Despite the growing number of evidence and cases of mobile software that blatantly violate user privacy, it’s almost impossible to imagine life these days without a smartphone. While hardcore privacy advocates might be able to ditch their mobile device for good, there are some that try to promise the best of both mobile and privacy worlds. One of those is Purism who has finally finalized the specs and features of its crowdfunded privacy-respecting Librem 5 phone.
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The question now is whether all of that is enough to justify a $699 price tag. For those who answer a resounding “yes”, an early bird pre-order will shave $50 off that price for $649 only until July 31. As for the shipping date, that is still unannounced for both those pre-orders and, more importantly, the original backers back in 2017.
Purism, the company behind the powerful Linux-based laptops known as the Librem computers, announced today the final hardware specifications of their upcoming Librem 5 Linux smartphone.
As you probably are already aware, Purism is working for some time on a Linux-powered smartphone, which the company calls Librem 5. Designed from the ground up to be privacy and security-aware, the Librem 5 Linux phone is currently scheduled for launch in Q3 2019, after it's been delayed a couple of times.
It still remains to be seen if Purism will be able to ship the Librem 5 Linux smartphone this quarter as is their current revised target, but at least today they are publishing the finalized specifications for the phone's hardware.
While we've long known of their plans to use the i.MX8 SoC and other components, items like the phone's cameras, battery capacity, and even RAM were not known until now.
Linux laptop company Purism is getting ready to ship its first Linux smartphone. The Purism Librem 5 was first announced in mid-2017, raised over $1.5 million through a crowdfunding campaign a few months later, and has been under development ever since.
But some details have been in flux. Now that Purism says the phone is almost ready to ship, the organization is revealing the finalized specifications and pricing details.
The Librem 5 is still on track to ship in the third quarter of 2019, and it’ll have a retail price of $699, but folks who pre-order by July 31st will still be able to reserve one for $649.
Purism has announced the finalised specs for Librem 5, the Linux-powered smartphone it successfully crowdfunded back in 2017.
While the bulk of the hardware that makes up the privacy-focused phone have been known for a while (and made available in developer kits) a few components, including memory and camera, were yet to be formally settled on.
While the Librem 5’s internals are on par with a budget handheld like the Moto E5, its price tag ($699 retail) is a bit higher than the OnePlus 7 Pro and more in line with lower-end flagships like the iPhone XR and Samsung Galaxy S10e.
However, the hardware isn’t the main draw of the Librem 5. Like its laptops, Purism’s devices are more akin to boutique showcases for the company’s software. The Librem 5 will run a mobile-optimized flavor of PureOS out of the box, and Purism has stated that the phone will be fully compatible with different versions of Linux. These include KDE’s Plasma Mobile, Debian, and any other GNU/Linux compatible operating system.
To that end, the app system is a bit different than that of Android or iOS. Rather than having a dedicated app platform with applications designed specifically for the OS, the Librem 5 relies heavily on HTML 5-compatible applications for most of its features. The handset supports OpenGL/ES 3.1, OpenCL 1.2, and Vulkan for graphics. There are a few native applications, most of which are the usual dialer, contact manager, SMS messaging, and web browser apps found on every phone.
Purism has said that the Librem 5 is all about privacy, openness, and enabling users to actually own their handset. While you’re not likely to see the Librem 5 in the pockets of everyone riding the tram to work or walking down the street, the free and open-source community is large enough (and loud enough) for the phone to gain some traction.
Purism recently announced the final specs for its Librem 5 smartphone. This is not based on Android or iOS – but built on PureOS, which is an open-source alternative to Android.
Along with the announcement, the Librem 5 is also available for pre-orders for $649 (as an early bird offer till 31st July) and it will go up by $50 following the date. It will start shipping from Q3 of 2019.
We have often seen apps telling us that “You are offline. Check your network status.”. It is not only convenient to do so but adds to a great UX. In this blog, we will look at how can we display a toast notification in a Nuxt/Vue app whenever the user goes offline or online. This will also help us to understand how to use computed and watch properties together.
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Hurray! Our toast notifications are working perfectly fine. So using the combined magic of computed and watch properties, we can create outstanding workflows and take our Nuxt/Vue app to next level. If you any doubts or appreciation for our team, let us know in the comments below. We would be happy to assist you.
From time to time I like to bring up fun adventures in LaTeX. In these stranges times in the United States it is important to look at somewhat practical applications beyond the normal reports and formal papers most people think of. With a Minimum Working Example we can mostly look at an idea.
The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network has a package known as newspaper which is effectively subject to nominative determinism. You can make things with it that look like newspapers out of the 1940s-1960s in terms of layout. The page on CTAN shows nice examples of its use and provides a nice story as to why the package was created.
The example source file on CTAN has a bug in it, though. We're going to make a new one based on it. I am also going to add but not yet utilize the markdown package to the example.
The course of the Raku Programming Language by Andrew Shitov made it to the top 20 of Hacker News and spurred quite a few comments. The first associated Grant Report was also published.
GCC 11 entered its final stage of development today as it works towards releasing around the end of Q1 / early Q2 if their past cadence holds up. Before GCC 11.1 can debut as the first stable version, there are some 60+ "P1" high priority regressions that need to be resolved or otherwise demoted to lesser priority regressions.
GCC 11 release manager Richard Biener this morning announced GCC 11 is now in stage four development meaning only regression fixes and documentation fixes are allowed. As of this morning the code-base is at 62 P1 regressions, another 334 P2 regressions, 35 P3 regressions, and more than 200 regressions of the lower P4/P5 status.
The Xtra-PC Linux USB-Stick might be your solution if you have problems with your old and slow PC. It's a small flash drive stick and it's using Linux OS to boost you PC's operations. Check out now.
Peter Turczak’s toddler son loves “technical stuff,” especially things like keyboards and computers that adults use. After discussing this with other likeminded technical parents, the idea of giving new life to an old (PS/2 or AT) keyboard as a teaching tool was hatched.
SiFive in cooperation with Tynker and BBC Learning have launched a Doctor Who themed HiFive Inventor Coding Kit. This Initial HiFive Inventor Coding Kit is intended to help kids as young as seven years of age get involved with computer programming through a variety of fun exercises and challenges involving the RISC-V powered mini computer and related peripherals like LED lighting and speaker control.
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So for those looking to get their kids involved with computer programming and looking for an IoT-type device with some fun sensors and various themed exercises to get them experimenting, the HiFive Inventor Coding Kit is worth looking into further. More details on the programming platform can be found via Tynker.com and on the hardware at HiFiveInventor.com. The HiFive Inventor Kit is available from Amazon.com and other Internet retailers for $75 USD.
Well this is a doozey. Made public a while back was a security vulnerability in many Snap Packages and the Snapcraft tool used to create them. Specifically, this is the vulnerability identified as CVE-2020-27348. It unfortunately affects many many snap packages…
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The problem arises when the LD_LIBRARY_PATH includes an empty element in its list. When the Dynamic Linker sees an empty element it will look in the current working directory of the process. So if we construct our search paths with an accidental empty element the application inside our Snap Package could be caused to load a shared library from outside the Snap Package’s shipped files. This can lead to an arbitrary code execution.
It has been common to put a definition of the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable into a Snap Package’s snapcraft.yaml that references a predefined $LD_LIBRARY_PATH as if to extend it. Unfortunately, despite this being common, it was poorly understood that SnapD ensures that the $LD_LIBRARY_PATH is unset when starting a Snap Package’s applications. What that means is that where the author tried to extend the variable they have inadvertantly inserted the bad empty element. The empty element appears because $LD_LIBRARY_PATH is unset so the shell will expand it to an empty string.
Security flaws can be incredibly stupid and dangerous. Of course, I’m not judging anyone, we are humans after all. But this little incident is quite funny.
Audiocasts/Shows: Blender 2.91, Server Security, Linux in the Ham Shack and More
Different use cases will have different security requirements but there's a certain base line that every Linux server should be at before you even think of deploying anything further like disabling certain ways to connect to the server and adding some ssh keys.
Hello and welcome to the 387th episode of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, the hosts discuss concepts related to building software from source code. Topics include proper build environments, packages to install for easy building of software, how to get source, commands for building software and much more. We hope you find this talk interesting and informative and we hope you come back for Episode 388.
The openSUSE Project welcomes our followers to participate in two planned meetups to discuss results from the End of the Year Community Survey on Jan. 23 and Jan. 30.
Both sessions will start at 13:00 UTC on openSUSE’s Jitsi instance and go for 1:30 hours.
Members of the “let’s improve the openSUSE learning experience” initiative will share results and analysis from the survey.
LF Edge has announced the addition of four new general members (FII, HCL, OpenNebula, and Robin.io) and one new Associate member (Shanghai Open Source Information Technology Association).
Additionally, Home Edge has released its third platform update with new Data Storage and Mult-NAT Edge Device Communications (MNDEC) features.
In mid-January 2021, the Text Encoding menu in Firefox looks like this:
Automatic
Unicode
Western
Arabic (Windows)
Arabic (ISO)
Baltic (Windows)
Baltic (ISO)
Central European (Windows)
Central European (ISO)
Chinese, Simplified
Chinese, Traditional
Cyrillic (Windows)
Cyrillic (KOI8-U)
Cyrillic (KOI8-R)
Cyrillic (ISO)
Cyrillic (DOS)
Greek (Windows)
Greek (ISO)
Hebrew, Visual
Hebrew
Japanese
Korean
Thai
Turkish
Vietnamese
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For users who have telemetry enabled, we collect data about whether the item “Automatic” was used at least once in given Firefox subsession, whether an item other than “Automatic” was used at least once in a given Firefox subsession, and a characterization of how the encoding that is being overridden was determined (from HTTP, from meta, from chardetng running without the user triggering it, from chardetng as triggered by the user by having chosen “Automatic” previously, etc.). If things go well, the telemetry can be analyzed when Firefox 87 is released (i.e. when 86 has spent its time on the release channel). The current expectation for this is 2021-03-23.
Wikipedia, which has been referred to as a world treasure, turns 20 on Friday. According to research conducted over the years — including a scientific study published by the journal Nature in 2005 and a report commissioned by the site's Wikimedia Foundation in 2012 — Wikipedia's entries are comparable in quality to those in prestigious encyclopedias such as Britannica. However, it is difficult to measure the consistency of information that can be altered at any time.
Odin has finally had enough sacrifices and shall be releasing Valheim from Iron Gate AB will enter Early Access with Linux and Windows support on February 2.
What is it? A brutal multiplayer exploration and survival game set in a procedurally-generated purgatory inspired by viking culture. Battle, build, and conquer your way to a saga worthy of Odin’s patronage! With low-poly artwork and a very flexible building system it looks absolutely brilliant. The early builds they had available were seriously promising back in 2018 so I'm personally excited to see how far they've progress with it in that time.
Purism finalizes specs for the Librem 5 Linux smartphone
Purism finalizes specs for the Librem 5 Linux smartphone (shipping in Q3, 2019)
Purism Confirms Final Specs for the Librem 5
Purism Confirms Final Specs for the Librem 5
Will This Linux Phone Make You Dump Android & iOS?
Librem 5 Final Specs: Will This Linux Phone Make You Dump Android & iOS?
Librem 5 Linux Smartphone Specifications Finalized
Librem 5 Linux Smartphone Specifications Finalized
Purism announces final specs of Librem 5 Linux phone
Purism announces final specs of Librem 5 Linux phone, excepts to start shipments in Q3 of 2019
Linux Smartphone Librem 5 is Available for Preorder
Linux Smartphone Librem 5 is Available for Preorder