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Initial setup

Aura Kelloniemi edited this page May 26, 2022 · 2 revisions

Before booting the Librem 5, you should read Purism's instructions on how to prepare the device – e.g. how to install the battery.

Before booting

If your Librem 5 has been preinstalled with full-disk LUKS encryption, you need to reflash your phone before using it, unless you can see enough to type with the on-screen keyboard. This is because the touch screen is likely the only option for entering the passphrase for unlocking the encryption keys on the device. This passphrase is asked in the early boot when any screen reader applications can't yet run.

If you need to reflash the phone, see Reflashing.

First boot

When you press the power button, Librem 5 should vibrate quickly. Librem 5 boots to phosh – the Phone shell, which is a graphical desktop environment operated with touch interface. This interface will not be of use to you, unless you can see enough.

When you boot Librem 5, phosh should be running in less than a hlf minute. To test this, press the volume down and up buttons repeatedly. You should hear a sound signal telling the volume level.

Powering off the phone

It is not possible to power the phone off by pressing the power button while the grapphical interface is active (i.e. while the current virtual console is the one where the Wayland compositor runs). To power off the phone, you need to either switch to a normal text console, and press the power button, or connect to Librem 5 from another system and execute

librem5# systemctl poweroff

Connecting to the phone from another system

To be able to run commands on the phone, you need to connect to it using SSH or similar technique. But you need to configure Librem 5 for network access before SSH can be used.

You can either use a sighted assistant to do this from the graphical interface, or use a USB terminal connection.

See USB terminal for instructions on how to connect the phone via USB.

Initial setup on Librem 5

Once you have connected to Librem 5 from another system, you can start configuring it.

To configure debconf priority, run:

librem5# dpkg-reconfigure debconf

It is advisable to set debconf priority to low as you'll need to fine tune many low-level aspects of the system. Also choose your desired debconf interface. If you haven't used debconf before, dialog and readline might be easiest.

To configure your locale settings, run:

librem5# dpkg-reconfigure tzdata locales

Networking

Search from the internet for information on how to set up USB networking to be able to connect to ineternet through your host's inetrnet connection.

TODO: Link to my usbnet scripts.

Configure the console

TODO Write a page about configuring the Linux console.

NOTE Currently you need to compile your own kernel for Librem 5 in order to set up the console properly. This is because console rotation is necessary to get a terminal of any sensible size.

Initial packages

Once you have a network connection up on Librem 5, you can start installing additional packages.

First upgrade your system:

librem5# apt-get update && apt-get full-upgrade

Install SSH server and other software that you wish to have. These packages should include whatever tools you generally use in Linux terminal. Start from essentials – text editors, file system tools, etc. Here is an example set of packages:

librem5# apt-get install alsa-utils aptitude btrfs-progs console-setup dracut-core elinks emacs-gtk ffmpeg info kbd openssh-{client,server} zstd

Braille display

To connect a braille display to Librem 5 follow instructions on the Braille displays page.