Purism Eyeing The i.MX8M For The Librem 5 Smartphone, Issues First Status Update

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Purism Eyeing The i.MX8M For The Librem 5 Smartphone, Issues First Status Update

If you have been curious about the state of Purism's Librem 5 smartphone project since its successful crowdfunding last year and expedited plans to begin shipping this Linux smartphone in early 2019, the company has issued their first status update...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Librem-5-Status-Update-1

[Brophen]

Be like Ubports and include Anbox too..!

I hope this phone really shines, I think this could only be a good thing for everyone involved.

[Licaon]

Fun fact, hope Matrix devs learn from the past: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desk.../msg00047.html

[L_A_G]

No i.MX8M devkits? Doesn't NXP have evaluation board available yet?

Just looked at NXP's website and they do have an evaluation board for the i.MX 8M, which is available for $450 or a bit more than that from NXP's own website, Avnet and Digikey, but it seems like they some weeks/months away from shipping. Avnet even has their usual really long lead times (12 weeks in this case) that I've run afoul of myself with another evaluation board made by them.

[GI_Jack]

What I want:

comes stock with TWRP and Linaege OS, and a native, everything working fork.

Free software drivers, including a wifi driver that has monitor and injection mode.

A capable kernel that has many if not most desktop modules.

Modem that is isolated without DMA access.

Thats it. I kinda like ASOP for phone usage. Not convinced I want a GNU phone, again. Pretty sure I don't unless you containerize apps using something like flatpak

[scottishduck]

Not entirely convinced that KDE or GNOME can produce a phone UI that's at all functional by modern standards

[edenist]

Glad to read that things are progressing.

The difference in specifications between the iMX6 and iMX8 are huge. Frankly, I'd rather wait a little bit longer for the device to ship if it means they can use the iMX8.
Hopefully NXP et al can get some dev hardware out pronto.

[shmerl]

Cool. Who can add etnaviv to Mesa's features.txt so it would show up in Mesa Matrix?

Not entirely convinced that KDE or GNOME can produce a phone UI that's at all functional by modern standards

Why not. It's actually quite simple to do. Ask SailfishOS developers.

[Almindor]

Cool. Who can add etnaviv to Mesa's features.txt so it would show up in Mesa Matrix?



Why not. It's actually quite simple to do. Ask SailfishOS developers.

I wished Jolla would make good on their promise and just bloody open-source it already. All I'm asking is the UI and their internal apps/settings etc. not the drivers. That alone would be a huge boon to the community and would vindicate their huge failures.

[MartinK]

Cool. Who can add etnaviv to Mesa's features.txt so it would show up in Mesa Matrix?



Why not. It's actually quite simple to do. Ask SailfishOS developers.

Actually, many of the original Sailfish OS developers had many years of mobile industry experience and some of the software components (such as ofono and maybe connman as well ?) have heritage from prior mobile distributions (Maemo 5/Harmattan/MeeGo). While AFAIK the Librem design and developer team seem to me both as a very clean sheat design without prior mobile experience and heritage.

BTW, the UI can be actually the easy part (and it was indeed totally new on Sailfish OS, not taken from any prior project) - the hard parts are IMHO all the telephony and mobile connectivity bits working under the scenes to connect phone calls, make SMS/MMS arrive and move bits around over the mobile connection. Given the constant stream of telephony/mobile connectivity related commits in the Mer activity log (Mer is the meta distribution which serves as a core of Sailfish OS) I think Librem could be in serious trouble if they don't have anyone of a similar telephony/mobile know how Jolla has on staff for Sailfish OS. It seems to be a constant fight to keep things running due to telephony infrastructure intricacies and complex connectivity issues users might run into at random.

Failure in this area means lost or interrupted calls, bad call quality, lost SMS messages or mobile connectivity issues and issues with switching between wifi and mobile connectivity. All potentially pretty annoying issues.