Where is the camera support?

Hardware Librem 5
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Purism’s Librem 5 product page contained this few months ago:
Upon initial shipment of the Librem 5 in 2019, it will offer the essentials: phone functionality, email, messaging, voice, camera, browsing. The featureset will expand after shipment and over time to more free software applications. Your user experience will improve as we incrementally add commonly requested applications and features (such as calendaring, notes, calculator, PDF viewer, etc.) while keeping performance in mind.

But the Purism’s Librem 5 product page currently contains this:
Upon initial shipment of the Librem 5, it will offer the essentials: phone functionality, email, messaging, voice, camera, browsing. The featureset will expand after shipment and over time to more free software applications. Your user experience will improve as we incrementally add commonly requested applications and features (such as Calendaring, Reminders, Call Conferencing, etc.) while keeping performance in mind.

If you want check for yourself:
The old site - https://web.archive.org/web/20200330133401/https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/
The new site - https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/

Why was the 2019 removed?

So, camera should have been functioning in the 2019, but it is late 2020 already yet there are absalute silence about the camera, which is an essential smartphone feature. So, where is the camera support? Why Purism is so silent? I can’t find any article, which talks about this thing.

I want answers.

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I see no reason to doubt. Cameras in technical specs are present. So, there will be support for cameras. Wait for Evergreen and make sure.

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you could also postpone for FIR (v2) …

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The Linux Gamer talks about cameras in his review of Dogwood.

Basically, both camera support and using the USB-C port to drive a monitor are on their way.

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Found this in the FAQs: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/linux-next/-/releases/pureos%2F5.7.14%2Blibrem5.2 So, in the latest release of the L5 kernel, there is some work being done on camera support. Still not done at both kernel level and also SW level (Cheese) but it is for sure a WIP.

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Because evergreen will be shipped in 2020 and not in 2019 as it was planned?

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Sometimes I’m sad there isn’t a dislike / disagree button.

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epinez, you don’t want answers from Purism?

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Obviously, the support comes with Evergreen, as is already stated on the website.

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No, they have other things to do. Camera support will be there once Evergreen ships.

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Just because Purism isn’t hosting a 24/7 news cycle about the condition of their products doesn’t mean they’re hiding something nefarious, sometimes no news is good news.
Ok a lot of the the time.

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Part of the delay has been caused by NXP, because it hasn’t done a good job of supporting the mainline Linux driver.

The mainline Linux driver for the i.MX 8M doesn’t yet support the MIPI CSI2 camera interface. When I asked Guido Gunther about this on Mastadon, he told me that the MIPI CSI2 interface is being worked on, but not yet ready in the mainline driver. I assume that Purism will have to pull the code for the MIPI CSI2 interface out of NXP’s driver and insert it into the Librem 5’s kernel code.

Another issue is that NXP has done a poor job of documenting the MIPI CSI2 interface and the NXP forum has posts of people complaining about how hard it is to implement cameras. (I posted links about this if you search this forum.)

For info about the cameras, see: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Frequently-Asked-Questions#how-good-will-the-librem-5-cameras-be

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Is there still no camera support or does it have to have that new version (Byzantium?) flashed to device? Last I checked with updates it still did not have camera app…

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Camera was supported already in Amber. Where did you check?

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what version do you run? check it with uname -r if it outputs Amber, then you have to reflash your OS Image in order to fully update to Byzantium. If it outputs Byzantium, run sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade.You should see an App installed called Dev Preview. reboot to make it fully usable.

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uname -r gives

5.13.0-1-librem5

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sudo apt list linux-image-librem5 -a

will show immediately which PureOS you are using. Let us know, please, if above command outputs to byzantium (it’s just me, I’m unsure which repository you’re currently using).

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lsb_release -a | grep Code

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