1 Librem5: Crimson Daily Driver
2 =============================
3
4 If you have a Librem 5 phone and are like me, you are eagerly anticipating the
5 release of Crimson, because you're stuck on Byzantium which has a super old
6 version of just about every package, but most notably, phosh and chatty.
7
8 A few weeks ago, I finally decided to try Crimson as a daily driver, and that
9 caused me some great headache a couple of times. I am still using it as a daily
10 driver however, but there are still some pretty sizeable issues which I have
11 accepted for the tie being. The issues:
12
13 The issues
14 ----------
15
16 ### No camera support yet
17
18 Pretty self explanatory here. I imagine this has something to do with the
19 libcamera api that is being worked on.
20
21 ### No SD card support yet
22
23 ...so if you use your SD card for your home directory, you'll have to rsync to
24 internal storage and use that. In my case, I have too much on my card, so I had
25 to be selective about what I put on internal storage.
26
27 ### You can have bluetooth audio, or phone call audio, but not both
28
29 Essentially, the current config for _pulseaudio_ doesn't work with bluetooth,
30 but audio generally works fine everywhere else. If you try switching to
31 _pipewire_, bluetooth audio works mostly well (switching audio outputs has to
32 be done manually from the settings), but you won't have any audio, microphone
33 or earpiece, on phone calls. This is because of [a
34 bug](https://gitlab.com/mobian1/callaudiod/-/issues/35) in _callaudiod_. This
35 issue is fixed in version `1.1.10`, but Crimson currently releases with
36 `0.1.9`, so pipewire support is broken as of 2024.10.22.
37
38
39 ### Installing upgrades is too perilous
40
41 
42
43 This actually isn't strictly true for me anymore. You just have to be diligent
44 when installing updates. Currently, the package `libgl1-mesa-dri` wants to
45 upgrade `24.2.4-1`, which breaks `phosh`, causing a crash loop. The only way to
46 fix it is to plug in a keyboard, `ctrl + alt + f2`, then `sudo apt install -y
47 libgl1-mesa-dri=22.3.6-1+deb12u1` to downgrade to `22.3.6-1`. Of course, while
48 you're doing this, phosh is continuing to launch and crash every 5 seconds, so
49 you have to keep doing the `ctrl + alt + f2` sequence as systemd takes you back
50 to `tty1`. `<sarcasm>Isn't systemd great?</sarcasm>`
51
52 To avoid the above shenanigans, every time you run `sudo apt upgrade`, _be
53 absolutely sure_ to also run `sudo apt install
54 libgl1-mesa-dri=22.3.6-1+deb12u1` before you reboot the phone, or you'll end up
55 in a crash loop of phosh.
56
57
58 Updates
59 -------
60
61 ### Update 2024.10.26
62
63 In rather frustrating timing, an important phone call came in today while I
64 wasn't home and the phone completely crashed and boot looped. When I got home
65 and could troubleshoot, I discovered an update of libseat1 to 0.9.0 had broken
66 the phone, and it needs to stay at version `libseat1=0.7.0-6` for now.
67
68 Here's an all-in-one command to keep your crimson phone working.
69
70 ```
71 sudo apt install libgl1-mesa-dri=22.3.6-1+deb12u1 libseat1=0.7.0-6
72 ```
73
74 And a couple of pieces of related advice:
75 1. Only install crimson updates when you are at home with a keyboard handy to recover with
76 2. Always reboot your phone after installing said updates so you don't discover
77 your phone is broken when you're away from said keyboard.
78
79 I'll update this post with other caveats as they come to me. If you're fine
80 with the above issues though,
81
82
83 ### Update 2024.11.21
84
85 I removed the `alsa-ucm-conf` piece of the below script, as that version of the
86 package is now available in the crimson repos. Woo!
87
88 Additionally, still no SDcard support and the libseat and libgl1-mesa-dri
89 downgrades is still required, despite _many_ updates having come in from
90 upstream. It's moving right along! At this point, we're seeing somewhere
91 between 2 and 30 package updates per day.
92
93
94 Hacks to get running
95 --------------------
96
97 Because I want to easily rebuild this phone if I need to, without following a
98 long checklist of shell commands, I put all this in a clean shell script which
99 handles everything for me/you.
100
101 I do recommend putting this in its own directory, as it has to download and
102 extract some of its own artifacts (alsa-ucm-conf) to complete.
103
104 In short, the following script:
105
106 * Overrides the system alsa-ucm-conf ucm2 directories with those from upstream
107 latest.
108
109 * Adds a few additional apt repos to bring in "unstable" packages so the phone
110 can actually be updated.
111
112
113 **~/crimson/fixup.sh**
114
115 ```
116 #!/usr/bin/env bash
117
118 set -euo pipefail
119 export IFS=$'\n\t'
120
121 # By default Crimson comes with the crimson repos, which is very broken last I
122 # checked.
123 # This adds landing, crimson-security, crimson-updates, and
124 # crimson-updates-proposed repos. These might make things unstable in the long
125 # run, but for now this is required to get things up and running.
126 #
127 apt_set_repos() {
128 sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list <<EOF
129 deb http://repo.pureos.net/pureos landing main
130 deb http://repo.pureos.net/pureos crimson main
131 deb http://repo.pureos.net/pureos crimson-security main
132 deb http://repo.pureos.net/pureos crimson-updates main
133 deb http://repo.pureos.net/pureos crimson-updates-proposed main
134 EOF
135 }
136
137 apt_set_repos
138 ```
139
140 Run that and most of the issues should be resolved.
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