Configuring librem5

Librem Phones (Librem 5)
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I have installed a librem5 kvm. And I have tried to configure IMAP and SMTP. Because I plan to host all services on my own linux server I want to be free to enter all configuration.

I tried to configure geary, but I could not find any configuration options. I think purism has stripped the GUI down. Is this correct, or did I oversee something? Stripping the GUI down is generally a good idea on librem5, but I found no option to exceptionally allow all configuration.

So I started geary via X11 on my desktop. And I could see all needed options. After configuration also my connection to my SMTP and to my IMAP server worked !!!

If someone else needs all options of an application like geary:

  1. kill geary on the librem5 (kvm) if it is running: ssh <librem5> killall geary (maybe you need apt-get install psmisc before)
  2. ssh -t <librem5> geary --display=$DISPLAY (maybe you need apt-get install xauth before)
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Maybe the config is unworkable on the phone screen and is waiting reimplementation, rather than intentionally removing the functionality completely.

Did you try scaling the phone screen so that it is more like a desktop screen?

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How can I scale the phone screen. I will try if I find that out.

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I have now seen that I do not want geary, because I found no option for pgp. I think I will need evolution. But evolution is too large to be displayed. Maybe I have to scale with xrandr.

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@bschubs you might be interested in the following regarding geary:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/geary/-/merge_requests/401 : make the main window adaptive, that doesn’t cover 100% of the UI but that’s a great start :slight_smile:
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/geary/-/issues/6 : issue where it is asked to add pgp support, looks like there are people intending to work on it.

Hopefully with those feature in, geary would be a lot more usable on the L5, also for your use case.

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@kieran and @bschubs, the method in @Kyle_Rankin’s post works, but affects every app on the phone. You can get more granular control using the official scripts here:

auto-maximize sets a global option for the compositor to maximize applications on start; this typically removes controls that are not used on a phone.

scale-to-fit sets a per-app option to scale the display to make the window fit. The app is specified as a Wayland app id.

You can also have a look at my versions of these scripts:

I made them report the current setting when called w/o the {ON|OFF} parameter, instead of defaulting to OFF.

I also made an additional helper to get the Wayland id of an app. You call get-app-id with the name of the executable and get to see where the app sets its id. (This is basically just a simple grep plus a timeout to kill apps that don’t provide a way to close them - like the maximized VLC…)

To find the name of the executable, start the app from the app grid and try ps -a in the Terminal. Long names are cut off, unfortunately, and I haven’t bothered because I have so far been able to guess the rest of the names.

(I’m afraid this is pretty low-level, but has made using the Dogwood phone a bit easier for me.)

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