Purism Gets Plasma Mobile Running On Their First Librem 5 Development Board

Purism is reporting they have been able to get KDE Plasma Mobile in its current development state running on their initial Librem 5 smartphone development platform.

This development platform is still based on the i.MX6 SoC rather than the i.MX8 they intend to use for the shipping smartphone, but they have made progress nevertheless in getting KDE Plasma Mobile with Wayland working -- while also using the open-source Etnaviv driver.

Plasma Mobile was running off the company's Debian-based PureOS distribution but required rebuilding Plasma/KWin for wp_linux_dmabuf support that's needed by Etnaviv as well as overcoming some other issues.

In the end they got it up and running as outlined via this blog post. The company is going over to Shenzhen soon to begin meeting with potential suppliers.

It's great to see they have Plasma Mobile up and running already though the company has noted they intend on using the GNOME stack by default as part of a unified PureOS experience and they also recently began developing their own Wayland compositor.