I have asked that Purism create a general community wiki that covers all Purism products. See this thread for the discussion.
My Google searches in English didn’t turn up anything about GitLab being blocked in Ukraine. Perhaps that is a rumor that arose from this story about GitLab and Russia. If the gitlab.com domain is blocked in Ukraine, it is unlikely to cover source.puri.sm, which is a local installation of GitLab in another domain.
I can’t find the proprietary firmware for the DDR training which is stored in the SPI Flash chip. This page explains how SolidRun builds the flash.bin file that can be saved in the SPI Flash chip, but I don’t know if Purism does it the same way.
I added this text to the FAQ:
The following proprietary firmware for the Librem 5 is available for download in the Purism code repository:
Feel free to create a new page in the Librem 5 community wiki to explain what is the Librem 5 booting sequence. I don’t know enough to answer that question.
Missed that Wikipedia alleviated GitLab’s/Google’s statement: (<< To overcome this issue, the non-profit organization Framasoft provides a Debian mirror to make GitLab CE available in these countries.[31] >>)
I reckon, that this really isn’t too much of a problem then, especially not if they would block just the gitlab.com domain.
Will try to do so as soon as I’m able to conduct hands-on experiments on recompiling and re-flashing the complete firmware. Perhaps Q3/2021?
It doesn’t have UEFI–it uses u-boot instead. To test whether it has ACPI support, someone who has the phone should do this: sudo apt install acpi acpi -V
To determine its level of SBSA would take hours of reading the spec and testing each thing in the spec, and I doubt that very many people care about SBSA.
Purism has been accepting pre-orders for the Fir batch at the same price as the first version of the Librem 5, but has not made any further announcements, so it is not known whether Fir will have more RAM, more Flash memory storage, or different components than the Librem 5 (Evergreen).
This is not true that Purism made no further statements. Here is one:
Purism announced “Fir” on 2019-09-05 and @nicole.faerber made that comment one day later on 2019-09-06, and that comment doesn’t contain any more info about Fir than the original post. Since then, Purism employees have reaffirmed that Fir will happen on this forum, but Purism hasn’t released any further details about Fir.
Nothing is wrong. The FAQ could just be updated saying that the i.MX 8M Plus, first announced in early January 2020, is likely to become the power envelope for the phone according to not only to the existing FAQ link but also according to this link above I found.
Although you are right that no further announcements were made.
Since that answer was written Purism published a couple of very good articles and videos on convergence. I think they should be emphasized here and be linked in the very beginning, especially the first one:
The Librem 5 was first to release a development batch, but PinePhone was the first to reach mass production, so it can be argued which was the first to introduce hardware kill switches.
The version of Pinephone currently available for preorder is called “Beta Edition”. To me it means that the previous “Alpha Edition” was also actually a development batch, even though it was available to more developers than the Birch. It definitely was not the final version of the hardware, too (it had a bug preventing convergence).
By every way that I can think to define “mass production”, I think that the PinePhone got there before the Librem 5, which isn’t surprising considering the design choices that PINE64 made compared to Purism’s design decisions.
If we define “mass production” as when a product has its full functionality available with only minor bugs, then neither the PinePhone nor the Librem 5 are at mass production, but the PinePhone is definitely closer to that state than the Librem 5.
If we are going to call the PinePhone “beta”, then we also have to call Evergreen “beta” or maybe “alpha”, considering the lack of FCC/CE certification and all the software dev work that is still required for things like the cameras, GNSS, OpenPGP, suspend-to-RAM, system wakeup by the cellular modem and WiFi, etc.
If we define mass production as when shipping a large number of the devices, then the PinePhone started mass production in June 2020. Maybe you can argue that Librem 5 started mass production in November 2020, but I don’t think 250 devices per month is a large enough number for that definition. At this point the PinePhone has shipped 20k - 30k units, whereas the Librem 5 is around 1200.
Another definition could be when the hardware stops changing. By that definition, I would say that the PinePhone reached mass production with v1.2b in October 2020. At this point we don’t know for sure if the Librem 5 will have any further hardware changes, but it appears likely that there won’t be any changes to v.1.0.2 of the schematics, which were released in November 2020.
No debating this, but do you have a source for that? I would be interested. And I agree with your post :).
Just asking, because I know the size of the Mobian CE batch (sorry, non-public) and if the other editions are similarly sized, I would not arrive at that number…
