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Purism

Beautiful, Secure, Privacy-Respecting Laptops, Tablets, PCs, and Phones

Latest posts by Purism (see all)

• Librem 5 Ranked #1 Most Secure Mobile Phones to Buy in 2024 - April 15, 2024
• $99/mo Librem 5 + Librem AweSIM - February 7, 2024
• Purism Crosses $100,000.00 in fewer than 48 Hours - January 31, 2024

Progress on Many Fronts

We continued to ship Librem 5s throughout March all according to plan and also continue to hunt down CPUs. As we get more hardware confirmed we will contact the next group of Librem 5 backers with their shipping estimate and at the moment our pipeline is full well into May.

Camera and Hardware-accelerated Video Support

We made a lot of progress in March on the software front. Probably the most exciting news is that after a lot of work from the team to write kernel drivers, we have gotten both the front (“selfie”) and back cameras working! With the drivers functional we can now get raw images from the camera sensors. The focus now shifts outside of the kernel and into “userspace” software to post-process those raw images, correct colors and brightness, and provide a default camera app.

What better way to announce to the Internet that the Librem 5 camera is working than with a cat picture?

We have also added support for hardware-accelerated video playback using the iMX8mq’s Hantro VPU. By using the VPU instead of the CPU we save power and free up the main CPU for other tasks.

Userspace Software Improvements

Phosh (the desktop shell for the Librem 5) got additional features in March including a volume overlay, swipeable dialogs, geoclue support (adding location services), and shutdown dialogs. Phoc also released version 0.7.0 with massive stability improvements and snap-to-edge support for windows when the Librem 5 is docked.

We have also been working on SIP support to our Calls application so you can use a SIP provider instead of a cellular provider to place calls over the Internet. While the work isn’t yet complete we have made great progress toward supporting SIP, and are now working on adding this support into the user interface to make it convenient.

March also saw Nautilus, the default file manager used by GNOME, add adaptive features so it functions well on the Librem 5. You can see this in action in our sneak peek for the next version of PureOS on the Librem 5.

Blog Posts

We also published a number of blog posts and videos about the Librem 5 throughout the month of March:

• Charging the Librem 5
• My First Week of Librem 5 Convergence
• Disassemble Librem 5
• App Showcase: Tootle
• Sneak Peek of the Next PureOS Release on the Librem 5
• Librem 5 and Librem 5 USA: What Are the Differences?
• Snitching on Phones that Snitch on You

What’s Next

We have completed the process of rounding up components for Librem 5 USA and once everything has arrived we hope to start production of the Librem 5 USA PCBA in April. We will also continue to ship through our Librem 5 backlog in April and hope to provide an update on the next round of Librem 5 shipments.