Plasma Mobile on the Librem 5

[Matthias Klumpp]

2017-08-30 9:24 GMT+02:00 Bhushan Shah <bhush94 at gmail.com>:
> Hello Matthias and all,
>
> First of all huge thanks for reaching to us!
>
> On Tue, Aug 29, 2017 at 03:28:36PM +0200, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
>> As some of you might already know, we at Purism are planning to
>> develop a mobile phone that uses only free software and Matrix[2] for
>> communication. We are currently running a crowdfunding campaign[1] in
>> order to be able to make the phone a reality.
>
> Best of luck for that campaign! I will reach out to KDE Promo people as
> well to help spread a word about this campaign.

That would be awesome! Thank you for considering this!

>> [...]
> I see no issues with this, in fact Plasma Mobile platform is designed
> with ability to switch underlying distribution in mind, we also have
> some experimental Arch Linux ARM based images in addition to normal
> Ubuntu ARM images. Basically following are the requirements for Plasma
> Mobile stack.
>
> - Logind/Consolekit
> - Libinput
> - Ofono, Telepathy (For calling functionalities)
> - Qt5 (5.7.1 minimum, 5.9 recommended)
> - Wayland
> - DRM/HWcomposer/Framebuffer for graphics
> - Login manager with wayland session support (SDDM for example)
>
> If any distribution provides those, it can work as a base for the Plasma
> Mobile.

That pretty much describes any modern Linux system, PureOS or even
stock Debian support this with ease.

>> The system will make full use of systemd and will use Bubblewrap[6]
>> for sandboxing of selected more critical components.
>
> This is interesting, We Plasma devevlopers haven't looked into
> Bubblewrap so far, but it would be useful from the initial glance at
> documentation it seems.

Bubblewrap is an amazing piece of software. It comes with a slight
performance penalty for startup, but gives you a well audited and
relatively easy to use sandboxing solution. Bubblewrap is used by
Flatpak to sandbox its applications, and a couple of other projects
make use of it as well.

>> Due to the nature of the hardware, we will not need libhybris or any
>> Android kernel abstraction, which means that we can run stock Linux on
>> the phone, which greatly simplifies development and will allow us to
>> develop at a faster pace, due to not being bound to a specific kernel
>> version.
>
> YAY! As Sebastian mentioned in his reply this is the dream for us and
> also lot of users.

Yes indeed :-) It's probably the thing I am most excited about myself :D

>> The downside is that the i.mx6 ARM CPU isn't incredibly fast. We hope
>> that we will be able to update to the faster i.mx8 when it is
>> available and can be used with free drivers, but at this point in time
>> we need to focus on the i.mx6 as primary hardware target.
> [...]
> Other bit I am unsure about is, mobile baseband. Tech specs on the
> campaign page mentions just "Separate mobile baseband" without any
> further details. Though assuming that mobile baseband is supported by
> ofono [2][3] Plasma Phone will work with it.

The problem here is that we need to find one which has working drivers
and open-sourced firmware, which will be a bit challenging. We haven't
settled on anything yet, that's why this item is unspecified on the
campaign page for now. In any case, whetever we come up with will need
to support OFono.

>
>> ## What we need from a phone UI
>>
>> Our scope for this project is limited, in order to be able to complete
>> it successfully and not end up in a never ending development loop: The
>> phone should be able to communicate via Matrix, have a web browser,
>> make calls, take pictures. We are not aiming for a massive amount of
>> apps, but instead want the basic functionalities of the phone working
>> well when we ship it - more apps and features can be delivered later
>> via Flatpaks and system updates.
>
> To meet the need of Librem, we have following,
>
> - A simple yet functional phone shell

Yay!

> - Web browser: we have QtWebengine based Angelfish browser for mobile

Interesting, I didn't know a dedicated browser existed. There is some
talk about using Firefox here, but I do not know any details on it
yet.
In any case, having a browser that is already optimized for mobile is great!

> - Calling: Dialer application and a simple contacts application which
>   supports vcard based storage, can be extended with KPeople[4]
>   framework. Actual calling functionality is handled through
>   telepathy-ofono[5] and telepathy-ofono-ril-mc-plugin[5] (part of same
>   sources as telepathy-ofono). However Librem 5 won't need the
>   ril-mc-plugin, given it won't be using Android based RILd.
>
> - Take Pictures: We have very simple camera application which uses Qt's
>   Camera API, however it hasn't evolved much due to various issues with
>   Android HAL itself. Though nothing that can't be improved, for viewing
>   Photos itself, we have simple Kirigami based application named
>   Koko[6].

Cool!

> - Matrix: Unfortunately we don't have any application supporting Matrix
>   itself, though it is in Plans as Eike's response mentioned.

That will not be an issue. We will have a strong partnership with
Matrix[1], and the Matrix developers will help us to make a good
integration of the service for the phone. They also have experience in
working with Qt ;-)

> - There are some more applications, for example,
>     - Marble maps
>     - Okular Reader for reading pdf and other documents
>     - Kube[7], QtQuick based e-mail client
>     - Peruse, Comic Reader based on Kirigami
>     - Spacebar, Kirigami based chat client to send and recieve SMS

I like that a lot :-)

>> [...]
>
> Sure, I will be happy to help you in putting Plasma Mobile on your
> development board, one challenge I can think currently is Plasma Mobile
> is not packaged in Debian archives, so you will need to manually package
> and build Plasma Mobile repositories for Debian/PureOS

That will actually be an incredibly easy task. I am a Debian Developer
and member of the KDe team at Debian, so adding it would be a
no-brainer.

> There is already
> effort by community member to provide packaging for Plasma Mobile for
> Debian [8]. I will put you in contact with him if you need help.

Even better! I could review the changes and sponsor them into Debian, if needed.

> I think it makes sense to have a meeting/conference call between Purism
> and Plasma team to document the requirements from both sides and plan
> how to make this reality.

I think so too, but I also think we will need a bit more time in
Purism and see how the campaign works out :-)

Cheers,
    Matthias

[1]: https://matrix.org/blog/2017/08/24/the-librem-5-from-purism-a-matrix-native-smartphone/