Linux Phones

What's PmOS? I'm intrigued

Edit: PostmarketOS. I made the connection. I must be more tired than I thought.

Oh, I don't mind questions. :)

Help: A lot via the Mobian Ports ( #mobian-ports:matrix.org ) Matrix room and the postmarketOS offtopic ( #offtopic:postmarketos.org ) Matrix room.

Sources: Not much there yet. As soon as there are official builds for the Pixel 3a, I will start writing docs. I already have a lot of notes on what I had to do. But first I need to have someone merge the Kernel patches, as I don't know C, which makes resolving merge conflicts really hard, it turns out. Once that is done, there are just a few smaller merge requests left and builds will appear magically.

The whole process is not that difficult if there are already Kernel patches available. In the case of the Pixel 3a, I only had to clone the sdm670-mainline repo ( https://gitlab.com/sdm670-mainline/linux-patches ) , compile the kernel (two commands) and get a .deb, which I used with mobian-recipes ( https://salsa.debian.org/Mobian-team/mobian-recipes/ ) to build an image. I then wrote a config file for droid-juicer ( https://gitlab.com/mobian1/droid-juicer/-/merge_requests/4 ) which tells it what files on the vendor and modem partitions it should get, then those are copied to /usr/lib/firmware/updates/.

That was easy as dmesg will just tell you what files it cannot load because they are missing. Just find those, write the config, run droid-juicer, reboot... boom. Display, Wifi, LTE and so on working.

Then smaller stuff like udev rules for vibration and an initramfs hook ( https://salsa.debian.org/DebianOnMobile-team/qcom-phone-utils/-/blob/debian/latest/initramfs-tools/hooks/qcom-firmware?ref_type=heads ) so that firmware files get integrated into initramfs and components start to work early during boot.

The most difficult part would be merging the Kernel patches with other patches and resoving the merge conflicts... At least to me, as I don't know C.

If there are no mainlining efforts for a phone yet, then I don't know what to do, as that requires a Kernel dev.

For the Pixel 4a you mentioned, there is a postmarketOS port. So this should be doable. ( https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Google_Pixel_4a_(google-sunfish) )

That's all not that hard, my main difficulty was finding out what to do. Everything I did so far would be an afternoon of work, if I had just found the necessary information much quicker. Instead I spent two weeks, of which 95 % was finding info, lol.

Just join the Mobian Matrix room, we should be able to help you, even though I know far less than the others there...so far. :p

I do hope that's helpful and I'll happily try to answer more questions. :)

Kernel mainlining effort for the SoC in thr Pixel 4a: https://github.com/sm7150-mainline/linux

Same, my Pinephone does that within an hour maybe xD

You could join the Mobian Matrix room or the PostmarketOS room I have mentioned in another post on this thread (or whatever the right term is... Comment on a post? Sub-post?). I did not know anything about porting two weeks ago, but asking dumb questions helps learning.

Phosh was created from scratch, while Gnome Mobile is attempt to port existing Gnome to well... mobile and ultimately share same binaries.

Very much not. GNOME Shell Mobile was funded by the German Prototype Fund in 2022 IIRC, way later than Phosh was created (funded by Purism for their Librem 5). GNOME Shell Mobile will eventually be part of GNOME proper (meaning it's Mutter, and GNOME Shell, patched to work on small devices), currently it's a patch set on top of multiple GNOME components that's packaged in postmarketOS and the AUR (if you consider AUR stuff packaged).

Phosh was created on based on wlroots (which is also used in Sway and other wayland-native window managers) and GTK3, as a Mobile Shell. Ironically, this way was pursued because Purism developers where told by the GNOME Shell people that an adaptation of GNOME Shell for Mobile would not be feasible.

Both rely on designs created by (at least then) Purism-employed designer Tobias Bernard IIRC, and thus may seem quite similar despite being based on a different tech stack, and both are hosted on GNOME's Gitlab, using all the same apps.

Nope. They look differently and have different functions. PostmarketOS wiki has screenshots: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Category:Interface

Those are impossible to hard brick in my experience, you would need to break both bootloaders and recoveries. See if this helps:

https://flash.android.com/welcome

Also, Pixel 3 has different hardware, but is supported by pmOS and I've spotted some commits in Mobian, so there might be people working on it there.

And hopefully I can save a few devices from getting trashed. :)

Made huge amounts of progress since I posted this! Should really post a follow-up at some point. :D

Ubuntu touch is pretty but useless. Unlike postmarketOS/Mobian it doesn't support native linux apps.