May Progress Update – Librem 5

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Purism

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

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Hi again, here’s your Librem 5 hardware update report for the first half of the month of May:

Conferences

At JDLL, Adrien gave a talk on “GNOME on phones” and helped out at the GNOME booth, where he answered lots of questions about Purism’s products and animated a first contribution to GNOME workshop along with community member Alexandre Franke.

Design

The current design effort is around the Geary email client, where adaptive designs have begun; some of the symbolic icons in Geary have been improved.

Software Work

Images

There are always improvements and fixes making their way into the image creation; for example, the librem5-base package needed a fix in order to unbreak rendering. To make testing easier, debs built by gitlab-ci are now saved as artifacts. Flashing a devkit is a little easier now that the tool used to flash a new image, uuu, has been updated to make it buildable for PureOS. Also, with a recent change to the scripts used in flashing the devkit, we avoid re-downloading the image if one already exists.

Mesa

Since graphics are quite important for a phone, we continue to invest in the mesa graphics library. A lod level dump issue and a symlink issue were fixed. A second version of the GALLIUM_DDEBUG fix was submitted and merged upstream (thanks to Lucas Stach for the review!).

Compositor + Shell

We continued experimenting with our own forked compositor by implementing wlr-output-manager: however, until it is ready for prime time, there is a parallel effort to keep on improving rootston. The main phosh improvement was that the adwaita-dark theme was applied to the shell by default.

Calls

We all know how important it is for a phone to place phone calls, so there is a continuing effort investigating audio over the modem. There are issues with DMA transfers on the SAI interface; digging into the issues included testing various kernel changes. Stay tuned for more to come on this effort.

Libhandy

We’re getting closer to bumping the API version of LibHandy to 1! Some new widgets are in the works: HdySqueezer is a cool new widget that is needed for HdyViewSwitcher, which is needed by many apps and HdyPreferencesWindow, which in turn is needed by Web and other apps.

Messaging

The SMS plugin is being reworked, and an issue happening when more than one instance of Chatty was opened that has been resolved.

Linux 5.X Kernel

Hooray, the devkit’s LCD panel driver has been accepted upstream; thanks to Thierry Reding for applying these, and thanks to the reviewers Fabio Estevam and Sam Ravnborg, too! We are working on getting the librem5-devkit devicetree upstream. There is also an ongoing investigation into why USB stopped working with the 5.1 kernel, and last but not least, an SDMA fix was accepted upstream.

Hardware Work

We continue to work on the Librem 5 board schematic, and are getting ever closer to getting the hardware into production!

Community Outreach

The troubleshooting guides on the developer documentation have been split out to be a little more readable.

A big “Thanks!” to all the external teams that have helped review and merge changes into upstream projects; your time and contribution are much appreciated.

That’s all for now, folks – stay tuned for more exciting updates to come!