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Crimson Daily Driver Part 3

I have been using the stock Crimson builds lately with mostly minimal issues. The camera now works, but you need to install millipixels manually as it does not come preinstalled. Battery life is mediocre as always, though it has gotten better as of late.

It looks like upstream development on Crimson has slowed down significantly as previously we were seeing about 5-10 package updates per week, and now we're down to 1 at most. However, yesterday, I got an update to four packages, and now... Chatty freezes so hard I can't use it at all. I can launch it with some luck about 1 in 5 times, but even then, it's completely unresponsive. I've tried launching it from command line with chatty --debug, but that shows nothing of use really either.

Let's give landing another try

So today, I thought I'd give the landing repo a try again, since our Crimson official version of Chatty is over a year old now (0.8.0rc0).

With that, I added

deb https://repo.pureos.net/pureos landing main

To the top of my /etc/apt/sources.list file, ran sudo apt update, annnnd...

$ sudo apt update
Get:1 https://repo.pureos.net/pureos landing InRelease [9625 B]
Get:2 https://repo.pureos.net/pureos crimson InRelease [9641 B]
Get:3 https://repo.pureos.net/pureos crimson-security InRelease [4753 B]
Get:4 https://repo.pureos.net/pureos crimson-updates InRelease [8746 B]
Fetched 32.8 kB in 3s (11.4 kB/s) 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
1248 packages can be upgraded. Run 'apt list --upgradable' to see them.

Wow! What a list of packages. Actually calculating the upgrade though:

...
470 upgraded, 21 newly installed, 0 to remove and 778 not upgraded.

So about 60% of those "packages can be upgraded" aren't actually upgradable yet for various reasons.

But! As my phone is currently unusable as far as texting goes, might as well give this a try!

First thing I notice is big upgrades to gnome related packages; we went from

Gnome 43 to 48. Also a lot of the noto fonts got installed.

After the upgrade

Yep, you guessed it, it reboots to a blank screen still. However, this time we can SSH in to the phone (assuming you have wifi set up in advance), so that will make fixing this much easier.

Interestingly, I did my usual sudo apt install libgl1-mesa-dri=22.3.6-1+deb12u1 libseat1=0.7.0-6 from the previous post to resolve the issue, but my phone said that that version of libgl1-mesa-dri was already installed, which is nice to see that's the version in the repos now for libgl1-mesa-dri. However, libseat1 did downgrade, so it looks like the command above just needs to downgrade libseat1 now. Additionally, after this downgrade, apt then proceeded to configure a bunch more stuff than was related to libseat1. I guess the first upgrade didn't succeed despite exiting code 0?

After it finished with reconfiguring what looked to be about 20 packages, I ran apt upgrade again, and this time got

270 upgraded, 36 newly installed, 0 to remove and 475 not upgraded.

I was under the impression that apt upgrade would fully upgrade all packages in one shot. This feels a little like the dark days of my past with Windows (Install updates, reboot, install more updates, reboot, install even more updates, reboot). Nevertheless, I went ahead and upgraded a second time [while my phone screen bootlooped phosh].

After the upgrade upgrade

With all of that, I have a phone that boots (and is now quite warm)!

The first thing I noticed was that the UI overall was smoother. Gear was smoother, gnome calendar was smoother, weather was smoother. All around, quite nice! I also launched millipixels and it works still as well!

I tried to install imv, but now get a dependency conflict with librem5-gnome, librem5-gnome-base, and librem5-gnome-phone.

But the big question though - can I access chatty to text message. Unfortunately, the answer was no, it still freezes solid on launch. I guessed at this point it was some sort of a database corruption, or database size issue, or data load speed, or something. So, I moved my ~/.purple/chatty/db to ~/.purple/chatty/db.old, throwing away all of my message history, and chatty started up fine. It even loaded lightning fast and the UI is much quicker now. Could be I just needed to clear out that old DB I suppose. It was almost 7 MB and had messages from the past three years in it.

After a day of use

One thing you'll notice if you keep running on landing is how much work is being done upstream. If you run stock crimson repos, it looks like almost nothing is being done. If you run landing, you'll see 5 or more packages per day showing up for updates.

Some problems I noticed were that the settings app lags really badly. It refreshes every few seconds, and gets worse the longer it runs. You can close it, but it's pretty slow. Other than that, running landing is surprisingly smooth. Of course, I haven't tried a dist-upgrade / full-upgrade yet. Doing that shows me:

465 upgraded, 301 newly installed, 119 to remove and 7 not upgraded.

So I'll hold off until a day when I have time to fully rebuild the phone in case it breaks something really badly.

Final notes

If you start using landing, be sure you run sudo apt install libseat1=0.7.0-6 every time you do an upgrade or phosh will loop crash on boot.

Well, I ran a full-upgrade

Whoops. Yeah, don't do this. Really don't do this. Apt got partially stuck during the install because there were undetected dependency version conflicts between the various meta packages in such a way that was not reasonably fixable. So, I reflashed. Back to stock.

Running landing is relatively stable, but it will block certain packages from being installed. For example, I cannot currently install mpv, ffmpeg, imv, and many other packages, because doing so would cause conflicts with many of the librem5 meta packages like librem5-gnome and librem5-gnome-base. So at this time, I do not recommend running on landing yet.