Purism Starts Shipping The First Librem 5 Smartphones

[jaskij]

I wonder why Purism dropped Quectel. I met their rep once and they seemed quite friendly to small vendors. I even had some of their modems in a devkit connected to a Pi and two out of three worked out of the box with Raspbian 9. Third was too new but works with Raspbian 10. Didn't try voice though. And oh, they joys of DBus to control the thing (DBus might be fine but the gtkmm bindings... Urgh).

It will be joy to look through those schematics once they are released. I wonder which CAD they used? Eagle which is very popular in the hobbyist/maker community does not really have the features you would want working with such a device. KiCad is FOSS and has more features I believe (never bothered to learn it). And if you need a 5k+ CAD to edit those files... Some people are gonna complain.

Damn, I want to run Phoronix Test Suite on it. Either on Purism or on a devkit. But the cheapest devkit is like 400 USD :/

[intelfx]

I wonder why Purism dropped Quectel.

Hmm. Which modem do they have there?

[Caliga]

jaskij , ModemManager is only added on top. Hardware support needs to be in the kernel.

On the modem choice, look at this forum search: https://forums.puri.sm/search?q=M.2%...ole.faerber%20
There, Nicole says: "So first the Quectel EG-25G is a miniPCIe form factor card, we are looking for an M.2 card. "
And much more details.

intelfx , they have several replaceable modems to choose from. See https://puri.sm/faq/what-are-the-phone-specs/

[Toggleton]

It will be joy to look through those schematics once they are released. I wonder which CAD they used? Eagle which is very popular in the hobbyist/maker community does not really have the features you would want working with such a device. KiCad is FOSS and has more features I believe (never bothered to learn it). And if you need a 5k+ CAD to edit those files... Some people are gonna complain.

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

Looks like they used KiCad for the Dev-Kit, so i would guess they will use it for the Final Phone too.
https://puri.sm/posts/how-we-designe...free-software/

[jaskij]

Caliga you would be surprised how much modem handling happens in the userspace. Quite often it's seeing that vid/pid with vendor-specific class and using modeswitch to switch them to a more general class (commonly it's CDC-ACM for control plus CDC-ETH for data). And then modem-specific commands are sent on that tty from ModemManager or other userspace software. Or some such. Kernel support is less than half the story here.

[profoundWHALE]

People who complain about Purism not being Libre enough clearly haven't actually done their research:

https://www.crowdsupply.com/libre-risc-v/m-class/updates/purism-donation

I wonder why Purism would want a low-power libre-GPU that operates at ~25FPS 720p...