PureOS Crimson Development Report: May 2025

Hardware Librem 5
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Another little step… :walking_man:

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I would say another bunch of big steps. Only three to go to an alpha image.

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I asked to venice.ai to make it simpler for me. I share it here for those, like me, that find too difficult to understand. Hope someone will find it useful :sweat_smile::pray:

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The PureOS Crimson team is working on creating ready-to-flash images for the Librem 5. Here are the key steps:

  1. Creating the Operating System Image:

    • To create an operating system image, you first “bootstrap” a base installation of the operating system into a directory on your computer. This involves setting up a minimal set of files needed for the OS’s package manager to work.
    • Then, you use the package manager to install anything else you need.
    • On Debian, the most common tool for this is debootstrap, which sets up a basic environment to get dpkg and apt working.

  2. Issues Encountered:

    • When trying to bootstrap an arm64 installation of PureOS Crimson from an amd64 host, some issues were encountered. debootstrap couldn’t find important packages like usr-is-merged and cron-daemon-common.
    • The problem wasn’t with the packages themselves or the tools used to install them, but with the package lists in the archive.

  3. Differences Between Debian and PureOS:

    • PureOS uses a newer archive format that doesn’t include “all” (architecture-independent) packages in the package lists for each architecture. This caused issues with debootstrap not being able to find cron-daemon-common.
    • Debian, on the other hand, includes all “all” packages in each architecture’s package list.

  4. Solution:

    • The team proposed a fix for debootstrap to better handle “all” architecture package dependencies and sent it to the main developers of debootstrap.

  5. Results:

    • Now that the images build reliably, they are continuing to improve them. They have both encrypted and unencrypted images, the images are sized correctly, and Librem 5 images now greet you with a Phosh greeter on boot.

  6. Package Work:

    • While making these changes, they also fixed several issues with individual packages to make the Crimson images ready for testing. For example, they updated GNOME Clocks and Authenticator, and fixed rendering issues in GNOME Console and web browsers.

  7. Next Steps:

    • The next goal is to build these images in CI with Laniakea, so they will update automatically.

If you want to try building your own image, you can follow the updated instructions in the l5 branch and let them know about your experience in the merge request.

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Oh i love this news. Cant wait to try a Build! I used Linux from the stretch in the past and had in mind to just have a fully self compiled Linux on my Librem5 before - just the issues with power Management and the binary drivers hold me back. On the other side, i loved my phone and will not get nuts if its end up in an unstable or time consumption (hard to fix) status.

Veleno, Pureos or this phone is for me freedom of computation and privacy. Its value grows news by news every day.

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I wish a alpha for Gnu Dawn as i already using Gnu Crimson for a while.
Both Librem 5 and Gnu Pureos it the Phosh origin, not Mobian, not Postmarket, not Liberuxx, not PinephoneS, not whatever.

Love you Purism!

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Is crimson functioning well enough to be daily drivable? I may test it out on my pinephone so I can keep using my L5, I never use that phone.

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Nope, it’s still Work In Progress and there is nothing new to test for us atm.

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Have you tried it out personally yet?

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Yes, the older linked one (and the backports). The current testing (any newer version) is not available.

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What do you mean by that? The images are buildable.

The only phone supported by PureOS is Librem 5.

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“Not available via normal means” (flash image) would be more accurate. I don’t want to go further than that - got other things to do.

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I knew you had tried the old one, I read all your old posts on the matter. The recent report PureOS Crimson Development Report: May 2025 – Purism states First, you “bootstrap” a working installation of that operating system into a directory on your computer. Then, you pack it up into an image file that can boot on the target computer. but is there a guide to follow on this point?

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Now that I am aware that the long term support for debian 10 has ceased it gives me greater incentive to learn to understand OS build methods because Bullseye and bookworm continue to have security updates. If thia phone is no longer secure only the relatively small group at Librem would be keeping an eye on our security. Seems like a big ask from one small company.

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Byzantium is based on Debian 11 (bullseye). Amber was the buster-based version and it hasn’t been supported for a while now.

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For some reason I thought we weren’t* on debian 11, is byzantium on version 10? Do you know the shell command to display software version?

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Pick your choise: hostnamectl or cat /etc/os-release or one of the others… or look it up from the settings (“About”")

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Maybe you were confused by the fact that PureOS 10 is based on Debian 11. PureOS version number does not correspond to the Debian release it’s based on.

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Maybe you should do the jump in version numbering - all the “cool” kids are doing it nowadays…

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screw that noise

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You’re a knowledgable dude, thanks.

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