Librem 5 Dev Kit Can At Least Run Quake II Now, Progress On Adopting Linux 5.2

Purism today issued their June software status update on how things are going with bringing up their privacy-minded Linux software stack for their Librem 5 smartphone. On the software side things are still moving along though still rather primitive with a goal of shipping in Q3. Similarly, this status update lacks any talk of the hardware progress for seeing how that is moving if there is any chance of shipping their planned phone next month after already having been setback twice.

On the software side they continue working on Libhandy for allowing adaptive GTK user-interfaces, their chat program is getting chat history functionality, design effort for running GNOME Initial Setup on the smartphone, and a lot of system-level work.

On the kernel front they have their initial Librem 5 Developer Kit DeviceTree files added to the upstream kernel and they are working on transitioning from Linux 4.18 to Linux 5.2 for their preferred kernel. They also continue working on their Wayland compositor as well as U-Boot work.

Their Etnaviv-based open-source graphics driver stack is also now able to run Quake II on their developer kit as the latest milestone. But Etnaviv still primarily supports just OpenGL ES 2.0 and there is no Vulkan driver or the like compared to modern smartphones and their immersive graphics capabilities, among other areas for improvement with this open-source driver stack.

Those wanting to find out more about their software adventures can do so via the Purism blog.