Purism's Librem 5 Making Progress In GTK4 Toolkit Usage, Kernel Upbringing

Purism announced earlier this week that the Librem 5 smartphone has been delayed to April 2019. In trying to make that date not slip further, which they attributed this three-month delay on NXP hardware errata, they continue working quickly on the software side of this privacy-minded GNU/Linux smartphone puzzle.

Purism has published another blog post today offering their latest general development report on the project. Among their latest areas of work have been:

- Work in the direction of being able to build Plasma Mobile Librem 5 images.

- Various fixes to their Phosh Wayland shell. Somewhat related are also some fixes for the WLROOTS Wayland support library.

- Various fixes going on with upstream GTK+ 4 and the Librem 5's libhandy library in making up the default Librem 5 user-interface. Preparations for Wayland virtual keyboard support are also underway.

- Continued work on SMS/messaging and calls support.

- They are currently working on adapting the Linux 4.18 kernel to work on their developer kit. They have managed to get a power supply driver for the battery charger working and hope to upstream it soon. They also have USB 2.0 support tested and working.

- On the hardware side, they have sent out the manufacturing files for PCB fabrication and assembly of prototypes.

This 20th general development report on the Librem 5 Linux smartphone can be found via the Purism blog.