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.wp.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.wp.puri.sm.

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