Waiting for a Librem 5 being ordered for me by my employee it crossed my mind that it would be fun to have PureOS running on an arm platform and maybe being able to test some of the Librem 5 functionality.
I read about the new CuBox Pulse by Solidrun, which is quiet easy to use and based on imx.8 as the Librem 5.
To start with I could just connect a monitor using hdmi.
To have some mobile experience it might be possible to use a case like this to connect a mini PCIe card containing the same PLS8 by Gemalto as offered with the Librem5 to the CuBox via USB.
Audio could be used via USB also.
But the question is: Is there a chance to get PureOS arm64 running on that CuBox and would I be able to use the Gemalto PLS8 (btw: why not PLS9?) via USB?
To people wanting “dev kits”, we’ve been recommending something from EmCraft, because that’s what the actual dev kit has been built around: https://www.emcraft.com/products/868
I was thinking along the line of CuBox, because it already has a case around it and it could be “recycled” as a LibreElec media center or just an arm64 desktop.
I cannot judge how big the difference between the mentioned sbc and the CuBox would be.
Did you recommend a solution for tests using a mobile modem like the Gemalto PLS8 I mentioned, also?
I just ordered a CuBox Pulse for similar reasons as yours: I want a small i.MX8 device that I can use as a arm64 desktop/development system/IoT toy/media centre, too. And as my Raspberry Pi 3B+ just died some days ago, I need a replacement soon
The reason I settled for the CuBox this time instead of the Pi 3B+ was: More RAM (I had a hard time sometimes with the 1GB even with zswap) and the availability for open source graphics drivers (etnaviv).
The Pi 4 was no alternative, as it doesn’t seem to be usable with Debian arm64 at the moment.
As soon as I have the device, I’ll report here what you need to do to get a decent librem 5 test environment running on this device. Shouldn’t be much more of a hassle than on a Raspberry Pi with arm64 Debian buster
A bootable Debian buster image (with the binary i.mx8 vivante blobs and probably a lot of other proprietary stuff) can be found here: https://images.solid-build.xyz/IMX8/
If it’s just about porting/trying generic software - you can easily use rpi3 which is also using quad A53 cores. And is way much cheaper. If you really about focusing on phone specific software (using periphery) - then rather need emcraft as suggested by Dorota above.
