• Purism to Bring Hardware Encryption to Its Librem 5 Privacy-Focused Linux Phone

  Purism announced today that it partnered with leading cryptography pioneer Werner Koch to integrate hardware encryption into its upcoming Librem 5 Linux phone and future laptops products.

  Purism is a computer manufacturer known for its security-focused and privacy-oriented laptops powered by the PureOS Open Source Linux-based operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux. The company recently announced that it now has the most secure Linux laptops thanks to the implementation of Heads integrated TPM (Trusted Platform Module) chips in the coreboot firmware in its Librem 13 and Librem 15 laptops.

  Now, the company says that it wants to push the industry forward and set unparalleled protection for end-user devices by planning to include hardware cryptography by default in its forthcoming Librem 5 Linux smartphone and all future revisions of the Librem 13 and Librem 15 laptops, as well as the yet-to-be-announced Librem 11 model. Purism will be able to achieve this goal by manufacturing hardware with its own software and services.

• In-vehicle panel PC has up to 10.4-inch touchscreen

  Taicenn's Linux-ready, IP65 protected “TPC-DCXXXC1E” in-vehicle panel PC runs on a Bay Trail Celeron J1900, and has an 8- to 10.4-inch capacitive touchscreen, 2x GbE ports, SATA, mSATA, and wide-range power.

• The Shift to Linux Operating Systems for IoT

  As IoT devices become more full-featured, the Operating System that drives them is shifting from Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS) to Linux.

  [...]

  By this time (circa 2005), Linux was widely used in certain computing environments such as servers and was enjoying a steadily increasing footprint for some embedded environments such as TVs. It was quickly seen as a good building block for smartphones, as it brought out of the box a modern full-featured Operating System with very good device driver support, and that was considered both scalable for the new generation of devices and had the added benefit of being royalty free.

• Samsung announces its 2018 Tizen TV lineup

  Samsung is hitting us with its best shot as the tech company unveils its 2018 Smart TV lineup. The line up which was unveiled at an event in New York has Samsung offering us details of its new QLED model which includes the Q9F, Q8F, Q7C and Q6F. The new QLED line with enhanced picture quality, design element and also integrated with Bixby. Samsung also gave details of its expanded lineup of Ultra HD certified, Premium UHD and Super Big Screen TVs.

We'd like to introduce you today to AsteroidOS, an open-source and privacy-focused operating system for Android-powered smartwatches, designed as an alternative to Google's Android Wear.

Developed by Florent Revest, AsteroidOS was first introduced three years ago as an embedded Linux distribution built using the OpenEmbedded build automation framework and cross-compile environment on top of the Linux kernel and the systemd init system.

The operating system is using various mobile Linux middleware technologies like machine check exception (MCE) and lipstick, which were originally developed for Nemo Mobile or Mer. Its graphical user interface is entirely written with the Qt5 application framework.

Apps are written in QML using the cross-platform Qt Creator IDE and the current release of AsteroidOS comes with a set of default apps including an agenda, an alarm clock, a timer, a stopwatch, a calculator, a music controller, a weather forecast app, as well as a settings app.

Walid Hammami managed to port UBports' Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system on the Moto G2 2014 smartphone, which features a Qualcomm MSM8226 Snapdragon 400 chip, 1GB RAM, and 8GB internal storage.

As such, Moto G2 has been accepted by the UBports project as the first community supported device, and it's a well-done port with everything working just fine, including Wi-Fi, GSM, 3G, GPS, Bluetooth, SMS, Camera, Ubuntu Store, etc.

We have spent the last two months building our design team for the Librem 5 Phone project. We have been studying the current state of mobile design within the free software community as well as large companies that have shown success in mobile. We have been in the planning phases of development attempting to produce an ethically designed device and now that we have a working prototype we have shifted to the process of designing User Interfaces (UI) and User eXperience (UX) for the Librem 5.

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