Travel report - To DebConf 22 with the Librem 5

https://honk.sigxcpu.org/con/On_a_road_to_Prizren_with_a_Free_Software_Phone.html

Credits go to @guido.gunther. Thanks
:slight_smile:

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We have also reposted this on the Purism blog. I figure it makes sense for this to be the combined discussion thread since you got the scoop.

Yes, you can go onto a multi week trip with a smartphone running free software. I wanted to share some impressions from my recent trip to Prizren/Kosovo to attend Debconf 22 using a Librem 5. It’s a mix of things that happened and bits that got improved to hopefully make things more fun to use. And, yes, there won’t be any big surprises like being stranded without the ability to do phone calls in this read because there weren’t and there shouldn’t be.

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I see now that my link to the article goes to https://honk.sigxcpu.org. I actually found the article on https://planet.debian.org where I’ve taken the link from.

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I suppose posting this here is as good of a spot as another. Specifically because it pertains to questions answered in Guido’s talk.

Regarding standby and userspace issue still to tackle, I have an alternative perspective to present, that would provide some extremely low hanging fruit.

Basically my suggestion is to view the standard desktop / laptop standby as something that doesn’t need to be altered just because it is a smartphone. I get that being able to get an emergency call while in standby is important, but maybe not if proper expectations are set. For me, the idea of having a smart phone that only works when I want it to is SUPER appealing. I mean you can do that today by just always turning your phone off. But that is clunky and not convenient.

With the L5 you can do that, but resume and standby are MUCH faster, because this isn’t power cycling a phone but waking a sleeping desktop! Basically, I want to be able put the L5 in standby, and this will severe all TCP connections, all processes, etc. JUST like when on a desktop when suspending. This is the behavior I would want. When resuming from suspend, those apps would reconnect, etc. just as on a desktop.

My point is that perhaps seeing the L5 as a desktop that can make phone calls and take pictures is the better angle, than that it is a phone that can act as a desktop?

On the MNT Reform using the same SoC suspend works for the most part. It cuts power consumption to about half normal usage. This significant drop would make it very easy to get through a whole day without needing a charger.

But could someone tell me if I what I want to do with my phone is already possible today? Can I suspend the L5 and resume it like a desktop?

I think that would be OK until someone says “I’ll message you later today” and you have to keep your phone awake all day waiting on this message that, at any given time, could arrive at any given moment.

Sure, that specific example is going to be a rare occurrence, but the idea of suspending the way a phone is expected to versus a desktop is so that you can receive unscheduled notifications. If it “desktop sleeps” then it can’t be relied on for that, making it pretty useless for the vast majority of phone owners, I’d say.

Yeah, it would kind of be a way to reclaim your time. You know?

Oh I do, but when I feel the need to reclaim my time currently I turn my notifications off. In this way I have the option to be notified or not while the phone is sleeping, which I think is the important part.

Yes this works today, you can enable suspend in Power section of Settings,

However we mark it as experimental (and even pop up a warning as such) because while many of us have had success with resuming (mine resumes every time) there are still issues to tackle with the modem waking up properly (sometimes it wakes up fine, other times you have to power cycle it with a kill switch, other times you have to run a few commands to disable and re-enable the module).

Note that if you do enable this, the phone will also wake up if it gets an incoming call or SMS. I suppose if you want to disable that as well, you could turn off the modem with the hardware kill switch before you suspend.

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Thanks Kyle, I really can’t wait to get mine. Thanks for keeping up the good work!

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In case anyone missed the link to Guido Gunther’s talk at DebConf 22:

One really cool tidbit that I didn’t know was the LCD driver that Guido created for the Librem 5 DevKit was later re-used by the PinePhone. I also appreciated Guido’s comments about how much the situation has improved since the days of the N900 and OpenMoko, since the current work is no longer siloed and different devices and projects can share code.

I like watching the developers talk about their work, and seeing a bunch of scruffy guys asking them questions. There is something inspiring about being able to see it, and it gives me more faith in the process. In all the years that I used software from Microsoft, Google and Apple, I never once got to see their programmers talk, and I certainly never got to ask them questions.

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One thing I liked was that Guido was using an N900 as the backup to his L5. I have a fully functional N900 that was my first smartphone, way before I even cared about Linux, and it would be great if I could get it working again, with things that would make it useful again today.

These terms can be ambiguous and confusing.

Sometimes the terms suspend-to-ram and suspend-to-disk are used to clarify what is being requested. Sometimes people use the terms standby and hibernate as synonyms respectively, but not always.

If you want to suspend-to-ram and getting a call while suspended is not important and calling is a problem during or after this scenario, you could try killing the modem before suspending. That could still be better than turning your phone off.

If the TCP connection is not using keepalive and the application does not itself implement and use some kind of keepalive in the application protocol then TCP connections can last indefinitely, regardless of how sleepy each end gets providing that no transmissions are being made and provided that no timeouts have been set.

So you don’t necessarily have to sever all TCP connections. It depends on the behaviour that you want.

Yeah I knew someone would get their feathers ruffled by that. I suppose in my mind, standby and suspend are all suspend to RAM. If you mean disk you would say hibernation. Good thing we talked about this.

However, in both scenarios your work session is preserved and power consumption reduced. If you are resuming from a low power state you are going to be coming back from some state of standby.

Can we shut off the modem via software, or must one use the physical kill switch?

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Depends what you mean by “shut off”. For minimum power consumption, there is no substitute for cutting the power. For design reasons, there must be a way of cutting the power in hardware - in case the phone software is compromised.

It would be interesting to know whether there is a way of getting the modem to shut itself down in software but then probably the only way of getting it to power up again would be to use the hardware switch to turn the modem off and then on again.

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So there isn’t a real airplane software mode then?

I love the switches, I really do. But I want to find less reasons to use them, as I would like to slow down the rate at which the switches will wear and eventually break.

I think there is actually - and if you intend to use it, it would be a good idea to find out exactly what it does, both from a security point of view and from a power consumption point of view. At least with open source you have a chance of doing that.

My Ubuntu desktop has flight mode and in that mode wlan0 disappears. lspci still shows the WiFi card. What does that really mean? Who knows? It may be something to do with the “rfkill” functionality.

Can we shut off the modem via software, or must one use the physical kill switch?

There is a software way to disable each piece of hardware you can also disable via a kill switch. This is to allow maximum flexibility for people who may want to mix and match which pieces of hardware are disabled, since many of the kill switches disable more than one piece of hardware (and all three enter lockdown mode).

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If that’s what you need, you can already do that today.

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