Gadgets
Librem 14 in Pictures
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Tuesday 20th of April 2021 01:57:23 PM Filed under

We are excited that the Librem 14 is shipping, and we are so pleased with the production model that we wanted to share some brand new pictures of it inside and out...
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Open source PinePhone modem firmware now supports audio, GPS, and power management
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 20th of April 2021 03:33:52 AM Filed under
Most modern smartphones actually run two different operating systems – there’s the one you interact with directly and there’s the firmware running on the modem system-on-a-chip, which is basically like its own little computer.
So even a phone like the PinePhone that’s designed to run free and open source (usually Linux-based) operating systems might ship with closed-source, proprietary firmware installed on the phone’s Quectel E25-G modem.
But a few months ago a small team of independent developers released an open source alternative. It was a bit buggy at the time, but it was mostly free of proprietary “blobs.”
Since then, developers Biktor and Konrad Konrad have continued working on their software, and it’s now pretty close to being a fully functional replacement for the PinePhone’s default modem firmware.
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Have You Heard About These Secured Linux Phones?
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Sunday 4th of April 2021 11:47:27 AM Filed under


Let’s have a look into some of the secured Linux phones available right now in the market with their specifications.
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Do you really want Linux phones
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 3rd of April 2021 04:03:35 PM Filed under
The community around Linux phones is interesting. The phones do sell to a lot of people, but it seems a lot of those people come back to complain that Linux phones isn't what they expected it is.
For some reason all the distributions for the PinePhone are bending over backwards to provide an android or ios experience on the phone. The operating systems are judged on the amount of apps preinstalled and every tiny issue labels the distribution as completely unusable.
Stability doesn't matter at all, as long as there are features! more features! Doesn't matter there are 20 patches on top of every package and things aren't upstreamed. Doesn't matter if the kernel is full of hacks with no upstream in sight for most things.
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Sxmo 1.4 released with keyboard, display, text rendering improvements for the lightweight Linux phone UI
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 1st of April 2021 10:58:23 PM Filed under
Some Linux phone user interfaces, like Plasma Mobile, draw obvious inspiration from other modern smartphone operating systems like Android or iOS. Sxmo doesn’t do that.
It’s a simple, lightweight user interface with a dynamic window manager (dwm) that uses tiling to stack windows side-by-side, atop one another, or a combination. You can navigate using a combination of button presses and touchscreen taps and gestures, and Sxmo comes bundled with a handful of simple applications and scripts.
While it takes a little getting used to, having played around with Sxmo a few times in the past, I’ve found it to be one of the speediest, most responsive user interfaces available for the PinePhone. This week the developers released Sxmo version 1.4 (quickly followed by v1.4.1), and the software has picked up a number of new features and improvements.
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Pro¹ X, a linux phone with a slide-out keyboard
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 1st of April 2021 06:12:59 PM Filed under
Your new cyberdeck has arrived, madam. The Pro¹ X is a handsome smartphone that runs a variety of free operating systems and has a slide-out keyboard, perfect for SSHing in, NMAPping corpo headquarters, or raiding ATMs in the early 1990s.
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Snitching on Phones That Snitch On You
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Thursday 1st of April 2021 02:32:47 AM Filed under

A phone that snitches on you and sends a trove of personally-identifying data back to the vendor every few minutes, even if it’s idle, is not on your side. A phone that’s on your side helps you snitch on them. A phone that’s on your side honors your opt-out requests and ideally requires you to opt-in to anything that risks your privacy. A phone that’s on your side doesn’t collect your data, it protects it.
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Building The Dolphin Emulator In Ubuntu On A Nintendo Switch
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Sunday 28th of March 2021 11:37:45 PM Filed under
[LOE TECH] has made a habit of trying out various emulation methods on his Nintendo Switch and recording the results for our benefit. Of that testing, some of the best performance he’s seen makes use of the Dolphin emulator running in Ubuntu Linux, and he has made a tutorial video documenting how to build the project, as well as how to make some performance tweaks to get the most out of the mod.
We love seeing Linux run on basically anything with a processor. It’s a classic hack at this point. Nintendo has traditionally kept its consoles fairly locked down, though, even in the face of some truly impressive efforts; so it’s always a treat to see the open-source OS run relatively smoothly on the console. This Ubuntu install is based on NVIDIA’s Linux for Tegra (L4T) package, which affords some performance gains over Android installations on the same hardware. As we’ve seen with those Android hacks, however, this software mod also makes use of the Switchroot project and, of course, it only works with specific, unpatched hardware. But if you’ve won the serial number lottery and you’re willing to risk your beloved console, [LOE TECH] also has a video detailing the process he used to get Ubuntu up and running.
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Gadgets: Librem 5 and Raspberry Pi 400 Turned "Data Blaster"
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 26th of March 2021 11:08:15 PM Filed under
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Librem 5 and Librem 5 USA: What are the Differences?
We sometimes get questions from customers who are trying to decide between the Librem 5 and Librem 5 USA, such as whether someone living in the USA must buy a Librem 5 USA (Answer: both Librem 5 and Librem 5 USA work in the US) or whether the Librem 5 is $1999 (Answer: the Librem 5 is $799, the Librem 5 USA is $1999). If you are trying to decide between the two phones and want to understand what makes the Librem 5 USA a premium product, in this post we’ll highlight the differences between the two.
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Data Blaster Is A Hip RPi Cyberdeck | Hackaday
The Raspberry Pi has always been popular in the nascent cyberdeck scene, providing real Linux computing power in a compact, portable package. Now, we have the Raspberry Pi 400, which is exactly that, built into a shell that is, approximately, half of a cyberdeck. This formed the base of [Zach]’s build, coming in handy with its full-sized keyboard.
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Lilbits: Cyberdecks, Chromebooks, Kindle jailbreaks, and Linux phones
One recent example is the Data Blaster, made from a Raspberry Pi 400, a widescreen display plus a detachable wearable display, and… 3D printed handles. It’s kind of pointless and kind of awesome, and I highly recommend checking out the full video to see how (and why) it was made.
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Preview of Next PureOS
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 25th of March 2021 12:14:17 AM Filed under


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Disk encryption, GPS, new apps and settings coming to the Librem 5 with PureOS
Purism’s Librem 5 smartphone ships with a custom GNU/Linux distribution called PureOS. It’s the same software that runs on Purism’s Linux laptops, but it’s been adapted to work with phones like the Librem 5.
So far there are some key features that haven’t worked yet. Now Purism is announcing it’ll enable some of those things in the next release of PureOS, which is code-named Byzantium.
Among other things, Byzantium will bring support for full disk encryption and GPS navigation. There are also a bunch of software updates that’ll make it easier to not only use the Librem 5 as a phone, but also as a desktop computer.
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Sneak Peek of the Next PureOS Release on the Librem 5
Disk encryption will allow for the root disk to be password protected. With this setup, you’ll be asked to decrypt your device before it continues to the phone shell.
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Dev kit and module run Linux on Zynq Ultrascale+
Topic Embedded has launched a “Florida Plus” dev kit that runs Linux on its Zynq Ultrascale+ based Miami MPSoC Plus module. Meanwhile, Aries announced it has begun distributing Topic’s Zynq-based Miami modules.
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That’s because the JingPad A1 will be the first tablet to ship with JingOS, an operating system developed by Chinese company Jingling that’s a custom Linux distribution designed for tablets but capable of running desktop applications (as well as some Android applications).
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