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Purism

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

Latest posts by Purism (see all)

• Abside and Purism Partner to Deliver Secure Mobile Solution for U.S. Government and NATO Countries - July 19, 2024
• Purism Announcing MiMi Robot Crowdfunding Campaign - July 16, 2024
• Federal Government Mobility Veteran Randy Siegel Joins Purism - July 15, 2024

Conferences

Some of the Purism team members attended Akademy 2018 in Vienna. This conference facilitated further discussions with KDE developers and it was nice to meet everyone in person!

We would like to express our gratitude to @Puri_sm, not only for sponsoring #Akademy2018, but also for working with our developers so we can have a Plasma Mobile-based smartphone soon.

— Akademy (@akademy) August 20, 2018

There were also some team members that attended FrOSCon. Coming up, we have Todd presenting at AllThingsOpen, and Capitole du Libre where François and Adrien will be manning a booth (so be sure to stop by and say bonjour if you’re there).

We're excited to have Todd Weaver, Founder & CEO of @puri_sm, presenting at #AllThingsOpen! https://t.co/FXc3M9ENwi pic.twitter.com/piFRSZ5WOL

— All Things Open (@AllThingsOpen) August 29, 2018

Design

More improvements have been made to the shell mock-ups and those should be complete soon! Also some exciting new icons are on the horizon and we will use them early in our development builds and on the apps shipping with the phone; GNOME’s new icons are slated for inclusion in the 3.32 release in 2019.

Software Work

Images

Now the qcow2 images are archived as well as the raw image file. This makes the x86_64 VM image more accessible to those “can’t wait” to try things out today, or who haven’t ordered a development board. You can find the most recent builds and build artifacts here. See below for a demo of rotation in the qcow2 image. Also, a couple of packages have been added to the images to enable the resizing of the rootfs to fill the partitioned space.

We are now transforming Plasma Mobile’s Debian packaging into git repositories suitable for our build jobs and building them. These packages will eventually be included in a Plasma Mobile Librem 5 image. There is ongoing work with upstream Plasma developers to resolve the remaining build issues.

Phosh

Many fixes and tweaks have occurred in phosh in the last few weeks. Size calculations have been fixed (and therefore menu positions) on scaled displays with custom modes. The German translation has been updated. Now a login shell is used when we launch gnome-session, which ensures XDG_* is set up correctly so icons of flatpak applications are correctly recognized by phosh. To make phosh more robust, more compile warnings were enabled and the resulting errors were addressed.

gnome-settings-daemon

To lay the ground work for configuring your modem, an upstream discussion has been started to discuss how gnome-settings-daemon should behave regarding modems.

Wlroots

Wlroots was known to crash when phosh reconnects and that has been fixed. We also continue to keep wlroots up to date with new upstream snapshots.

GTK+ 4 and libhandy

Since the compositor and GTK+ need to work well together, an issue was fixed to make the xdg-shell’s app_id match GApplication’s application-id property. This makes it simpler for compositors to match applications to desktop files in Wayland.

Among the many fixes in libhandy recently, it has been made more robust during builds to now fail on warnings. There are three GTK+ bugs that currently affect the ability to create adaptive UIs that have been brought up with the upstream developers: a non-rounded corner issue, an off-screen popover issue, and an issue that causes the separator to sometimes be transparent. For the separator issue, a solution has been proposed as well. There is ongoing work upstream on the separator to add a selection mode variant and make adding a separator less complicated that is quite necessary to have cleanly defined panels in HdyLeaflet. Furthermore, the libhandy flatpak runtime (org.gnome.Platform) has been updated from 3.26 to master so we can be on the bleeding edge.

Keyboard

On the OSK front, the text-input-v3 patch-set has been included in wayland-protocols and gtk-3.24. The preliminary support of text-input-v3 has also been added to wlroots. Additionally, the virtual-keyboard protocol patch has been updated and is in review. There has even been an input-method-v2 protocol RFC posted. So get ready to type on your virtual keyboard!

Calls and messaging

Since the decision to implement a ModemManager back-end to the Calls application, some changes were needed to Calls. To give ModemManager more privileges, some policy kit files were created. To improve the UI of Calls, some of the Calls display code was cleaned up and made the Calls UI closer to the final design.

New and exciting things are on the horizon for the Messaging app. A new SMS libpurple-plugin has begun development and testing is ongoing with the Pidgin-Debug window to check if the ModemManager interface works. Work is advancing to glue the Chatty GTK+ objects to libpurple UiOps structs and signals for conversation handling. A blog post on Chatty—complete with a demo video—has just been published so go read it if you haven’t already!

Kernel

A significant effort has been put in to make the 4.18 kernel work with the devkit SoM. In order to help debug kernel hangs, some work was done on openocd like adding a board configuration for the particular board that will be used on the dev kits and warn when the CPU is not halted by invoking phys2virt. The openOCD folks were a great help on this effort!

Efforts continue on other pieces of the kernel too. Work continues on the power supply driver for the battery charger with upstream kernel developers and should be accepted soon. USB 2 has been tested and is working. There were also some clock issues that were resolved and both SDMA and RTC are both now working as well.

Hardware Work

The Purism hardware team has sent out the manufacturing files for PCB fabrication and assembly of the prototypes. The files are currently under review.

Community Outreach

An issue template has been added to the current phosh, libhandy, calls, chatty, docs, and virtboard projects to guide the user to provide all of the necessary information when filing an issue against these projects. For more information on filing issues, see our documentation page on reporting an issue.

A big Thanks goes out to all of the external teams that have helped review and merge changes into upstream projects. Everyone’s time and contribution is much appreciated!

That’s all for now folks. Stay tuned for more exciting updates to come!