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Purism

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

Latest posts by Purism (see all)

• PureOS Crimson Development Report: December 2024 - January 16, 2025
• PureOS Crimson Development Report: October 2024 - November 14, 2024
• PureOS Crimson Development Report: September 2024 - October 16, 2024

Welcome to 2025!

It’s a new year, and we are excited for the developments coming this year to Librem devices!  We know our community is eager to try PureOS Crimson on their phones.  As we wrap up 2024, what better summary is there than a development image that you can try?

With these developments combined…

We’ve been doing a lot of work on the PureOS archive – the pieces of software that makes up PureOS – as we’ve discussed in our previous posts.  While that was going on, Evangelos has also contributed work on pureos-image-recipes to build new OS images for the Librem 5.  (Thank you, Evangelos!)

With the latest package updates combined with the latest image tools, we now have initial PureOS Crimson images for the Librem 5!

Give it a try!

If you don’t mind erasing your Librem 5, and you’re not relying on it as your daily phone, you are welcome to try out this image and contribute!

Follow the instructions to flash your Librem 5.  When you run ./scripts/librem5-flash-image, add --variant plain --dist crimson to select Crimson and disable encryption. (Encrypted images are not working in Crimson yet.)

The complete command is: ./scripts/librem5-flash-image --stable --variant plain --dist crimson

The next mile

We’re not at the end of the Crimson marathon yet.  There is some key work still needed before completing our first milestone:

• The OS needs to use all available disk space.  (The tools to resize the disk on first boot aren’t working yet.  A workaround is to boot Jumpdrive on the Librem 5 and resize the partition from your PC using GNOME Disks.)
• Disk encryption needs to work.  (The prompt to unlock your disk isn’t working yet in Crimson on the Librem 5.)
• Essential functionality, like calls and SMS, has not been tested much – it is likely that there are still issues to be found.
• We need images for the prior Librem 5 revisions, not just Evergreen.

Get involved

If you flash this image, let us know about your experience.  Try your favorite apps and Web sites.  Check if cellular data, calls, and SMS work for you.

If you have feedback, let us know on the PureOS mailing list, or open issues in repos under the PureOS and Librem 5 groups.  In particular, we want to know about regressions from Byzantium.  Anything that worked well in Byzantium and no longer works in Crimson is a regression.

We will continue to call for feedback as we complete more work toward the first milestone, which will enable more people to test the image.

Finally, if you would like to mirror the PureOS archive, we would like to add mirrors to increase availability and bandwidth available to PureOS users.  If you can help out with this, get in touch on our mailing list!