Figured I would comment here instead of starting a new thread. Has anyone successfully deployed plasma mobile to the Librem 5 on PureOS recently? I know there are other options such as postmarketOS or Mobian that have methods for Plasma Mobile on their OS and I have enjoyed using it there, but unfortunately it seems somewhat difficult to get it working on Byzanium at this point.
Since buster is no longer available I moved to bullseye (which Byzantium is based on) and also testing repos and am able to successfully install all the packages required with both, but the login screen never appears. Before I continue down this rabbit hole, I’m curious if anyone else has managed to get this working.
No, not in PureOS, I could never get it to work properly. Because of this I used postmarketOS for a while but may give installing it on PureOS another try now since it’s been a few months since my last attempt. Maybe something has changed to make it more workable now.
How was your experience on Postmarket OS? Since I got over the initial fear of flashing the phone and restoring my data I have been curious to try it out.
@velocity303 I did try the instructions in the devkit but it seems that no longer works.
I also tried to follow the Mobian instructions but that errors out in unmet dependencies.
I did look into flashing the L5 device with postmarketOS so it would be very interesting to learn about your experience on postmarketOS.
I am a long time plasma user and bought the L5 to be able to run plasma-mobile as that was communicated early on that that was something that was actively prosued. Apparently this has changed.
My experience was OK, but it’s not as polished as PureOS is on the device. I prefer plasma mobile in regards to look and feel, but necessary things were somewhat glitchy.
For example the current version of plasma mobiles dialer does not hear any audio from the microphone. Also it has trouble remembering network settings sometimes. These are both known issues with bugs in their bug tracker but they have not seen much movement in the last few months. As such I’m switching back to PureOS just so I have more of the real functionality of the device back. I’m still hoping to land on plasma mobile in some form eventually
Thank you for your write up on your experience. I do really agree with you regarding plasma mobile.
I would really like PureOS to support plasma mobile. But since the initial announcement years back nothing has been communicated
purism@chonkyboi:~$ sudo apt install plasma-mobile plasma-mobile-tweaks plasma-settings plasma-phonebook plasma-dialer spacebar angelfish okular-mobile libwacom2
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
libwacom2 is already the newest version (1.8-2).
libwacom2 set to manually installed.
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
libegl-mesa0 : Depends: libgbm1 (= 21.2.6-1pureos4) but 22.3.6-1+deb12u1 is to be installed
libwacom2 : Depends: libwacom-common (= 1.8-2) but 2.6.0-1 is to be installed
E: Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks, this may be caused by held packages.
I have to find out how to force it, but I’m guessing it’s not supported by Purism for some reason (lack of personnel?). It feels like I’d have to install an alternative OS like postmarketOS or mobian to get it to work properly without forcing it.
That’s a very efficient way to break your system. Please don’t.
There’s no Plasma Mobile packaged for PureOS yet. It may be possible to install Plasma Mobile on the next version of PureOS (crimson) thanks to Debian upstream; it’s not feasible on Byzantium at all without putting a huge amount of work into packaging.
Eh, that’s fine. It’s been a brick in my drawer ever since I got the fixed modem and personally found out the battery lasted <8h (even less with signal alternatives on it).
Right I got everything installed and am stuck at it dropping me into a TTY. Was able to ssh in After installing sddm it “failed to read display number from pipe”. So, I’m debugging that right now. simplelogin from https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Development_Environment/Boards/HowTo/Install_Plasma_Mobile.html doesn’t exist on the debian repo, so I’m just trying to find a display manager that can boot plasma-mobile.
Edit:
well, gdm doesn’t seem to allow choosing sessions and just installs gnome shell, which won’t start after entering the password. Postmarket OS uses tinydm, but I have to find an apt repo for that.
EEdit: found tinydm repo and it uses openrc? Well, no systemd and it depends on /usr/bin/autologin which isn’t on the system. In any case, /usr/share/wayland-sessions/plasma-mobile.desktop exists, but the script doesn’t work as it can’t find a display
Your whole system remains broken and you’re going to have many issues trying to install further packages. That’s a fun exercise if you plan to wipe it afterwards, but please - don’t report any issues happening on a system in such bad state.
The script was written à posteriori from the cobbled together shell commands I had in my ssh terminal. You might need to debug a little.
The first time it starts, it doesn’t ask for your pin! After that, it works fine though.
I wouldn’t recommend you do this unless you can ssh into your phone or have a USB-C dongle with a keyboard to unfuck yourself should shit go sideways
Script
Run this in an ssh session
# install curl and get the mobian gpg key
sudo apt install -y curl
curl 'https://repo.mobian.org/mobian.gpg' | sudo apt-key add -
# Add mobian repo to repo list
echo "deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm main" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
# phosh has fixed dependencies that clash with those of plasma-mobile
sudo apt remove phosh
# Install plasma-mobile and greetd that will start plasmamobile
sudo apt install plasma-mobile plasma-mobile-tweaks plasma-settings plasma-phonebook plasma-dialer spacebar angelfish okular-mobile greetd
# Generate a greetd "greeter" which is plasmamobile
echo '
[terminal]
# The VT to run the greeter on. Can be "next", "current" or a number
# designating the VT.
vt = 7
# The default session, also known as the greeter.
[default_session]
user = "purism"
command = "startplasmamobile"
' | sudo tee /etc/greetd/config.toml
# Enable the greeterd greeter
sudo systemctl enable greetd
# You should be ready for a restart now
sudo reboot
So far, it’s quite fluid and much more reminiscent of android, which is exactly what I was looking for. Never liked not having a “desktop” / tray / launcher / whatever with phosh.
Don’t worry, this was just a fun experiment for my Saturday. Maybe I’ll try to run the pi-hole on this. Nixos doesn’t have it and I don’t fancy mucking around with dnsmasq + I much prefer it over a raspberrypi.
If it works without a battery, it’ll stay on, but in either case I’ll tuck it away safely, back in the dusty drawer it came from.
I’m aware, but since you’re posting it publicly I really need to stress out how much it breaks the whole system, because I know from experience that people will try it and then will be surprised that things are broken and then will cry for help, often failing to mention that they were actively trying to break it beforehand
Hey thanks for figuring this out. Hopefully Purism will support this when Crimson launches. I found I did not have to install the Debian package list as you did. Here are my updated steps to do this all from PureOS on the Librem 5.
# Update to PureOS Crimson
$ sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list
# /etc/apt/sources.list
deb https://repo.pureos.net/pureos crimson main
deb https://repo.pureos.net/pureos crimson-updates main
deb https://repo.pureos.net/pureos crimson-security main
# disable phosh
$ sudo systemctl disable phosh.service
# Install plasma-mobile and greetd that will start plasmamobile
$ sudo apt install plasma-mobile plasma-mobile-tweaks plasma-settings plasma-phonebook plasma-dialer spacebar angelfish okular-mobile greetd
# Generate a greetd "greeter" which is plasmamobile
$ echo '
[terminal]
# The VT to run the greeter on. Can be "next", "current" or a number
# designating the VT.
vt = 7
# The default session, also known as the greeter.
[default_session]
user = "purism"
command = "startplasmamobile"
' | sudo tee /etc/greetd/config.toml
# Enable the greeterd greeter
$ sudo systemctl enable greetd.service
# You should be ready for a restart now
$ sudo reboot
I will update with similar steps on the Debian wiki for Mobian so this is less confusing.
I also ran into an issue where I couldn’t remove phosh as it was tied to a librem5-gnome-core package that was held?
