https://medium.com/@thegrugq/secured-android-smartphone-32b28ae3fbd8
On Mon, Sep 30, 2019 at 12:03 AM grarpamp <[email protected]> wrote: > > https://www.pine64.org/ > > > https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/09/purisms-librem-5-phone-starts-shipping-a-fully-open-gnulinux-phone/ > https://puri.sm/posts/first-librem-5-smartphones-are-shipping/ > https://pureos.net/ > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuT2w6BkT-k > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvnt78mK-Ac > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHcHi0TBFv4 > https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC64-PJ-yoF7aJ9pIHWEbrTQ/videos > > Support the Digital Rights Movement... Get this phone ! > > Purism announced their first Librem 5 smartphones were rolling off the > assembly line and heading to customers. "Seeing the amazing effort of > the Purism team, and holding the first fully functioning Librem 5, has > been the most inspirational moment of Purism's five year history," > said their founder and CEO Todd Weaver. > > On Wednesday they posted a video announcing that the phones were now > shipping, and Friday they posted a short walk-through video. "The > crowdsourced $700 Linux phone is actually becoming a real product," > reports Ars Technica: Purism's demand that everything be open means > most of the major component manufacturers were out of the question. > Perhaps because of the limited hardware options, the internal > construction of the Librem 5 is absolutely wild. While smartphones > today are mostly a single mainboard with every component integrated > into it, the Librem 5 actually has a pair of M.2 slots that house > full-size, off-the-shelf LTE and Wi-Fi cards for connectivity, just > like what you would find in an old laptop. The M.2 sockets look > massive on top of the tiny phone motherboard, but you could probably > replace or upgrade the cards if you wanted... > > [Y]ou're not going to get cutting-edge hardware at a great price with > the Librem 5. That's not the point, though. The point is that you are > buying a Linux phone, with privacy and open source at the forefront of > the design. There are hardware kill switches for the camera, > microphone, WiFi/Bluetooth, and baseband on the side of the phone, > ensuring none of the I/O turns on unless you want it to. The OS is the > Free Software Foundation-endorsed PureOS, a Linux distribution that, > in this case, has been reworked with a mobile UI. Purism says it will > provide updates for the "lifetime" of the device, which would be a > stark contrast to the two years of updates you get with an Android > phone. > > PureOS is a Debian-based Linux distro, and on the Librem 5, you'll get > to switch between mobile versions of the Gnome and KDE environments. > If you're at all interested in PureOS, Purism's YouTube page is worth > picking through. Dozens of short videos show that, yes, this phone > really runs full desktop-class Linux. Those same videos show the dev > kit running things like the APT package manager through a terminal, a > desktop version of Solitaire, Emacs, the Gnome disk utility, DOSBox, > Apache Web Server, and more. If it runs on your desktop Linux > computer, it will probably run on the Librem 5, albeit with a possibly > not-touch-friendly UI. The Librem 5 can even be hooked up to a > monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and you can run all these Linux apps > with the normal input tools... > > Selling a smartphone is a cutthroat business, and we've seen dozens of > companies try and fail over the years. Purism didn't just survive long > enough to ship a product -- it survived in what is probably the > hardest way possible, by building a non-Android phone with demands > that all the hardware components use open code. Making it this far is > an amazing accomplishment.
