Tag: Newsletter and status updates

September 6, 2018

Librem 5 general development report — September 6th, 2018

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!

September 4, 2018

Progress update from the Librem 5 hardware department

As you might have noted when we announced closing the development kit “last call” sale, new specifications have been made public. I want to explain what led to these specifications and why we made the choices we made and what the current timeline is for the devkits and Librem 5 phones. Read more

August 16, 2018

Ethical aesthetics – Librem 5 design report #7

You may have noticed that there is no obvious visual branding on the Librem laptops. While this was at first a technical limitation on the very first Librem model (back in 2015), the subtle and minimalistic branding that began on newer models in 2016 was a conscious design decision.

Now, we’re hoping to refine the physical branding further.
One reason for a minimalist design is aesthetic. Just like on a piece of hand-made jewelry, we wish the branding to be made in the form of an inconspicuous marking that doesn’t interfere with the natural beauty of the overall shape.

Another reason is ethical. While one should easily be able to identify a computer model when closely inspecting it, people using a Librem device should be prevented from, unintentionally, exposing the brand of their hardware, which may be seen as arrogant in some situations. But, above all, the Librem customer should not be used as a passive promoting medium. We think that this is an essential part of an ethical design.

This is described within our internal industrial design policies in term of visual identity, so I think important to emphasize those points.

Branding on the Librem laptops

Therefore, on the current Librem line, branding is only visible on the keyboard (with the “Super” key displaying the Purism logo) and on the bottom cover, displaying the brand and model name, along with certification symbols, underneath the computer.

That said, while not being visible during normal use (open on a table), the bottom branding of the Librem may be considered a bit flashy when carrying the laptop around, so we are considering making it even more discreet in the future.

Branding on the Librem 5

The Librem 5 is not in production yet but the public mock-ups have been escaping that rule so far. While I think that it was important for everyone to easily identify the device mock-ups during the campaign, the final model should not display any branding on the back cover of the handset. Instead we are discussing the possibility of having the brand and model number carved on the side of the device.

July 31, 2018

Designing the scope of the Librem 5’s communication apps

We have spent the last few weeks focusing on the design of the default communication features of the Librem 5. As part of that process, we came up with the design specification for two applications. One of them is called “Calls” and has been designed for the purpose of—you guessed it—making and receiving phone calls. The second one, called “Messages” has been designed for the no less obvious purpose of sending and receiving messages.

Tobias, our lead designer, does a great job in communicating and collaborating with the GNOME design team, and so we keep making progress jointly with the upstream GNOME project. When Tobias joined, we started by having a call with Allan Day and Jakub Steiner (from the GNOME design team) where we presented our project, our goals and discussed the way to structure our contributions to GNOME. For example, we have an app design repository on the upstream GNOME GitLab server, where our design and mock-ups are made available to everyone. All in all, our project and vision seem to be very well received by the GNOME community.

The “Calls” application

This application is not based on any existing application so we had to design it from scratch. We did so while Bob was making good progress on implementing the basic cellular call features.

“Calls” is supposed to let the user handle regular phone calls but is not limited to that. It is designed to integrate a much higher level of security and privacy through end to end encrypted technologies in a very transparent way. Private calls, between two devices supporting that feature, would be made by simply selecting a contact and pressing the “call” button.

The full design of the Calls application can be seen in its own repository.

The “Messages” application

At the beginning of the summer, some Purism members (Dorota, Adrien, Tobias and myself) participated in the Fractal hackfest in Strasbourg. The goal was to analyze and discuss the possibility of having Fractal become the default messaging application on PureOS and the Librem 5. This is motivated by our wish to be in sync with upstream choices as well as with the fact that Tobias, besides being the designer for the Librem 5 applications, is also the designer of Fractal. We also took this opportunity to meet Matthew from Matrix who provided very helpful technical clarifications about the Matrix technology.

It was clear in this meeting that Fractal’s future plans are aligned with the Ethical Design principles, that the Librem 5 and PureOS design guidelines are based on. An application following those guidelines, must be simple and focused on a single purpose.

One might think that the current state of Fractal already fits the main purpose of the Messages application (sending and receiving messages), but it is actually too general in terms of purpose. Chatting privately with a friend is not the same as discussing in a crowded IRC like public room. While the back-end technology may be the same for both situations, the user interface may have different requirements. This was discussed at the Fractal hackfest (Tobias used the analogy of the “barbecue” and the “banquet” to expose the problem), where Fractal developers decided that Fractal should be split into two distinct applications; one application would be used for the purpose of private 1 to 1 and small group chats (the barbecue), the other one would be used for the purpose of crowded IRC like discussions (the banquet). It will take a while for that split of an existing application to happen, however.

The simplified Messages application we have been developing is based on the “barbecue” usecase; private 1 to 1 and small groups chats, the most common usage for the majority of the population. The plan is for the Messages application to be able to handle regular text messages (SMS) while also handling secure end-to-end encrypted messages in a transparent way between two compatible devices.

The full design of the Messages application can be seen in its own repository.

July 16, 2018

Librem 5 general development report — July 16, 2018

These last few weeks, the Librem 5 team has been hard at work improving the current software stack as well as making great strides towards finalizing the development kit schematic. Here are the highlights of the exciting progress that has been made.

Software Work

Images

The images produced for the i.MX6 board now have phosh as the default shell and we are experimenting with PureOS as the base OS (instead of Debian buster). There is also now an x86_64 raw VM image being produced and you can follow these instructions on getting a copy of the image and running it. The VM image uses the same screen resolution that the actual Librem5 phone will use.

While the i.MX6 images have been developed for the current hardware in the team’s hands, work continues on the image to be used on the i.MX8-based development board and actual phone. Note that during the investigation of the i.MX8 CPU, there were freedom issues that needed to be addressed. To read more about this, checkout the Solving the first FSF RYF hurdle for the Librem 5 blog post.

The image built for the i.MX8 board can now boot a very basic mainline kernel (instead of the vendor kernel offered up by the manufacturer). The next steps are to bring more components (like the display) online and to upstream these changes. All in all though, this i.MX8 image is really coming together!

Phosh/wlroots

At some point, most people will likely use their Librem 5 at night so having redshift in place makes the screen easier on the eyes. There was some work done to implement some of Mutter‘s DBus API in phosh, needed for e.g. display configuration and redshift. So now, phosh can detect the attached outputs and supported video modes and report them in a mutter/gnome-shell compatible way so they show up in gnome-settings and gnome-settings-daemon is happy. This is the base for future gamma control work (redshift). This depends on a patch to wlroots which is currently under discussion.

Other phosh usability improvements have been made as well. The lock screen timeout has been increased to allow for a bit more time to log in. Also, the favorites / home screen handling has been corrected to properly wrap columns and add scroll bars when necessary.

Since phosh is the shell and it works hand-in-hand with wlroots, they both are key areas for the image development. There have been frequent updates to wlroots to stay current with the upstream snapshots. A minor issue was fixed in upstream wlroots to improve the error handling of compiling for armhf. Also support for adding custom video modes has been added to wlroots. Work on Gcr system-prompt integration is being done in phosh. This will solve a heap of authentication and modal dialog issues with PINs, PUKs, passwords, smart cards and keyrings by leveraging what’s already in GNOME.

Keyboard

There has been ongoing work into the onscreen keyboard (virtboard) which has led to virtboard being included in the images. In order for virtboard to show/hide when needed, merging of an input method (text-input) into wlroots was needed and GTK+ upstream was contacted about upstreaming the input method code. We are working on a patch securing the input method in our compositor. There has also been continued feedback from upstream on upstreaming the virtual keyboard protocol. The keyboard scales much better now too!

Calls

The calls application has also been added to the images for easy access. Within the calls app, the sending of DTMF tones has been added so that you can now hear those familiar sounds when touching a number on the keypad.

To make calls more robust, the possibility of doing unit tests of Calls’ oFono provider backend using the phonesim simulator were explored but unfortunately running ofonod requires root privileges in order to take ownership of the well-known name, org.ofono, which makes testing a massive headache if not impractical. Still though, unit tests for the Calls Provider interface using the dummy implementation, as well as tests for Origin and Call interfaces have been added.

Libhandy

The libhandy GTK+ widget has seen some growth too. HdyColumn has been added to help out with dynamic column resizing. There have also been some unit tests added for HdyArrows (used for directional swiping). A first version of libhandy has been released and v0.0.1 has even been uploaded to Debian experimental!

Epiphany/GNOME Web

The web browser on the Librem 5 will be Epiphany so adaptive changes have been merged upstream to improve the usability on small screens. An in-window app-menu for Epiphany has started to be implemented and is still a work in progress.

Messaging

A demo app for libpurple has been drafted and an XMPP conversation has been established between the demo app and Dino. For encryption, an OMEMO conversation running with libpurple and the Lurch plugin was established. There has also been a conversation-view that pulls avatar/account data from a buddy list stored in xml. The ofono interface in SMS/XMPP was implemented into the demo app as well.

Hardware Work

External factors have caused our development board schedule to slip beyond our initial June projected ship date. While developing the schematic for the development board, not all information was readily available so investigations were needed on various components (e.g. cameras, WLAN+BT, batteries, switches, push buttons, etc), and circuits needed to be added before the schematic is considered ready for review by the third party that will print the boards. The Librem 5 hardware team has done all of these required tasks and are in the process of ordering parts to be sent to the manufacturer of the boards. Our current rough estimate for shipment of the development boards is August 2018 but stay tuned for a more detailed blog post on the subject.

Community Outreach

The Librem 5 matrix chat rooms have really exploded with lots of fantastic feedback and questions. Some community members have even stepped up to help find new issues, fix some issues, and add to the documentation. Due to the demand from the community, there is now an x86_64 VM raw image available that looks just like what the team is installing on the i.MX6 boards.

The Purism collaboration with the Plasma community continues as well. There are now some arm and aarch64 flatpaks of Plasma software. The Purism team is also actively investigating building a Plasma image for the i.MX6 boards as well.

Developer documentation changes have also been made to better guide everyone to the right places:

The volunteers page has been updated with more clear instructions on how to participate.
Regardless of the type of board (whether physical or emulated), common steps have been added to a first steps page.
There are now instructions on setting up the x86_64 VM image.
Contribution guidelines have been posted to demonstrate the preferred communication processes
A GTK+ page has been added with example apps and includes documentation on adaptive labels.
A phone constraints page has been added to outline some specific constraints that should be considered when developing apps for the Librem 5 phone.

We also recently attended the GUADEC conference in Spain where we got to interact with a lot of wonderful folks excited about the Librem 5. More on the GUADEC conference to com in a future progress report.

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!

June 11, 2018

Librem 5 general development report — June 11, 2018

There has been some exciting work done on the Librem 5 project and while there is still plenty of work left, we would like to highlight the accomplishments the team has achieved over the last couple of weeks. So here please enjoy a brief update on our recent efforts and victories.

Software Work

There is so much that goes into the software stack of the Librem 5. There’s the underlying infrastructure like the UI shell and newly developed libraries and protocols. But then there’s the familiar apps that are necessary.

On the nuts and bolts level, our phone shell (phosh) has seen several usability improvements mostly around the lockscreen. One important change is that the lockscreen unlocking has been switched to PAM to better handle the PIN to lock the device. There have also been some additions to the code to better handle multiple outputs (screens). Also, Libhandy is our “handy” UI library for developing GTK+ apps. There has been a recent addition of an arrows widget (HdyArrows) to indicate swiping direction which will be very useful to many applications, especially the lockscreen. Additionally, libhandy has seen some bug fixes and a slight rework of the keyboard handling support. Since graphics are important, we have added Etnaviv support to weston-simple-dmabuf (a Wayland client to test Linux DMA-BUF protocol implementations). We also extended it’s NV12 format support. It’s being used over here to test wlroot’s linux-dmabuf implementation which we wrote a couple of weeks ago. We’d like to especially thank the wlroots and Weston projects for their code reviews, recommendations, and support.

Since you can’t have a phone that doesn’t make phone calls, there have been great strides made on the Calls app and the Calls app can successfully place phone calls now! (And if you missed it, we encourage you to go read the exciting blog post about it.) Along with all of the great work it took to get to this point, the interfaces have been documented in the code. Debian packaging is being put together and we’ve been working to include Flatpak packaging contributed by a member of the community.

Every smart phone needs an On-Screen Keyboard (OSK), so there has been significant development on writing some necessary protocols and getting them upstream. So far the virtual-keyboard protocol has been accepted for inclusion in upstream wlroots. The text-input protocol has also been submitted upstream. To test virtual-keyboard protocol, we created a prototype client based on weston-keyboard. You can read more about the OSK developments in Dorota’s initial blog post on the matter.

Hardware Work

Identifying and testing the individual hardware components that will be present on the dev kit and eventual phone is a non-trivial task. After identifying a component as a potential fit for our needs and receiving a couple of them to test, often kernel modules need to be modified or written before the testing can begin. This was the case when evaluating and testing a low power WiFi card/module, which is still underway. Vibration motors are also being gathered for evaluation and battery chargers are being tested. We are also looking into various camera options.

Community Outreach

The community continues to be at the front of our thoughts. So we have created a general PureOS wiki at wiki.puri.sm that still doesn’t have much details yet but will eventually be a place to look for both general and technical information on PureOS and Purism products. We’ve also fixed an issue with the community email lists so that they are functional now and opened up our Matrix rooms so that you can join our discussions with your already existing Matrix ID. For more information on both the email lists and Matrix rooms, have a look at our volunteer page.

We have been so happy to receive some initial volunteers that are doing fantastic work to help the Librem 5 become awesome. If you’ve been following and contributing to our code repositories, please note that we just moved the hosting from Gogs to GitLab – the new location can be found at source.puri.sm.

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