bind-mounts /dev/kvm from the host in to the LXC container. However, this fails if group ID of POSIX group kvm differs between host and container.

LXC Hook Script for KVM Support Enablement

The following script I placed at /var/lib/lxc/.hooks/lxc-hook.kvm-support (on the LXC host!):

#!/bin/sh

# set up native KVM support in LXC container
mknod -m 0660 ${LXC_ROOTFS_MOUNT}/dev/kvm c 10 232
chown :kvm ${LXC_ROOTFS_MOUNT}/dev/kvm
mknod -m 0660 ${LXC_ROOTFS_MOUNT}/dev/vhost-net c 10 238
chown :kvm ${LXC_ROOTFS_MOUNT}/dev/vhost-net
mknod -m 0660 ${LXC_ROOTFS_MOUNT}/dev/vhost-vsock c 10 241
chown :kvm ${LXC_ROOTFS_MOUNT}/dev/vhost-vsock

Join us at Lomiri CodeFest on May 16-17 & Fre(i)e Software GmbH is hiring more Lomiri Developers

Di., 21 Apr. 2026 17:35:40 +0000

Lomiri Codefest in Tilburg NL (May 16-17 2026)

Just a quick invitation to an in-person event in Tilburg, the Netherlands.

All people interested in the Lomiri Operating Environment are invited to join us at the Lomiri Codefest [codefest] taking place on May 16-17 (participation is free of charge).

We are hiring Lomiri developers

And as another side node, we still have budget (until 07/2027) for 2-3 additional Lomiri developers (depends on each devs weekly availability). The details of my previous post [hiringdetails] +/- still apply. One more limitation / strength: You need real coding skills to apply for the open positions, AI-generated contributions will not be accepted for the tasks at hand.

If you are interested and a skilled FLOSS developer (you need previous OSS contributions as references) and available with at least 10 hrs / week, please get in touch [fsgmbh].

References

[codefest] https://codefest.os-sci.info/?lang=en
[hiringdetails] https://sunweavers.net/blog/node/150
[fsgmbh] https://freiesoftware.gmbh/

Debian Lomiri Tablets 2025-2027 - Project Report (Q4/2025)

Do., 12 März 2026 08:59:05 +0000

On 25th Oct 2025, I announced via my personal blog and on Mastodon that Fre(i)e Software GmbH was hiring. The hiring process was a mix of asking developers I know and waiting for new people to apply.

At the beginning of November 2025 / in mid November 2025, we started with 13 developers (all part-time) to work on various topics around Lomiri (upstream and downstream). Note that the below achievements don't document the overall activity in the Lomiri project, but that part that our team at Fre(i)e Software GmbH contributed to.

Organizational Achievements

Setup management board for Qt6 migration in Lomiri [1]
Setup management board for salsa2ubports package syncing [2]
Bootstrap Qt 6.8 in UBports APT repository
Bootstrap Qt 6.8 in Lomiri PPA
Fix Salsa CI for all Lomiri-related Debian packages
Facilitate contributor's project around XDG Desktop Portal support for Lomiri.
Plan how to bring DeltaTouch and DeltaChat core to Debian

Maintenance Development

Replace libofono-qt by libqofono in telepathy-ofono
Rework unit tests in telepathy-ofono utilizing ofone-phonesim
Obsolete not-used-anymore u1db-qt
Fixing wrong bin:pkg names regarding snapd-glib's QML module

Qt6 Porting

qmake -> CMake porting (if needed) and Qt6 porting of shared libraries and QML modules consumed by Lomiri shell and Lomiri apps:
- biometryd
- libqofono
- libqofonoext
- libqtdbusmock
- lomiri-account-polld
- lomiri-action-api
- lomiri-api
- lomiri-download-manager
- lomiri-location-service
- lomiri-online-accounts
- lomiri-push-qml
- lomiri-push-service
- maliit-framework
- mediascanner2
- qtlomiri-appmenutheme
- qtpim (started, work in progress)
- qwebdavlib
- signond (flaws spotted in Debian's porting of signond to Qt6)

Feature Development

Continuing with Morph Browser Qt6 / LUITK
- Build, run and fix LUITK unit tests for Qt6
- various bug fixes and improvements for Morph Qt6
Add mbim modem support to ofono upstream
Improve ofono support in Network Manager
Improve mbim modem support in lomiri-indicator-network
Package kazv (convergent Matrix client) and dependencies for Debian
Provide Lomiri images for Mobian

Research

Research on fuse-based caching Webdav client for lomiri-cloudsync-app.
Research on alternative ORM instead of QDjango in libusermetrics

[1] https://gitlab.com/groups/ubports/development/-/boards/9895029?label_name%5B%5D=Topic%3A%20Qt%206
[2] https://gitlab.com/groups/ubports/development/-/boards/10037876?label_name[]=Topic%3A%20salsa2ubports%20DEB%20syncing

Debian Lomiri Tablets 2025-2027 - Project Report (Q3/2025)

Sa., 28 Feb. 2026 18:36:37 +0000

Debian Lomiri for Debian 13 (previous project)

In our previous project around Debian and Lomiri (lasting until July 2025), we achieved to get Lomiri 0.5.0 (and with it another 130 packages) into Debian (with two minor exceptions [1]) just in time for the Debian 13 release in August 2025.

Debian Lomiri for Debian 14

At DebConf in Brest, a follow-up project has been designed between the project sponsor and Fre(i)e Software GmbH [2]. The new project (on paper) started on 1st August 2025 and project duration was agreed on to be 2 years, allowing our company to work with an equivalent of ~5 FTE on Lomiri targetting the Debian 14 release some time in the second half of 2027 (an assumed date, let's see what happens).

Ongoing work would be covered from day one of the new project and once all contract details had been properly put on paper end of September, Fre(i)e Software GmbH started hiring a new team of software developers and (future) Debian maintainers. (More of that new team in our next Q4/2025 report).

The ongoing work of Q3/2025 was basically Guido Berhörster and myself working on Morph Browser Qt6 (mostly Guido together with Bhushan from MiraLab [3]) and package maintenance in Debian (mostly me).

Morph Browser Qt6

The first milestone we could reach with the Qt6 porting of Morph Browser [4] and related components (LUITK aka lomiri-ui-toolkit (big chunk! [5]), lomiri-content-hub, lomiri-download-manager and a few other components) was reached on 21st Sep 2025 with an upload of Morph Browser 1.2.0~git20250813.1ca2aa7+dfsg-1~exp1 to Debian experimental and the Lomiri PPA [6]).

Preparation of Debian 13 Updates (still pending)

In background, various Lomiri updates for Debian 13 have been prepared during Q3/2025 (with a huge patchset), but publishing those to Debian 13 are still pending as tests are still not satisfying.

[1] lomiri-push-service and nuntium
[2] https://freiesoftware.gmbh
[3] https://miralab.one/
[4] https://gitlab.com/ubports/development/core/morph-browser/-/merge_reques... et al.
[5] https://gitlab.com/ubports/development/core/lomiri-ui-toolkit/-/merge_re... et al.
[6] https://launchpad.net/~lomiri

Debian Lomiri Tablets - We are hiring!

Sa., 25 Okt. 2025 20:58:24 +0000

We at Fre{i}e Software GmbH now have a confirmed budget for working on Debian based tablets with the special goal to use them for educational purposes (i.e. in schools).

Those Debian Edu tablets shall be powered by the Lomiri Operating Environment (that same operating environment that is powering Ubuntu Touch).

That said, we are hiring developers (full time, part time) [*] [**]:

Lomiri developers (C/C++, Qt5 and Qt6, QML, CMake)
Debian maintainers

Global tasks will be:

Transition Lomiri from Qt5 to Qt6
Consolidate the Lomiri Shell on various reference devices (mainline Linux only)
Integrate Lomiri Shell with cloud services such as Nextcloud and OpenCloud
XDG Desktop Portal support for Lomiri, integrate better with non-Lomiri Wayland apps
Bring more Lomiri-specific (Ubuntu Touch) apps to Debian
... (more to come) ...

The budget will cover work for the +/- next 1.5-2 yrs. Development achievements shall culminate in the release of Debian 14.

If you are interested in joining our team, please get in touch with me via known communication channels.

light+love,
Mike (aka sunweaver at debian.org)

[fsgmbh] https://freiesoftware.gmbh
[*] We can employ applicants who are located in Germany, Austria or Poland (for other regions within the EU, please ask).
[**] Alternatively, if you are self-employed, we are happy to onboard you as a freelancer.

Creating (a) new frontend(s) for Polis

Do., 03 Okt. 2024 05:27:01 +0000

After (quite) a summer break, here comes the 4th article of the 5-episode blog post series on Polis, written by Guido Berhörster, member of staff at my company Fre(i)e Software GmbH.

Have fun with the read on Guido's work on Polis,
Mike

Table of Contents of the Blog Post Series

Introduction
Initial evaluation and adaptation
Issues extending Polis and adjusting our goals
Creating (a) new frontend(s) for Polis (this article)
Current status and roadmap

4. Creating (a) new frontend(s) for Polis

Why a new frontend was needed...

Our initial experiences of working with Polis, the effort required to implement more invasive changes and the desire of iterating changes more rapidly ultimately lead to the decision to create a new foundation for frontend development that would be independent of but compatible with the upstream project.

Our primary objective was thus not to develop another frontend but rather to make frontend development more flexible and to facilitate experimentation and rapid prototyping of different frontends by providing abstraction layers and building blocks.

This also implied developing a corresponding backend since the Polis backend is tightly coupled to the frontend and is neither intended to be used by third-party projects nor supporting cross-domain requests due to the expectation of being embedded as an iframe on third-party websites.

The long-term plan for achieving our objectives is to provide three abstraction layers for building frontends:

a stable cross-domain HTTP API
a low-level JavaScript library for interacting with the HTTP API
a high-level library of WebComponents as a framework-neutral way of rapidly building frontends

The Particiapp Project

Under the umbrella of the Particiapp project we have so far developed two new components:

the Particiapi server which provides the HTTP API
the example frontend project which currently contains both the client library and an experimental example frontend built with it

Both the participation frontend and backend are fully compatible and require an existing Polis installation and can be run alongside the upstream frontend. More specifically, the administration frontend and common backend are required to administrate conversations and send out notifications and the statistics processing server is required for processing the voting results.

Particiapi server

For the backend the Python language and the Flask framework were chosen as a technological basis mainly due to developer mindshare, a large community and ecosystem and the smaller dependency chain and maintenance overhead compared to Node.js/npm. Instead of integrating specific identity providers we adopted the OpenID Connect standard as an abstraction layer for authentication which allows delegating authentication either to a self-hosted identity provider or a large number of existing external identity providers.

Particiapp Example Frontend

The experimental example frontend serves both as a test bed for the client library and as a tool for better understanding the needs of frontend designers. It also features a completely redesigned user interface and results visualization in line with our goals. Branded variants are currently used for evaluation and testing by the stakeholders.

In order to simplify evaluation, development, testing and deployment a Docker Compose configuration is made available which contains all necessary components for running Polis with our experimental example frontend. In addition, a development environment is provided which includes a preconfigured OpenID Connect identity provider (KeyCloak), SMTP-Server with web interface (MailDev), and a database frontend (PgAdmin). The new frontend can also be tested using our public demo server.

Polis - a FLOSS Tool for Civic Participation -- Issues extending Polis and adjusting our Goals

So., 21 Juli 2024 12:58:50 +0000

Here comes the 3rd article of the 5-episode blog post series on Polis, written by Guido Berhörster, member of staff at my company Fre(i)e Software GmbH.

Enjoy also this read on Guido's work on Polis,
Mike

Table of Contents of the Blog Post Series

Introduction
Initial evaluation and adaptation
Issues extending Polis and adjusting our goals (this article)
Creating (a) new frontend(s) for Polis
Current status and roadmap

Polis - Issues extending Polis and adjusting our Goals

After the initial implementation of limited branding support, user feedback and the involvement of an UX designer lead to the conclusion that we needed more far-reaching changes to the user interface in order to reduce visual clutter, rearrange and improve UI elements, and provide better integration with the websites in which conversations are embedded.

Challenges when visualizing Data in Polis

Polis visualizes groups using a spatial projection of users based on similarities in voting behavior and places them in two to five groups using a clustering algorithm. During our testing and evaluation users were rarely able to interpret the visualization and often intuitively made incorrect assumptions e.g. by associating the filled area of a group with its significance or size. After consultation with a member of the Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) Group at the University of Groningen we chose to temporarily replace the visualization offered by Polis with simple bar charts representing agreement or disagreement with statements of a group or the majority. We intend to revisit this and explore different forms of visualization at a later point in time.

The different factors playing into the weight attached to statements which determine the pseuodo-random order in which they are presented for voting (“comment routing”) proved difficult to explain to stakeholders and users and the admission of the ad-hoc and heuristic nature of the used algorithm1 by Polis’ authors lead to the decision to temporarily remove this feature. Instead, statements should be placed into three groups, namely

metadata questions,
seed statements,
and participant statements

Statements should then be sorted by group but in a fully randomized order within the group so that metadata questions would be presented before seed statements which would be presented before participant’s statements. This simpler method was deemed sufficient for the scale of our pilot projects, however we intend to revisit this decision and explore different methods of “comment routing” in cooperation with our scientific partners at a later point in time.

An evaluation of the requirements for implementing mandatory authentication and adding support for additional authentication methods to Polis showed that significant changes to both the administration and participation frontend were needed due to a lack of an abstraction layer or extension mechanism and the current authentication providers being hardcoded in many parts of the code base.

A New Frontend is born: Particiapp

Based on the implementation details of the participation frontend, the invasive nature of the changes required, and the overhead of keeping up with active upstream development it became clear that a different, more flexible approach to development was needed. This ultimately lead to the creation of Particiapp, a new Open Source project providing the building blocks and necessary abstraction layers for rapid protoyping and experimentation with different fontends which are compatible with but independent from Polis.

Small, Christopher T., Bjorkegren, Michael, Erkkilä, Timo, Shaw, Lynette and Megill, Colin (2021). Polis: Scaling deliberation by mapping high dimensional opinion spaces. Recerca. Revista de Pensament i Anàlisi, 26(2), pp. 1-26. ↩

Weather Experts with Translation Skills Needed!

Mi., 17 Juli 2024 10:05:04 +0000

Lomiri Weather App goes Open Meteo

In Ubuntu Touch / Lomiri, Maciej Sopyło has updated Lomiri's Weather App to operate against a different weather forecast provider (Open Meteo). Additionally, the new implementation is generic and pluggable, so other weather data providers can be added-in later.

Big thanks to Maciej for working on this just in time (the previous implementation's API has recently been EOL'ed and is not available anymore to Ubuntu Touch / Lomiri users).

Lomiri Weather App - new Meteorological Terms part of the App now

While the old weather data provider implementation obtained all the meteorological information as already localized strings from the provider, the new implementation requires all sorts of weather conditions being translated within the Lomiri Weather App itself.

The meteorological terms are probably not easy to translate for the usual software translator, so special help might be required here.

Call for Translations: Lomiri Weather App

So, if you feel entitled to help here, please join the Hosted Weblate service [1] and start working on Lomiri Weather App.

Thanks a lot!

light+love
Mike Gabriel (aka sunweaver)

[1] https://hosted.weblate.org/
[2] https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/lomiri/lomiri-weather-app/

Polis - a FLOSS Tool for Civic Participation -- Initial Evaluation and Adaptation (episode 2/5)

Mi., 03 Juli 2024 19:56:24 +0000

Here comes the 2nd article of the 5-episode blog post series written by Guido Berhörster, member of staff at my company Fre(i)e Software GmbH.

Enjoy also this read on Guido's work on Polis,
Mike

Table of Contents of the Blog Post Series

Introduction
Initial evaluation and adaptation (this article)
Issues extending Polis and adjusting our goals
Creating (a) new frontend(s) for Polis
Current status and roadmap

Polis - Initial evaluation and adaptation

The Polis code base consists of a number of components, the administration and participation interfaces, a common web backend, and a statistics processing server. Both frontends and the backend are written in a mixture of JavaScript and TypeScript, only the statistics processing server is written in Clojure.

In case of self hosting the preferred method of deployment is via Docker containers using Docker Compose or any other orchestrator. The participation frontend for conversations can either be used as a standalone web page or be embedded via an iframe.

For our planned use case we initially defined the following goals:

custom branding and the integration into different content management systems (CMS)
better support for mobile devices
mandatory authentication and support for a broader range of authentication methods, including self-hosted solutions and DigiD
support for alternative email sending services
GDPR compliance

After a preliminary evaluation of our own and consulting with Policy Lab UK who were also evaluating and testing Polis and had already made a range of improvements related to self-hosting as well as bug fixes and modernization changes we decided to take their work as a base for our adaptations with the intent of submitting generally useful changes back to the Polis project.

Subsequently, a number of changes were implemented, including the removal of hardcoded domain names, the elimination of unnecessary cookies and third-party requests, support for an alternative email sending service, and the option of disabling Facebook and X integration.

For the branding our approach was to add an option allowing websites which are embedding conversations in an iframe to load an alternative stylesheet for overriding the native Polis branding. For this to be practical we intended to use CSS custom properties for defining branding-related styles such as colors and fonts. That approach turned out to be problematic because although the Polis participation frontend stylesheet is generated via SCSS and some of the colors are parameterized, however, they are not used consistently throughout the SCSS stylesheets, unfortunately. In addition the frontend templates contain a large amount of hardcoded style attributes. While we succeeded in implementing user-defined stylesheets, it took a disproportionate amount of development resources to parameterize all used colors and fonts via CSS custom properties aggravated by the fact that the SCSS and template files are huge and contain many unused rules and code.

Polis - a FLOSS Tool for Civic Participation -- Introduction (episode 1/5)

Di., 02 Juli 2024 14:14:46 +0000

This is the first article of a 5-episode blog post series written by Guido Berhörster, member of staff at my company Fre(i)e Software GmbH. Thanks, Guido for being on the Polis project.

Enjoy the read on the work Guido has been doing over the past months,
Mike

A team lead by Raoul Kramer/BetaBreak is currently adapting Polis for evaluation and testing by several Dutch provincial governments and central government ministries. Guido Berhörster (author of this article) who is an employee at Fre(i)e Software GmbH has been involved in this project as the main software developer. This series of blog posts describes how and why Polis was initially modified and adapted, what issues the team ran into and how this ultimately lead them to start a new Open Source project called Particiapp for accelerating the development of alternative Polis frontends compatible to but independent from the upstream project.

Table of Contents of the Blog Post Series

Introduction (this article)
Initial evaluation and adaptation
Issues extending Polis and adjusting our goals
Creating (a) new frontend(s) for Polis
Current status and roadmap

Polis - The Introduction

What is Polis?

Polis is a platform for participation which helps to gather, analyze and understand viewpoints of large groups of participants on complex issues. In practical terms participants take part in “conversations” on a predefined topic by voting on statements or submitting their own statements (referred to as “comments” in Polis) for others to vote on1.

Through statistical analysis including machine learning participants are sorted into groups based on similarities in voting behavior. In addition, group-informed and overall consensus statements are identified and presented to participants in real-time. This allows for participants to react to and refine statements and either individually or through a predefined process to come to an overall consensus.

Furthermore, the order in which statements are presented to participants is influenced by a complex weighting system based on a number of factors such as variance, recency, and frequency of skipping. This so called “comment routing” is intended to facilitate a meaningful contribution of participants without requiring them to vote on each of a potentially huge number of statements 2.

Polis open-ended nature sets it apart from online surveys using pre-defined questions and allows its users to gather a more accurate picture of the public opinion. In contrast to a discussion forum or comment section where participants directly reply to each other, it discourages unproductive behavior such as provocations or personal attacks by not presenting statements in chronological order in combination with voting. Finally, its “comment routing” is intended to provide scalability towards a large number of participants which generate a potentially large number of statements.

The project was developed and is maintained by The Computational Democracy Project, a USA-based non-profit organization which provides a hosted version and offers related services. It is also released as Open Source software under the AGPL 3.0 license.

Polis has been used in a variety of different contexts as part of broader political processes facilitating broader political participation and opinion-forming, and gathering feedback and creative input.

Use of Polis in Taiwan

One prominent use case of Polis is its adoption as part of the vTaiwan participatory governance project. Established by the g0v civic tech community in the wake of the 2014 mass protests by the Sunflower movement, the vTaiwan project enables consultations on proposed legislation among a broad range of stakeholders including government ministries, lawmakers, experts, interest groups, civil society as well as the broader public. Although the resulting recommendations are non-binding, they exert pressure on the government to take action and recommendations have been adopted into legislation.3 4 5

vTaiwan uses Polis for large-scale online deliberations as part of a structured participation process. These deliberations take place after identifying and involving stakeholders and experts and providing through information about the topic at hand to the public. Citizens are then given the opportunity to vote on statements or provide alternative proposals which allows for the refinement of ideas and ideally leads to a consensus at the end. The results of these online deliberations are then curated, discussed in publicly broadcast face-to-face meetings which ultimately produce concrete policy recommendations. vTaiwan has in numerous cases given impulses resulting in government action and provided significant input e.g. on legislation regulating Uber or technological experiments by Fintech startups.3 5

Blog on Fre(i)e Software GmbH

KVM Support inside LXC Containers [updated]

LXC Container Config Adjustment

LXC Hook Script for KVM Support Enablement

Join us at Lomiri CodeFest on May 16-17 & Fre(i)e Software GmbH is hiring more Lomiri Developers

Lomiri Codefest in Tilburg NL (May 16-17 2026)

We are hiring Lomiri developers

References

Debian Lomiri Tablets 2025-2027 - Project Report (Q4/2025)

Organizational Achievements

Maintenance Development

Qt6 Porting

Feature Development

Research

Debian Lomiri Tablets 2025-2027 - Project Report (Q3/2025)

Debian Lomiri for Debian 13 (previous project)

Debian Lomiri for Debian 14

Morph Browser Qt6

Preparation of Debian 13 Updates (still pending)

Debian Lomiri Tablets - We are hiring!

Creating (a) new frontend(s) for Polis

Table of Contents of the Blog Post Series

4. Creating (a) new frontend(s) for Polis

Why a new frontend was needed...

The Particiapp Project

Particiapi server

Particiapp Example Frontend

Polis - a FLOSS Tool for Civic Participation -- Issues extending Polis and adjusting our Goals

Table of Contents of the Blog Post Series

Polis - Issues extending Polis and adjusting our Goals

Challenges when visualizing Data in Polis

A New Frontend is born: Particiapp

Weather Experts with Translation Skills Needed!

Lomiri Weather App goes Open Meteo

Lomiri Weather App - new Meteorological Terms part of the App now

Call for Translations: Lomiri Weather App

Polis - a FLOSS Tool for Civic Participation -- Initial Evaluation and Adaptation (episode 2/5)

Table of Contents of the Blog Post Series

Polis - Initial evaluation and adaptation

Polis - a FLOSS Tool for Civic Participation -- Introduction (episode 1/5)

Table of Contents of the Blog Post Series

Polis - The Introduction

What is Polis?

Use of Polis in Taiwan

See also