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Librem5: Crimson Daily Driver

If you have a Librem 5 phone and are like me, you are eagerly anticipating the release of Crimson, because you're stuck on Byzantium which has a super old version of just about every package, but most notably, phosh and chatty.

A few weeks ago, I finally decided to try Crimson as a daily driver, and that caused me some great headache a couple of times. I am still using it as a daily driver however, but there are still some pretty sizeable issues which I have accepted for the tie being. The issues:

The issues

No camera support yet

Pretty self explanatory here. I imagine this has something to do with the libcamera api that is being worked on.

No SD card support yet

...so if you use your SD card for your home directory, you'll have to rsync to internal storage and use that. In my case, I have too much on my card, so I had to be selective about what I put on internal storage.

You can have bluetooth audio, or phone call audio, but not both

Essentially, the current config for pulseaudio doesn't work with bluetooth, but audio generally works fine everywhere else. If you try switching to pipewire, bluetooth audio works mostly well (switching audio outputs has to be done manually from the settings), but you won't have any audio, microphone or earpiece, on phone calls. This is because of a bug in callaudiod. This issue is fixed in version 1.1.10, but Crimson currently releases with 0.1.9, so pipewire support is broken as of 2024.10.22.

Installing upgrades is too perilous

This actually isn't strictly true for me anymore. You just have to be diligent when installing updates. Currently, the package libgl1-mesa-dri wants to upgrade 24.2.4-1, which breaks phosh, causing a crash loop. The only way to fix it is to plug in a keyboard, ctrl + alt + f2, then sudo apt install -y libgl1-mesa-dri=22.3.6-1+deb12u1 to downgrade to 22.3.6-1. Of course, while you're doing this, phosh is continuing to launch and crash every 5 seconds, so you have to keep doing the ctrl + alt + f2 sequence as systemd takes you back to tty1. <sarcasm>Isn't systemd great?</sarcasm>

To avoid the above shenanigans, every time you run sudo apt upgrade, be absolutely sure to also run sudo apt install libgl1-mesa-dri=22.3.6-1+deb12u1 before you reboot the phone, or you'll end up in a crash loop of phosh.

Update 2024.10.26 In rather frustrating timing, an important phone call came in today while I wasn't home and the phone completely crashed and boot looped. When I got home and could troubleshoot, I discovered an update of libseat1 to 0.9.0 had broken the phone, and it needs to stay at version libseat1=0.7.0-6 for now.

Here's an all-in-one command to keep your crimson phone working.

sudo apt install libgl1-mesa-dri=22.3.6-1+deb12u1 libseat1=0.7.0-6

And a couple of pieces of related advice:

1. Only install crimson updates when you are at home with a keyboard handy to recover with
2. Always reboot your phone after installing said updates so you don't discover your phone is broken when you're away from said keyboard.

I'll update this post with other caveats as they come to me. If you're fine with the above issues though,

Hacks to get running

Because I want to easily rebuild this phone if I need to, without following a long checklist of shell commands, I put all this in a clean shell script which handles everything for me/you.

I do recommend putting this in its own directory, as it has to download and extract some of its own artifacts (alsa-ucm-conf) to complete.

In short, the following script:

• Overrides the system alsa-ucm-conf ucm2 directories with those from upstream latest.

• Adds a few additional apt repos to bring in "unstable" packages so the phone can actually be updated.

~/crimson/fixup.sh

#!/usr/bin/env bash

set -euo pipefail
export IFS=$'\n\t'

# Deploy updated alsa-ucm-conf profiles.
#
# Solution discovered by [Kyle Evans]
# https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/OS-issues/-/issues/346#note_264442)
#
fix_alsa_ucm() {
  local name='alsa-ucm-conf'
  local version='1.2.12'
  local src="https://github.com/alsa-project/${name}/archive/refs/tags/v${version}.tar.gz"

  if [ ! -f v${version}.tar.gz ]; then
    printf 'Downloading %s version %s\n' "${name}" "${version}"
    curl -o ".v${version}.tar.gz.tmp" -L -# "${src}"
    mv ".v${version}.tar.gz.tmp" "v${version}.tar.gz"
  fi
  tar -xf "v${version}.tar.gz"

  printf 'Deploying updated ucm2 profiles\n'
  if [ -d /usr/share/alsa/ucm2 ]; then
    sudo mv -v /usr/share/alsa/ucm2{,.$(date +%F)}
  fi
  sudo cp -r "${name}-${version}/ucm2" "/usr/share/alsa/ucm2"
}

# By default Crimson comes with the crimson repos, which is very broken last I
# checked.
# This adds landing, crimson-security, crimson-updates, and
# crimson-updates-proposed repos. These might make things unstable in the long
# run, but for now this is required to get things up and running.
#
apt_set_repos() {
  sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list <<EOF
deb http://repo.pureos.net/pureos landing main
deb http://repo.pureos.net/pureos crimson main
deb http://repo.pureos.net/pureos crimson-security main
deb http://repo.pureos.net/pureos crimson-updates main
deb http://repo.pureos.net/pureos crimson-updates-proposed main
EOF
}

fix_alsa_ucm
apt_set_repos

Run that and most of the issues should be resolved.