14 DAY TRIAL // Purism announced on Tuesday that it managed to successfully run KDE's Plasma Mobile graphical environment for mobile devices on the initial, i.MX 6-based development boards for their upcoming Librem 5 Linux phone.
The company, which is known for selling the most secure laptops powered a Linux-based operating system, said in a report that they worked closely with the KDE community to install, run, and enable a mobile network provider service on the Plasma Mobile graphical environment on top of the Debian-based PureOS distribution.
While their Librem 5 Linux phone is far from becoming a reality, Purism's initial enablement of KDE's Plasma Mobile was done on an i.MX 6 development board running their PureOS operating system installed, which is currently based on Debian Testing, and using a Wayland/Weston environment.
"Several KDE and Qt packages were needed for the Plasma Mobile environment, and a few packages were not available within PureOS so needed to be built: plasma-phone-components, kpeople-vcard, and plasma-settings," said Heather Ellsworth, Head of documentation at Purism.
Baby steps towards Plasma Mobile's successful deployment on Librem 5
As expected, Purism faced several challenges in their first attempt to run KDE's Plasma Mobile on the Librem 5 development board, including some bad screen issues due to the zwp_linux_dmabuf protocol not yet being supported in KDE Plasma, but upstream patches were already available and immediately applied.
Another issue they encounter was with the mouse cursor, which is invisible due to the DRM driver not providing the cursor plane. A temporary workaround is in place until the problem gets resolved when Purism receives the missing touch adapter hardware, so that they won't have to use the traditional mouse pointer.
Phone calls couldn't be placed on the i.MX 6 development board due to the currently installed modem, but Purism promises that the Librem 5 Linux phone will have full phone capabilities when it is released next year. Until then, they take baby steps towards Plasma Mobile's successful deployment on the Librem 5 Linux phone.
