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amesser

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2018-07-15

Posts: 6  

Website

Devuan for Librem 5

As some of you maybe already noticed, there is ongoing work for creating an fully opensource and free mobile phone plattform:

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

While the vendor will provide a Debian based linux distribution "Pure Os" to run the phone, the opensource nature of the project will allow to use virtually any operating system with the phone.

Where to get

The development kits for the phones are out now and there has already been some work to make Devuan images for these development kits.

• Daniel Albrecht has created a shell script based image generator for Devuan, find it here:
  https://gitlab.com/DanielAbrecht/librem5-image-builder
  I can not tell much more about it

• and I have made another one, based on the "ansible" tool here:
  https://gitlab.com/amesser-group/librem … ge-builder
  My image is a little different to original Puri SM image in the following points:

  • Devuan based

  • Kernel recompiled with much more filesystem and network filesystem options enabled

  • Using f2fs instead of ext4 for root partition (hopefully extends lifetime of eMMC)

The images can be readily used with the Librem 5 Development kits.

Known issues

• The Display is currently not working due to initialization issues. However a HDMI monitor can be connected instead.

• Images bigger 4GB wont flash properly on the phone. (This took me some days to figure out) Not yet clear if this is an issue of the used u-boot version or NXP's software "mfgtools" required for flashing.

• Network link might go down even if cable plugged after some uptime. Looks like a timing issue in ethernet driver of kernel

• Bootup takes about two minutes, most of the time waiting for random number generator initialization

Todos

• Purism has already spent some effort to build an gui interface for the phone. This software is available as .deb packages (and source of course). Some of these software packages need porting to Devuan. (mainly remove systemd dependencies)

Resources

• Source code repos of Purism for Librem 5 https://source.puri.sm/Librem5

Finally

Any feedback is appreciated.