When will Byzantium launch?

Hardware Librem 5
41

Yes, I ran the reflash and afterwards that script.
I also have an /dev/ttymxc2

1 Like
42

Well I donā€™t want to break my rare linux phone so I should probably wait for instructions from the company.

43

https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Development_Environment/Phone/Troubleshooting/Reflashing_the_Phone.html

44

Iā€™d expect that Purism eventually create a way to reflash/upgrade the phone from Amber to Byzantium without having to use a USB cable and a ā€œworkstationā€, i.e reflashing/upgrading on the phone ā€œin placeā€. Anything less than that is frankly unacceptable from a user point of view. You should not need a separate computer to get the upgrade / reflash to Byzantium if youā€™re currently on Amber.

2 Likes
45

Upgrading from amber to Byzantium could probably be done very easily without an other computer if you donā€™t care about encryption
But adding encryption to the whole disk in the process, there is no easy way (their reflashing solution IS the easy way)

Maybe you could use a livecd/liveusb on the L5 and then proceed from that live launched OS

Did someone already tried a live OS from CD or USB on the L5 ? which OS ?
Would it be more acceptable for you @tq44 ?

Unless you have a dock for it, I think it would be nightmare-ish to do it from the phone in a live OS

4 Likes
46

I am too used to rolling release distros.

Does anyone know any good article that describes how Debian (and therefore PureOS) schedules itā€™s releases and how they are determined?

https://www.debian.org/releases/
This gives a little info, but I am more interested in the why. What I mean is, with Arch, a program is updated, a developer packages it, and the user downloads the updates.
But with Debian, who decides, and why, that program X version 10.x will go into testing, but 9.0.1 bugfixes still get into stable?

I feel like I donā€™t understand it enough to even ask the correct question.

Is updating from Debian 9 to 10 just a matter of changing repos in /etc/apt/sources.list?

1 Like
47

Yes, that was the point of my first sentence
When you do that it only upgrades the packages versions, so you could go from amber to byzantium the same way (if Purism made it possible, I didnā€™t tried it)

But it canā€™t provide the encryption of the full disk at the same time, you have to set the encryption when installing the OS

The L5 should have had encrypted disk when shipped, that was one of the initial security promise, but Purism decided to ship the L5 before full disk encryption was available (Iā€™m glad they did ! :+1:)

Now for those who received it with amber (non-encrypted phones), they will have to go to the reflasing process IF they want the secure phone they expected

I didnā€™t tried the reflashing script yet but, connecting the L5 to a computer and executing a script to install byzantium with full disk encryption seems to me pretty neat

48

Probably wise but ā€¦ if you do backups (know how to backup, and restore) then you can mitigate some of the risk. That is, image your phone on Amber, blow it away, flash it to Byzantium, selectively restore certain files and configuration where applicable (optional) ā€¦ and if it all goes pear-shaped then you can blow it away and image it back to Amber.

That is likely to be relatively time-consuming but then any in-place upgrade from Amber to Byzantium is likely to be slow and entail a certain amount of risk, particularly if attempting to activate the full-partition encryption.

(Given that I have a capacious uSD card it must be possible to do this but whether instructions are ever forthcoming or whether it would be possible to work out what to do is another question. I would suppose that it would be necessary to upgrade to Byzantium first and then do some magic to encrypt the root partition.)

2 Likes
49

One could create a small new logical volume, install Byzantium on that volume (with encryption), and have both Amber and Byzantium available for boot. This also makes for easy copying of configurationfiles as from either OS the other OS can be mounted.

If Byzantium is made fully operational, the Amber logical volume can be removed, and the Byzantium one extended.

2 Likes
50

which says:

If you are using PureOS, Debian, or a recent Ubuntu derivative, install uuu by opening a terminal and

Though Ubuntu-based, Elementary OS 6.0 doesnā€™t have uuu in its repositories. But Pop OS 21.04 does, & it worked just fine. (I didnā€™t try, but I suspect even the live image could be used, without installing the OS anywhere.) The reflashing instructions were crystal clear & spot-on.

Now that Iā€™m back to a fresh install, Iā€™m happy I kept good notes on things I had changed in Amber.

2 Likes
51

Yes. I left instructions in the Wiki for any Ubuntu users who need to build from sources: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Building-uuu-and-Jumpdrive

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52

Perhaps not unacceptable but definitely a headache if you are not familiar with Linux like me. Trying to get windows games to work on desktop Linux is already hassle. I would rather avoid more hassle if I can.

53

My first road block already.

Loading repository data...
Reading installed packages...
'uuu' not found in package names. Trying capabilities.
No provider of 'uuu' found.
Resolving package dependencies...
Nothing to do.
54

What operating system (distro and version) and architecture (e.g. ARM or x86_64) are you attempting to do this on?

55

Sometimes in the computer world you do. There is an emulated O/S that requires the serial number and a photo of the bezel with the serial number on it before they will sell you the emulator. However weā€™re talking umpteen thousand here.

56

Yeah I also got a used 99 dollar laptop with Windows 7 just to play my old games going back to Win/NT era.

57

OpenSuse Leap 15.3 with normal x86 CPU.

58

Unfortunately I have no experience with that distro, and the following instructions may not help but: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Building-uuu-and-Jumpdrive

At the time I wrote those instructions my distro (Ubuntu) did not include uuu and hence I had to build it from sources.

59

What is a jumpdrive and why can it take up to 5 hours to build?

60

Sounds like marketing ploy on the old term bootstrap, which was a program to start computers back in the day. A ā€œjumpā€ would avoid using the bootstrap. Bootstrap was another term based on the phrase to ā€œlift by oneā€™s bootstrapsā€.