Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

Librem 5 phone hands-on—Open source phone shows the cost of being different

Filed under
Linux
OSS
Reviews

From a distance, this Chestnut model isn't terrible. It's a solid-feeling, plastic-backed smartphone with an old-school smartphone design thanks probably to the peel-off plastic back and the absolute brick of a body. Look closer and you'll see that the Librem 5 does not have the usual fit and finish from a seasoned Chinese smartphone builder, though, and there's no shortage of nits to pick. There are uneven glue blobs that have squished out from around the display. The earpiece speaker has some of the display glue on it. The front camera is off-center, and there is uneven, visible glue around that, too. One section of the removable back doesn't connect to the case correctly, so the seam is uneven.

The most frustrating part of the Librem 5 right now is easily the power management, which isn't nearly complete. The phone is dead nearly all the time, because so many basic charging features we normally take for granted don't work. First, the phone doesn't seem like it has any kind of idle power mode. It is hot from the minute you power on until the battery dies, even with the screen off. You can't leave the phone on the charger overnight to charge it—you'll wake up to a dead phone. I think what is happening is that there's no trickle charge, so the phone charges to full, then stops charging, then the battery dies.

Read more

Librem 5 Chestnut Hardware Changes

  • Librem 5 Chestnut Hardware Changes

    Phones in the Chestnut batch have the following improvements over the Birch batch:

    The red LED always indicates the charging state, even when the phone is off. Birch devices only showed the charging stage while on.

    We fixed an issue where the TPS65982 was not entering its APP mode when VBUS was presented before the PMIC’s BUCK6 VDD_3V3 rail. This means that rapid charging now occurs regardless of whether the TPS65982 is first powered via USB or via the battery – power delivery rapid charging always works!

    The microSD card is now read-write.

    The USB 2.0 D+/D- is now routed directly to the USB-C receptacle so it does not rely on the TPS65982 entering its APP mode to use the data interface. This prevents an extremely unlikely brick situation (only possible on Birch if done deliberately).

    Improved the WWAN kill switch inrush current such that using a PLS8 M.2 module would not cause the device to reset if you flip the switch off and back on.

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.