It turns out it’s pretty complicated to have a system where files in boot are signed and need to be re-signed when they change (which can happen somewhat frequently when you update). While I tried my best to write the PureBoot documentation well, I’m sure there are gaps and holes, and areas that could benefit from extra explanation, if I know what they are.
As far as the future of coreboot, even if we make PureBoot the default that doesn’t mean that coreboot goes away, it just means it becomes the secondary option. There are still plenty of reasons we would want to keep coreboot as an option, including the fact that there are some OSes that can’t necessarily be kexeced into (which is how PureBoot does it) so we’d want coreboot to be available for customers who, for instance, might want to boot or dual-boot into Windows (yes some of our customers do).
There is still work to do before PureBoot can be the default anyway. For instance, we need to develop a “PureBoot Basic” mode (name not set in stone) for customers who don’t buy a Librem Key, that skips all of the tamper detection that depends on a Librem Key. It would behave more like coreboot in that instance, and just boot into the OS and in that way be “simpler” while still providing a much richer recovery environment than you’d get with coreboot+grub.
Note that you can still disable BT in software and get most of the power saving from that and no radio waves.
Well, that’s the same thing. TipRingRingSleeve is a 3-channel connector, where TRS is stereo.
The adapter would be used to split these into stereo + microphone, as you can see in the original post.
In summary, you want Purism devices to have a TRRS instead of a TRS.
I’m not quite sure, but I would assume that L5 and L14 have that?
… and to make the obvious observation that WiFi on the 2.4 GHz band is operating in the same spectrum as Bluetooth so there are some benefits in having them on the same chip (while WiFi on the 5 GHz band is different spectrum - but the card / chip typically does both WiFi bands these days - so it tends to be all three or none, at a hardware level).
In practice, you can’t disable Bluetooth (or wifi, for that matter) in software because everytime you install a new OS image (which is rather often for many of us), the installer “helps” out by turning on everything by default before you can intervene. You generally can’t even turn it off in software before you turn it on in hardware, because otherwise it’s not even in the menus.
Yes, we want Purism devices to have a TRRS. (I didn’t know that was the acronym for the 3-band plugs.) Right now, they don’t have a connection for the mic on Librem 15. Not sure about 14.
On new innovations this year, it seems like a bad idea to introduce the Fir version of Librem5 when order fulfillment is 52 weeks so my guess for 2022 reveals would be the Librem 11 tablet from 2016 that got shelved. This way Purism competes with Pine64’s tablet before the PineTab exits beta this year.
Two-edged sword. There are good reasons for this but …
You get this behaviour either from booting a live environment or from installing a new system from scratch.
You can presumably fix this if you are good enough i.e. by repackaging the “ISO”.
You can also potentially get the situation where “BIOS” itself enables Bluetooth, only for the operating system to turn it off once control is transferred to the OS. That would be harder for you to fix.
… advantage depending on the hardware. If it’s a laptop then it would be unusual to want Bluetooth “on” during BIOS, probably only if the built-in keyboard has become faulty. For something like the Mini, things are not so clear cut.
If you have a computer that runs full time with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse then for the times that the customer wants to stop in BIOS (which is likely not on every boot), it would be desirable always to enable Bluetooth temporarily in BIOS, otherwise the customer could find it necessary to run off and get a wired keyboard.
Obviously this cannot conveniently be a BIOS option for this customer. (It could still be a BIOS option so that customers that never use Bluetooth can just turn it off.)
So, as far as I can see, this customer either has a need sometimes to run off and get a wired keyboard or you have that temporary Bluetooth exposure.
One thing is for sure though … if it’s a pure open source environment, the customer theoretically gets the choice about the functionality and can make that convenience / security trade-off regardless of decisions made by the vendor.
A BIOS option to disable BlueTooth (and wifi and, why not, Turbo Mode) would be great. As in, remove the device from PCI config space so it can’t be enabled at all. And, yes, I get into this problem frequently because I run random OS versions on a regular basis. Repacking ISOs would be a hard way to do business.
I test drove a Tesla Model 3 this week. Man, what a car? I’ve never experienced anything like it. No internal combustion engine sports car that I’ve ever been in even compares. When it comes to acceleration, it’s more like an aggressive carnival ride than a car. I can reserve my place in line to buy a $60K Model 3 (including taxes and upgrades) with only a $250 refundable deposit. Even with my early $599.00 Librem 5 pre-order, I could have reserved two Tesla Model 3’s for less than what I paid for my place in line to get one Librem 5. The wait in line for a Tesla to be delivered would be much shorter and on time as agreed, for the Tesla. Apparently, Tesla does not count on income from new orders to fund the production of their back orders. Perhaps Purism should take a lesson from this example after the initial financing round.
Good ideas shouldn’t require advanced full payment just to get in-line, long waiting periods, lots of excuses and routine disappointments. They get fully funded. They experience a steep production ramp, and they’re just as happy to refund your deposit if you change your mind. How many cars would Tesla sell if you had to pay in-full up-front and suffer an undetermined waiting period?
That’s irrelevant. The point is no other legit company (at least none that I’ve worked with) expects you to pay upfront for a product that you have no guarantee when you will get it. Purism should start acting like a legit company, then people will stop complaining.
Of course it would be a dream to have a complete product portfolio covering all possible hardware needs of the customers - desktop pc, phone, notebook, server, tablet, e-reader whatever.
But starting 10 products and not finishing them does not bring anything to the customers.
By far the most important are the notebook and phone products. And while Librem 5 is still that far from being ready, starting something new seems like a waste of time for me.
Librem 5 is such a large project, that the whole company could have been completely busy exclusively with it.
And the development of Librem 5v2 must already be midway and Librem 5v3 must soon begin if this is going to be a long term product and not just a one time proof of concept.
Yes, we want hardware usable for many years, but you can’t ignore, that for making it attractive, you need hardware upgradability and more powerful hardware every x years.
I totally agree. Sadly, neither of us gets to decide the environment under which good ideas are able to come to fruition. Personally, I have lots of ideas I think are good and I’d really love for them to be sustainable from the beginning, but there’s literally zero chance this can happen. Should I let them wither?
You should be overjoyed by the 2022 roadmap that Purism just published, because Purism says that it won’t use crowdfunding for its new products in 2022. This is a good sign because it indicates that Purism now feels that it has enough resources to finance its own development.
Your comparison between current Tesla and Purism makes no sense in my opinion. You are saying that Purism should act like a company with a 909.51 billion market capitalization that has virtually unlimited funding to invest in the R&D of anything it likes, including an experimental Dojo AI supercomputer and its Optimus Sub-prime humanoid robot. This is a ludicrous comparison.
There were very few investors in 2017 who would have been willing to finance the development of a Linux mobile phone, precisely because they had already witnessed 20 different attempts at mobile Linux PDAs or Phones over the last 2 decades that ended in business failure. After watching Motorola, NEC, Panasonic, Nokia, Intel, Palm->HP, FIC/OpenMoko, Samsung, Canonical, Mozilla Foundation and arguably Jolla all fail at making Linux phones, it would take a very strange investor who was willing to put up the money in 2017 to develop another Linux phone, and if they were willing, they would likely only go with a company that had a proven track record and didn’t do risky things like invest in very expensive software development and publish its schematics under the GPL (the last commercial phone with free/open source schematics was the GTA04 released in late 2011).
In 2017-18, there were really only two viable paths to develop a Linux phone, because no rational investor would put seed capital into it. Either do crowdfunding as Purism did in August 2017, because there are enough Linux users who want it, or avoid all the expensive stuff (software development, marketing, warranty service and user support) and just focus on developing experimental hardware with a 30 day warranty for tinkerers and hackers, as PINE64 did, starting in October 2018. The situation today has changed, because now investors can see physical products and can see the demand, which is why Purism was able to raise recently $7.3M in convertible notes, but Purism only raised $2.5M in late 2019, and it would have been much less than that in 2017.
If you are going to make a comparison with Telsa, then you need to compare your preorder for the Librem 5 to the people who preordered the Tesla Roadster for $100,000 in July 2006. They put down their money on a car that they thought would be delivered in 2007, but it ended up not being delivered until 2008, so it took twice as long as promised. However, in July 2006, Tesla had already put 4 years of development into the Roadster and had working prototypes to show the public, whereas many people preordered the Librem 5 when development was just starting and there wasn’t even a DevKit until Dec. 2018.
The people who preordered the Roadster took a huge risk with a company that had never produced a car before, and the conventional wisdom was that electric cars had no future after GM scraped the EV1. Most people at the time thought that Tesla would fail, and in December 2008, Tesla was on the verge of bankruptcy. Elon Musk didn’t have any more of his own money to invest, but he was able to call up a bunch of his Silicon Valley friends from his time at PayPal to keep the company afloat until it finally started to make a profit in mid-2009. Mark Shuttleworth tried to do the same as Elon Musk with Linux phones. He invested millions of his own money into Ubuntu Touch and never made it work until he threw in the towel in early 2017.
Another thing to keep in mind is that there was no way to produce a decent Linux phone in 2017 without paying for a lot of software development or accepting the proprietary bits in Sailfish OS. There are licensing problems with Tizen; Firefox OS had been abandoned; Hildon based on GTK2 was hopelessly outdated; LG’s WebOS was no longer focused on phones and replacing the proprietary bits would require a lot of work; Nemo Mobile and Plasma Mobile would have required years of software development to become usable; and taking on the long-term maintenance of Ubuntu Touch would have been a huge financial burden for Purism.
Maybe Purism should have used Plasma Mobile as was originally planned, but the evidence so far shows that Purism was right in its assessment that it was better to create a new GTK interface that would be easier to maintain because it was designed as a thin overlay on top of a desktop stack than trying to develop Plasma Mobile. Remember that 3 of the 5 PinePhone “Community Editions” shipped with Phosh preinstalled, largely because Plasma Mobile still wasn’t ready.
Don’t get me started with the bad choices available to Purism in terms of processors in 2017. My point is that Purism didn’t have good options and it made the best of a difficult situation, which is why I think the company deserves a lot of credit for not giving up like other companies and not taking the easy route like PINE64 and avoid paying for the necessary software development.
There are plenty of legit companies which have engaged in crowdfunding. PINE64 started out as a Kickstarter campaign in 2015 to create an A64 SBC. As I pointed out above, Tesla crowdfunded the early production of its first car, the Roadster. However, people who pre-order during a crowdfunding campaign should be conscious of the risk of losing their money and take the time to evaluate the company to assess that risk.
The question is whether the company can eventually gain enough resources or can attract enough capital, so it no longer has to engage in crowdfunding in order to finance the development of its new products. As the 2022 Roadmap states, Purism doesn’t expect to have to use crowdfunding for its new products in 2022, which is a good sign in my opinion.
Where Purism should be criticized is retroactively changing its refund policy, because people who crowdfunded the L5 in 2017-19 were promised that they could get a refund at any time. As I have pointed out before, a number of developers left the project or reduced their code commits, so I believe that Purism was having financial problems in late Feb. or early Mar. 2020 when it changed its refund policy. I don’t blame a company for making these sorts of decisions if it is facing bankruptcy, but now that Purism says that it has raised $7.3M in new capital, it should have the funds on hand to pay immediate refunds to people who preordered before Feb/Mar 2020, so I think the company deserves to be criticized on this point.
“Purism added Librem AweSIM to easily provide cellular VPN-like service to customers.”
A post with more technical details on AweSIM would be great. I didn’t have the impression that AweSIM was very VPN-like, maybe more like privacy services offered by domain-name registrars. Would be great to know more about what protection AweSIM actually offers.
Arguably those are also VPN-like. All 3 take and move whom you trust from one provider to another. The information is still accessible to a provider and you still have no meaningful say in how they use it.
