This is very exciting news! Also note that they are still targeting March for release of phone and that price for preorders will increase $100 after Jan 7th.

It's now April according to the shop page:

https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

Despite my early scepticism, I must admit I'm now tempted. I've been impressed with their diligence in putting out regular progress updates and it has raised my confidence in them.

Exciting times ahead... Librem 5, PinePhone and Necuno Mobile. After years of nothing, 2019 could be the year of the phone designed to run on mainline Linux, and fingers crossed, we might even be spoilt for choice!

From what i've seen about where the project is at the moment, they will not hit that April deadline, they would want to have proper prototypes by now for testing rather than just receiving the devkits

They are quite active in the librem 5 matrix channel if anyone is interested in asking questions about the project

Seems like purism need a lot of community help with the software stack to get stuff working so lets start:

If you have kicad and want to work with bare metal sw/hw debug stuff here is the schematics for the devkit baseboard and all of the components:

https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/dvk-mx8m-bsb

SOM here: https://emcraft.com/products/868#som and https://emcraft.com/component/jdownl...nload/153/1148

Dev kit setup:

https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/librem5-devkit-tools

and for UI devs there is:

https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/phosh

https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/libhandy

And of course:

https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/De...ards/imx8.html

Edit: Fedex did it's job it is here:

Just a small summary for those who not have the the devkit.

First of I do think librem 5 has a very promising 2019 for the FOSS community. This platform is for sure true open source so if you have not yet bought the librem5 just do it https://shop.puri.sm/shop/librem-5/

There is however plenty of stuff and when the phone is released , whatever it is released in April or not, the application will be very limited. BUT again true open source that means anyone can contribute with anything you like.

I have not yet played that much with the platform so far I have only trying to figure out all the development tools and so on.

But just a small summary what seems work or not, this is my own test, other may have got stuff working by tweaking kernel and so on

• Internal Display not working cause of a driver issue. They are working with the manufacturer to figure out timings and so on.

• Camera not working I tried ffmpeg, gst-launch...
  Possibly because all pins is not yet enabled in the kernel device tree or similar. But should be that hard get low level stuff working since the camera is OV5640 which is used on RPI, arduino and so on.

• GPS Works

• USBC works in peripheral mode at least with Serial device mode (eg: ttyACM device).

• LAN adapter works

• UART debug works using my old FTDI adapter

• SSH works (make surer install latest image)

For those interested in development and help just create an account at purism gitlab instance at:

https://source.puri.sm/

And don't forget to create an account at matrix chat I use web version http://riot.im, but there is other clients too: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html

channel:

https://riot.im/app/#/room/#librem-5...t:talk.puri.sm

Btw. avoid asking question about "when phone get released" since they probably is not know yet but work very hard to get it happen in April as marketing team told us.

I personally think it will be delayed some more but it is worth it since we talk true open platform not fake open source like XXXXX.

Thanks mikecomputing! Does purism offer a sdk you can just run on desktop?

This may seen a bit off topic at start but:

It would be very fun to see some more Rust based apps on librem5. I love this new safe language. It seems alot of C/C++ developers out there finally found a new language they likes. Rust has grown very fast 2018. Finally we have a safe low level language that can compete with C/C++! No shitty garbage collectors like Java. Rust is strictly typing but possibility to go "unsafe" when you really must. The compiler helps you code in correct direction. And no need for external static code analyze tools like codesonar since the compiler has it built in. You may hate the compiler at the beginning but after at week you learn to love the Rust. Whoops way off topic now lets go back to Librem:

The thing is: There already is Rust bindings for QML, but also Gtk, the one I have tried is https://github.com/woboq/qmetaobject-rs. When/if I port sailserver to librem I will for sure write backend in Rust instead of C++. It is way easier and fun make a tinywebserver in C++ using already written framework such as actix-web. It can be really cool indeed since you may add your own templates and so on.

There is also a pure UI toolkit for Rust. Now this is probably less bloated than Gtk/Qt maybe also less resource hungry (but limited): OrbTk, written in Rust used by a new "Unix based" OS Redox. OrbTk also works on Linux and Librem5 since OrbTk uses SDL.

Also I remember I saw a utube clip with someone working on a experimental Wayland compositor written in Rust.

Now RedoxOS would be epic to see on Librem5. However I heard the guy behind Redox is working at system76 maybe they also work on a phone

Anyway so much new cool stuff to learn 2019

Not the way sailfish doing it. I remember there were some qemu image somewhere on the developer pages.

https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/De...rkstation.html

I guess those few that has got their kit so far compiling it directly on the devkit.

But if you want to work with the UI it should be possible to work direcly on a Linux workstation with gnome developer packaged installed and clone libhandy/phosh from librems repos and test directly on your workstation.

https://source.puri.sm/explore/projects

Also there is flatpack but haven't look at it. There is wiki that probably will be updated:


https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/devel...mentation-wiki

Also check if someone can answer at the matrix chat channels.

Seems like initial i.mx8 support will be upstreamed in 4.21.


I wonder if Jolla itself would build a i.mx8-based phone. Would be nice to have a normal phone again (not an Android HAL-based) like N9 where you can build a kernel on the phone itself.

I'm not sure Jolla is that interested in making devices anymore. That said theres nothing particularly stopping you from getting a librem 5 and putting sailfish os on it, if that is what you wanted