[MyL5]: first impressions

simply deleting/removing data on the phone does NOT guarantee that it can’t be recovered/restored …

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Yep, neither formatting. And on flash disks tools like shred won’t work, so actually it’s quite impossible to safely erase data on the phone without rm+fill free space

So it should be crytoblob (eg for cryptoloop) with self-destruct capability (scramble the data and remove itself)

I hope L5 in the future will support FDE, as pmOS on the pinephone already does

True, up to a point.

In theory, yes. In practice, not as bad as that.

In fact, if you have some kind of erase at the disk firmware level, it actually is possible to safely erase data. The problem is, with closed source disk firmware, you have no idea whether the disk does what it says it does - which is why open source operating systems prefer to rely on secure erase functions that they themselves implement - and create an unsolvable problem.

I believe it is coming.

L5 also already does, with both PureOS and pmOS and I believe Mobian as well. We just don’t have it nicely integrated in a user friendly way in PureOS, but the plan is to have it ready in place for byzantium.

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or you can encrypt the data you want ‘gone’ and set a super-strong, random passw/pass-phrase that you will forget about and don’t store anywhere and simply format the whole data-storage-medium afterwards …

like this :

encrypt (LUKS) > set passw > lock > format

could additionally write whole data-storage-medium with random and then with zero …

No news on the repair process. They received my phone three weeks ago, last time I wrote to purism they told me that they were “waiting to receive some spare parts”. I’ll ask them again this week

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Received it today, they said they would have fixed it, but it seems a new unit: it came with the screen protector and no sign of my previous usage. I can confirm that this time the SD card reader is working :slight_smile:

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And yet another SD card slot update. Today it stopped working. Symptoms are the same as before:
fdisk:

fdisk -l /dev/sda
fdisk: cannot open /dev/sda: No medium found

gnome-disks: Drive is present, but under volumes it says: No Media.

I tried the uSD card on another machine and it is working, and I tried
again with the other 3 uSD I had around and none of them did work.

I just reported this again to purism support

edit: on the flip side the camera preview in the megapixel app is working :smiley: yay

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Did you by any chance remove or insert the SD/SIM tray while the phone was on?

Nope, since when I got the working unit I never had the need to change the uSD nor the SIM, so the tray was always left inside

Yes I did that today and the phone restarted. I placed the SIM with uSD card back in and since then I have no cellular signal.

no signal yet or is it solved? My uSD is still not working

Quick update:

  1. Lately, on byzantium, bluetooth started working well (for listening to the music, microphone not tested)
  2. GPS is working with pure maps! Not too easy to setup right now, but working
    :slight_smile:
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Thank you very much for posting your experience.

This is pretty much what I am expecting my experience to be like. It’s exactly like what we went through just before Ubuntu got going and we were trying to kinda get Linux desktop to work on all kinds of hardware profiles.

This time around there is an organization that has a bit more control over the hardware and some of the software side of things.

I am still amazed how the amazing Pinephone team and the amazing Librem team are making Linux phones a thing where Mark Shuttleworth poured millions into the project and couldn’t get it to work. Maybe Marks goals were to big and should have scaled the project down to the bare minimum necessary for a niche market.

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Mark Shuttleworth didn’t pour anything into Ubuntu Edge. He set up a crowdsorcing campaign that was asking for £30 million. And it reached only half. He was too greedy.

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Is that what happened? Ohh … you are right.

Imagine that!!! Holy moly. 15 million? That is a lot of money to fail at bringing a phone to the market.

Canonical did manage to bring a 5 phones (BQ Aquarius E4.5, E5 and M10 and Meizu MX4 and PRO 5) to market between Feb. 2015 and Apr. 2016. However, in July 2013, Canonical tried to crowdfund its own “Edge” smartphone, and gave up the project after a month after raising $12.73 million of its $32 million goal.

Smartphone cost more to design and assemble back then, since the Chinese ODM market wasn’t as developed and it wasn’t as easy for companies to find the right services in Shenzhen as today. However I think a larger part of it was that Canonical had no experience getting hardware built, and was probably talking to people who didn’t know how to get good prices in China, so Canonical thought it would cost a lot more to make a custom smartphone. Another fact is that Canonical was paying a big programming team to work on Ubuntu Touch, and Shuttleworth probably did think that he needed that much to pay their salaries. Ubuntu Touch, Unity8, the Mir display server and most of the apps are siloed code developed by Canonical, which is very different from the approach that Purism took when developing Phosh, so Ubuntu Touch cost a lot more to develop. Another big part of the problem was that BQ and Meizu didn’t market the phones to Linux users who could appreciate them and they weren’t really committed to UT and viewed it as an expendable experiment, that they gave up on way too quickly. At least that is how I see it.

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So, basically, Mark tried to crowd fund a competitor to the iPhone?

Considering OpenMoko was around 2007, I am not sure it would have been that difficult to get a phone built. It still would have cost mark a ton on the software side as none of the mobile stacks existed back then … so yeah, maybe a good point.

Perhaps the other difference between Pinephone/Purism and Canonical is that they are a software company and Purism is a hardware company. A software company looks at the problem and their reference point is app stores on generic hardware whereas Purism is a hardware company and their reference point is getting some optimum of hardware design with an absolute minimum of software resources spent to get a product out the door.

It’s interesting to think how narrowly focused the Pinephone and L5 projects are. Pinephone got hardware out first and the L5 is just a bit more polish above that to get it to be a daily for a niche audience.