Librem 5 January 2020 Software Update

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January saw development take off again after the end-of-year break, and following on from the Chestnut shipment of the Librem 5.

Some of the activities below were already mentioned in their own articles in Purism’s news archive; others will be covered in more depth in future articles. This is just a taste of all the work that goes into making the Librem 5 software stack. You can follow development more closely at source.puri.sm.

Power management

A lot of power management work continues to happen in the kernel, but we’ll mention a few of those items here:

Dynamically remove the CAPACITY property when no monitored battery is defined. This helps mostly with the development kit.
Work began to cover the use case where the phone can be woken up with an alarm.
Use the correct interrupt for the charge controller in the device tree. Allowing charging over USB C to work more reliably.
tps6598x: Export some power supply properties to make charging detection work.

Keyboard

Squeekboard saw a few new releases, adding higly requested features:

1.6.0 with emoji
1.7.0 with an automatic terminal layout
1.8.0 with an on-demand terminal layout
1.8.1 containing minor fixes

We are now using xkb layout names from GNOME.

Kernel

Enabled GNSS driver to automatically turn on GNSS power. The GPS can still be disabled in software, as well as by flipping the appropriate hardware switch.
Reported broken etnaviv on linux-next and helped to unbreak it.
Implemented runtime power management for the vcnl4040 (proximity/ambient light sensor).
Added mount-matrix support to the driver for the inertial module, and got it merged upstream. We also added a hardware description for it.
Enabled features in defconfig required for things like docker, anbox, iptables, wicd and btrfs.
Included fixes to prevent dropped Wi-Fi packets.
Configure NWDOG to Fix Rebooting.
Fixed an issue where the power button would not turn the device back on.

Shell and Compositor

The following ease-of-use improvements to Phosh/Phoc help to make the user experience more fluid:

The lock screen is now always shown in portrait mode.
Wi-Fi passwords can now be shown as clear text.
The passcode length limit was removed to help improve basic security.
Added touch point visualization to Phoc.

Behind the scenes, work continued to help with the robustness of the compositor:

An initial set of unit tests was added to Phoc.
Phoc’s command-line argument parsing was simplified.
Switched to wlroots 0.9.1/0.10.0.

Audio and Calls

The latest versions of libqmi and ModemManager were packaged and made available on the Librem 5:

Other changes include:

Work continues on audio routing features, with a new issue to explore options.
A change to the call display ensured that only the microphone is muted when the mute button is pressed, not the speaker as well.
When calls are disconnected, the displayed message became more user-friendly.

Design

Design input to GNOME Software resulted in upstream changes:

Contributions were made to GNOME Web/Epiphany improvements:

Contributions to Geary bring the messaging composer closer to the adaptive mock-ups. This time adding an adaptive toolbar.

Apps

Chats got a few new classes during refactoring:

A manager takes on the tasks of enabling and disabling accounts and handling network reconnections, as well as taking responsibility for the account store and loading plugins.
New user and avatar classes.
An account class makes its debut.

Other improvements to Chats and related components include:

Report connection failure when the modem is disabled making Chatty’s SMS support more reliable.
Added purple plugins for fully featured E2E XMPP so that Chats supports it out-of-the-box.

Updates to other applications and libraries include the following:

GNOME Calculator was ported to the Librem 5 and subsequently fine-tuned.
Refactored Epiphany’s data management dialogs to be adaptive.
Started work on libhandy 1.0.
Enabled flatpak builds of libhandy.
Packaged Animatch for PureOS.

Documentation

With phones being used and tested by users, the known issues list got longer:

Updated known issues for Birch and Chestnut phones.
Added hardware information for Chestnut phones in the developer documentation.
Highlighted warnings about the SIM tray.

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