I love detailed progress reports like this one. Thanks to the team!
I wish I could understand more of them 
but it’s good to see that things are happening.
Could anyone who has tried the installation and recovery processes with the librem5 already please drop a line about how this is supposed to be best done.
From what i’ve found out myself, there are precompiled 5.11 kernels in the repository. But the newest kernel i find via apt is a 5.9. My /etc/apt/sources.list shows:
deb https://repo.pureos.net/pureos amber main
deb https://repo.pureos.net/pureos amber-updates main
deb https://repo.pureos.net/pureos amber-security main
deb https://repo.pureos.net/pureos amber-phone main
The distribution list in the repo also contains amber-phone-staging. So i guess, one way to try the kernel might to add another line to the sources.list and install it regularly. Right?
More information about compiling and installing the kernel are in:
I have not yet tried out any of the procedures, beside a login to the phone via the serial console, for which one needs a USB-A to USB-C cable. I did not see any u-boot operation though, when rebooting the phone. As this is the most common procedure to recover from a hanging kernel, how is this suppossed to work on the phone? Is this procedure the right one, perhaps?
A last fallback in case anything goes wrong would be to reflash a sane image as in:
Not that i am too cowardly to just try it, but i’d thought to just better ask before …
You can replace amber-phone with amber-phone-staging in the /etc/apt/sources.list file, then you get newer versions of some packages. As I understood it, new package versions that are planned to come to amber-phone soon are first placed in amber-phone-staging to be tested and if they seem okay then the new package versions come to amber-phone a bit later, like a few days later.
Another way of testing new things is to install from .deb files yourself. I just tried that with the 5.11 kernel deb file that I downloaded from your repository link. I used this command:
sudo dpkg --install linux-image-5.11.0-1-librem5_5.11.0pureos1~amber1_arm64.deb
and it seemed to work, after rebooting uname -a now says:
Linux pureos 5.11.0-1-librem5 #1 SMP PREEMPT Mon Feb 15 10:06:55 PST 2021 aarch64 GNU/Linux
(it said 5.9 before)
So installing from the deb file like that is possible, however it might be safer and better to install it via apt when that is possible.
This got me thinking that there is a whole range of different ways to do things, on a scale from staying very safe but limited to increasingly risky things that give more freedom to do whatever you want:
- Use only apt with default repositories
- Use apt but after making some changes in the
/etc/apt/sources.listfile - Install directly from deb-files downloaded from an official place
- Install from your own deb files built after you modified the source code to your liking
- Skip the “dpkg” and deb files and just do something like ./configure --prefix/usr && make && make install
- Linux From Scratch
- Or skip Linux altogether and go for a pure GNU system using GNU Hurd
if only the Hurd kernel had another Linus Torvalds … or maybe a few more just for safe measure.