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Purism

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

Latest posts by Purism (see all)

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

Essential Functionality

Welcome back!  In our last update, we had exciting news – it’s now possible to flash a PureOS Crimson image to your Librem 5.

That’s a large step toward our first milestone.  Now, we need essential functionality.  The goal of the first milestone is to enable broad testing of applications by the community, and essential functionality has to work in order to get good feedback about applications.

For a phone, sound is about as essential as it gets.

The Sound of Silence

We already knew about this of course.  Our forum community had pointed it out back in October, before we even had flashable images.  Debian 12 (Bookworm), which PureOS Crimson is based on, had switched audio servers.  Distributions are replacing PulseAudio with PipeWire.

We expected that this may cause issues for the Librem 5, as there was a lot of work done to configure the codec and ensure the audio paths changed at the right time.  (Loudspeaker for notifications, earpiece when on a call, headset when it’s plugged in, etc.)  We’re going to continue using PulseAudio in Crimson – we’ll bring PipeWire to the Librem 5 in Dawn, the next release.

So was that it?

No! Although Crimson has pipewire-pulse, it’s still correctly using PulseAudio.

There were clues though.  Since PulseAudio is active, we took a deeper look to figure out why there was no audio.  We quickly noticed that the codec’s HiFi profile was missing.  It’s no wonder that sound did not work – the configuration we made for the Librem 5 was not used at all.

I Love it Loud

Do you remember ALSA?  You might remember a transition to PulseAudio in the 2000s, but ALSA is still with us.  It’s still the way that the sound server communicates to the sound hardware through the kernel.

ALSA applies this configuration file to configure our codec.  But they changed where these files go.  It was ignoring our config files, which were still in the old location.

All we had to do was move the two files:

With this trivial change to librem5-base, sound works again!

In the Meantime

We received several other helpful issue reports as well.  Some of these were known already.  We have not yet brought all of our adaptiveness patching for essential apps into Crimson.  We also heard that Redpine Wi-Fi cards aren’t working, and text cursors aren’t in the right place.  The audio fix above hasn’t landed in Crimson yet either due to an issue in the CI pipeline.  Look forward to more updates in our next post!

We’re thrilled to see more new subscriptions each month.  This allows us to do more and more to bring Crimson to a release and into your hands.  Watch for more progress on our milestones as we categorize reported issues and advance toward an alpha release!