25 ms·

219 days of postmarketOS

298 points by ajr0 9y ago

GranPC 9y ago
Site is struggling. Mirror link: https://web.archive.org/web/20180122151517/https://www.postmarketos.org/blog/2017/12/31/219-days-of-postmarketOS/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180122151517/https://www.postm...
rnotarog 9y ago
Dead link?
- ztoben 9y ago
  Works for me. Must be getting more traffic than they expected.
  - MartijnBraam 9y ago
    My server got a magnitude more traffic than expected for a few minutes and started swapping
    - snvzz 9y ago
      Time to dial down the threading then.
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
Really cool to see Glass hit this list, I'd love to break mine out again if I had a way to use it without Google tracking. The thing I recently got to play with wearable computing is a Vufine+ and an Intel Compute Stick, both of which can be powered by a regular external phone battery.
- ollieparanoid 9y ago
  If you are interested in this and have some time to spare: You should be able to flash something like your regular desktop Linux on it already. It's no where as functional as the original device was by now, but it's free of the tracking. From there on you could try to make it as functional as you need it to be. https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Installation_guide https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Installation_guide
zeveb 9y ago
Argh, the site specifies its own background colour but not its own foreground colour, making it unreadable with a default dark theme.
- ollieparanoid 9y ago
  Thanks for letting us know, we'd love to fix that. Which browser and OS do you use, and how did you turn on a dark theme there? Bug reports can be made here btw: https://github.com/postmarketOS/postmarketos.org/issues https://github.com/postmarketOS/postmarketos.org/issues But you can also reply here, then we'll open an issue for you.
  - zeveb 9y ago
    Thanks for the response! I'm using Firefox 57 on Linux, with the default theme, using the Arc-Dark gtk+ theme. I was able to fix it by applying a Stylus theme which sets foreground dark and background light, which I think is what your CSS expects. Best!
    - ollieparanoid 9y ago
      Unfortunately we couldn't reproduce it with Firefox 58. If this still happens, please reply here: https://github.com/postmarketOS/postmarketos.org/issues/48 https://github.com/postmarketOS/postmarketos.org/issues/48
breakingcups 9y ago
This is such a cool project. I'm looking forward to trying this on my old i9300, which is in the list of supported devices.
- Outpox 9y ago
  Same here, I've got my old one lying around that I'd like to revive just for fun.
TuringTest 9y ago
May this be the way open source arrives to the masses? As a solution against planned obsolescence? If people gets used to giving their old devices a second life by lending their old devices to a fellow geek, to install this "weird app" that allows them to keep using it, that could become huge exposure for FLOSS operating systems.
- bacongobbler 9y ago
  It's the exact same story with Windows and Linux. Many old PCs running Windows XP that cannot handle Windows 7's minimum requirements are being wiped by geeks and are installing Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, or some other distro onto these devices. As long as Linux, postmarketOS or LineageOS are the "weird apps" geeks install for their friends' devices, I highly doubt they'll ever gain any real exposure outside of tech circles.
  - JoelTheSuperior 9y ago
    In fairness though I'd say the issue is far less pronounced with desktop and laptop hardware than it is with mobile devices. I can get a PC from 10 years ago and install Windows 10 and it'll most likely run absolutely fine - really rather well in fact. On the other hand, many people would probably be quite frustrated if they had to use a phone that's even three or four years old. It amazes me how people react even when I tell them I'm still using an iPhone 6 Plus that I bought in 2015.
    - SomeHacker44 9y ago
      I am using the same phone. I just wish I could get Spectre fixes on an iOS 10 release.
    - dejv 9y ago
      I am still using iPhone 5S, 16GB and it still works great. Marketers did a great job convincing people that they need to renew their phones every two years (or less)
_wmd 9y ago
Is there good documentation anywhere regarding the minimum set of blobs (kernel, HAL, modem, display etc drivers) necessary to gut an Android device back to its bare shell? I love these alternative OS projects, but really I think a lot of that effort may be misspent for non-purists like myself. Maybe sometime after a simple, basic UI and apps are running on the phone, then a complex project like Microsoft's Android app sandboxing could be attempted Would love there to be something that provided just enough glue code between HAL and, say, Qt, alongside a bunch of shell scripts for gutting images of common handsets. But getting there myself, I've really little clue about this stuff, but I'm sure there is tribal knowledge buried all over the forums the Android dev community use
- magmastonealex 9y ago
  It's not super clear which blobs are needed for particular devices - and it's different for all of them. I'm not aware of a single place to find what's needed - though the LineageOS device repositories can help a lot. The plan, especially when it comes to modems and graphics acceleration, is to package these firmware blobs separately. Then, a user can choose at install time if they're alright with non-free blobs running on their phone. This has already been done for many phones for WiFi/Bluetooth chipsets. This method also has the advantage of letting us move quicker - we don't need to wait years to reverse engineer modem firmware, or be required to spend the time mainlining every device we want to add in order to get the "essential" features for a phone. (I'm a developer on the project)
- lawl 9y ago
  That depends on the chip and what you really think you need. Me personally I'm fine with framebuffer drivers, I don't need hardware acceleration. So that needs no blobs. For some Qualcomm chipsets you can get 3D acceleration working without blobs using freedreno. I personally started working on getting the qualcomm modem userspace blobs working under pmOS[0]. If you just want pretty much everything to get to work, there's also the halium project[1] which runs a stripped down android in an LXC container to provide that stuff. This could easily be ported to pmOS too. It really depends on how libre you want your phone to be. Android applications could probably be run on pmOS too using e.g. Anbox[2]. [0] https://github.com/postmarketOS/pmbootstrap/issues/1054 https://github.com/postmarketOS/pmbootstrap/issues/1054 [1] https://halium.org/ https://halium.org/ [2] https://anbox.io/ https://anbox.io/
Fragoel2 9y ago
Project is really cool and I am looking forward to it. Still, rather than make 10 different desktop environments run, wouldn't be better to implement critical features that are currently missing (i.e. calls)?
- jerf 9y ago
  I suspect there's a rather large use case that doesn't involve making calls. I've got a few cell phones hanging around the house in case a project like this makes them useful for something again, and I have no intention of making calls with them. After all, a mid-grade android from 3 years ago is still a computer that on most if not all specs thrashes what I called my desktop in 2000. There are uses for such things.
- lawl 9y ago
  I think ollieparanoid, who founded this project and puts a ton of work into it has a great answer to a very similar question someone had on reddit a while back[0]. I fully agree with his philosophy. This is a project ran completely by unpaid volunteers. And the most important thing is to have fun while working on pmOS. If people have fun getting 10 different desktop environments to run, why not? If you look at his comment from 6 months ago, only one phone had wifi support. Now, quite a few do[1]. I've read similar comments from OpenBSD devs. They get the best contributions when people work on something they simply want to work on, instead of telling people what needs work. Progress on getting cellular working is tracked in this issue here[2], if you're curious what the state of that is. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6ndik4/50_days_of_postmarketos_a_linux_os_for_phones/dk8pn22/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6ndik4/50_days_of_po... [1] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices [2] https://github.com/postmarketOS/pmbootstrap/issues/598 https://github.com/postmarketOS/pmbootstrap/issues/598
- spurgu 9y ago
  Making calls is ironically one of the least used features on my phone, personally speaking. SMS I only use for 2FA.
  - 9y ago
leeoniya 9y ago
> Sony Xperia Z1 (sony-honami) (fourth below) > Sony Xperia Z3 Compact (sony-aries) looking forward to trying this one day on my Sony Z5 Compact (sony-suzuran)
peatmoss 9y ago
Tangentially related: I keep wondering what to do with old Apple devices. I have an old 3rd gen iPad that is intolerably slow, but has such a nice form factor and screen that I hate to get rid of it. If someone made a swap-out logic board to Android-ify these things, I suspect there’s still got to be tons of them laying around.
- ollieparanoid 9y ago
  If you have some time to spare and want to learn something new, just try to get postmarketOS on one of them. Here are some loose ends to start with (not only iPod related, Apple in general): [0] If you get stuck somewhere, the community is happy to help you either in the matrix/irc chat[1] or in GitHub issues[2]. [0]: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Apple_iPod_Touch_1G_(apple-ipt1g) https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Apple_iPod_Touch_1G_(appl... [1]: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Matrix_and_IRC https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Matrix_and_IRC [2]: https://github.com/postmarketOS/pmbootstrap/issues https://github.com/postmarketOS/pmbootstrap/issues
  - peatmoss 9y ago
    Oh interesting, on my cursory glance I assumed PostmarketOS was only for rootable Android devices. This might actuall be pretty fun to try and get my 3rd gen iPad going. It’s barely usable as is, so no great loss if I brick it. Even then, I assume the screen is still usable for something.
    - ollieparanoid 9y ago
      Awesome! \o/
rsync 9y ago
I was interested in the list of compatible devices and I saw, of course, Android based phones and Nokia Nxxx series, etc. Why not Apple iphones ? Why don't I ever see proof of concept boot loaders or linux init on an iphone ? I understand they only run signed boot loaders / kernels / etc., but that was also true of the PS3 and that was broken wide open some years back ... Has, truly, nobody gotten an alternative OS to boot on any of the 8+ generations of iphone ?
- madez 9y ago
  The problem aren't the developers of alternative systems. The culprit is Apple.
- MartijnBraam 9y ago
  There is the iphonelinux project and we have the beginnings of a port to the ipod touch 1G, but the main issue with that port is that we can't get openiboot to build with GCC6
  - rsync 9y ago
    Thank you - that's interesting. Again, I'd like to have some sense as to the relative difficulty involved vs. the PS3 break which, IIRC, was the same kind of cryptographic signing issue ... Perhaps Apple just doesn't make those mistakes with their keys ?
    - monocasa 9y ago
      Apple def seems to have their shit together in this regard more than Sony. Sony managed to leak their private key by screwing up the math for instance.
- shravj 9y ago
  It was possible at one point to run Android on the iPhone 2G and 3G: https://youtu.be/2N2Md2qQ4pc https://youtu.be/2N2Md2qQ4pc Since then it doesn't really look like any progress has been made on running alternative operating systems on the iPhone.
AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
The frustrating part about this is that it's getting more difficult to flash ROMs onto most phones, not easier. For instance, all Samsung Galaxy flagships since the S6 have a locked bootloader. If you have the US-based Snapdragon models, it's nearly impossible to unlock them and load custom ROMs. And if you somehow do, Samsung caps your battery at 80% or so. There are notable exceptions. The OnePlus phones are easy to flash, as are Sony Experia models. But for the average person just looking to get a few more years out of their device, the OEMs have made it very clear how much they resent you keeping your phone beyond the two year mark.
- bradfa 9y ago
  LG have made some nice improvements to allowing bootloader unlocking on some of their models. It's still definitely well beyond what "normal people" would be able to do, but it's nice to see from a technical standpoint. At least one model from each of the LG V10/V20/V30 and G4/G5/G6 are able to be unlocked in an official way. http://developer.lge.com/resource/mobile/RetrieveBootloader.dev http://developer.lge.com/resource/mobile/RetrieveBootloader....
- floatboth 9y ago
  HTC also offered easy unlocks since the One m7 (and probably before). Nexuses/Pixels of course are the easiest. To me it feels like Samsung is the exception here.
  - AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
    I had both an HTC One M7 and an M9, and while yes, unlocks are easy, that is only true if you buy directly from HTC. OTOH, if you wanted to use them on Verizon's network, you needed a Verizon-branded HTC One, which had a locked bootloader. Getting around that usually required paying $25 to run some tool called Sunshine that could abuse an exploit to unlock the bootloader. So where the OEM's allowed flexibility, the carriers swooped in to fill that void.
    - seniorivn 9y ago
floatboth 9y ago
Nice to see open GPU drivers freedreno and etnaviv being able to run complete desktop environments. Looks like lima might join the party too, eventually https://github.com/yuq/mesa-lima/issues/29 https://github.com/yuq/mesa-lima/issues/29
znpy 9y ago
I would even subscribe a recurring donation via patreon or something similar if only they at least promised to get calls working in at least one model.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  Perhaps it would be good to port Ekiga, to allow for VoIP calls to be made without fully working phone baseband drivers: https://ekiga.im/ https://ekiga.im/
  - ollieparanoid 9y ago
    Good idea, added it to the potential apps wiki page [0] (feel free to add more apps!). The upcoming Matrix client for the open and recently funded Librem 5 phone[1] also looks promising. It will be one interface for doing both regular calls, and calls over the encrypted Matrix protocol over network. In theory we should be able to package that as well, since Librem 5 just runs on a Debian derivative. [0]: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Potential_apps https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Potential_apps [1]: https://matrix.org/blog/2017/08/24/the-librem-5-from-purism-a-matrix-native-smartphone/ https://matrix.org/blog/2017/08/24/the-librem-5-from-purism-...
  - znpy 9y ago
    Except it still needs an internet connection to work... If you exclude wi-fi and you have no baseband working... It doesn't work.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
miguelrochefort 9y ago
Why do all of these OSes have to be so ugly? It's a major turn off.
- klez 9y ago
  I guess some project (especially ones where work is done on a voluntary basis) have a different scale of value, that is it's more important to first have stuff work and then make it look appealing or making it usable by non-technical users. EDIT: I think in this case a more interesting question would be: why don't people with a better aesthetic taste or UX knowledge volunteer for these kind of projects?
  - ollieparanoid 9y ago
    > that is it's more important to first have stuff work and then make it look appealing or making it usable by non-technical users. Exactly! With that being said, contributions from UX people are welcome of course.
badsectoracula 9y ago
I have a couple unused phones lying around doing nothing. One is cheap "GoClever" phone i bought a few years ago and had it die or something some years ago (it is most likely fixable, but my mother had a phone she didn't want anymore due to upgrading and i got hers instead) and another is the ill-fated ZTE Open with Firefox OS which i bought the instant it was available (through ebay because nobody local would have it available). What i'd really love to do is to replace the entire OS from the ZTE Open one with a barebones Linux, and X server (no Wayland) and a few custom apps to use for music playback, note taking, etc. It was on my mind since i actually got my hands on it and saw how an awful idea was to have an OS that is built around "web applications" (i already knew it, i just hoped it wouldn't be too bad and wanted it for the novelty of having a phone with the Firefox logo :-P). The hardware is theoretically more powerful than the PC i had back when i played Quake 2 in full software rendering mode, yet it was barely usable due to everything being slow (i've actually lost calls because the UI was frozen). I see from the hardware list that some related devices seem to be supported so at some point i'd like to try doing that. It is more for a "here is how to actually make use of hardware resources without sucking" personal statement than something i really need (my 1st gen iPod Touch still works fine after all), so it might take a while for me to bother trying :-P.
- MayeulC 9y ago
  > and X server (no Wayland) May I know why that is? By all accounts, Wayland is more adapted to embedded devices, with a cleaner architecture. I don't think that you need features such as xdraw, printer and gpu drivers, input handling or a lot of what isn't display related baked into the compositor. I tkink that PostmarketOS could actually fit your goal quite well (you can run a variety of desktop environments on it, with Xorg o'er Wayland, including lightweight ones such as i3). But of course, the project is still in its infancy, although the community is pretty welcoming, and would probably be happy to help you get started ;)
  - djsumdog 9y ago
    I can understand why people are hesitant with Wayland, because they look at things like systemd (which is still a usability nightmare, although it does make packaging much easier). I recently ran Wayland/Weston on my home theater PC running Void Linux. For the most part it semi-worked. I have few native wayland apps, so almost everything ran through xwayland. Steam was weird; as the mouse was offset about 300px to the right and down. I'd have to hover away from stuff to click on it. Kodi would often Flicker (my HTPC just uses Intel ingratiated graphics). Most of the Games (both Steam and Humble) worked fine though. Weston, the reference implementation, just isn't that great. I ended up going back to X11/Gnome3 after getting sick of the graphics glitches and bugs, and forgot how terrible gnome is now (I've used i3 on my desktop for years). I might go the Wayland route with Sway (i3 clone for Wayland) on my dev box, but Weston was honestly still too buggy for prime time on my media pc. I do agree though, X11 is old and awful and Wayland is a big improvement over X11. But I do run X11 apps remotely over SSH (something the wayland people assume no one does) and when asked about it, they kind just hand wave everything away like someone just needs to write a plug-in and it will work. postmarketOS might be the big push to really get Wayland mainstream. I'm really impressed by postmarketOS and hope it will be what Linux was for the x86/PC in the mobile world. You could install Linux on everything back in the 90s/2000s. ARM is a cluster fuck of random shit connected to random pins that are different on every SoC. This is a real major step to true alternative mobile OSes.
greenhouse_gas 9y ago
Does postmarketOS use android-based binary blobs, and what does it have over such projects as Google-Free LineageOS (as in, if you don't flash opengapps) or Replicant?
- ollieparanoid 9y ago
  The biggest difference is, that Android's build system is completely avoided as of now. The system consists of small packages, and you can easily modify those parts without rebuilding the entire system. Regarding blobs, right now there are no blobs running in the userspace. Firmware blobs are needed for Wifi for example. There are plans to both allow proprietary blobs in userspace (to get accelerated graphics for people who want that trade-off), but at the same time to make these entirely optional. Relevant part of the post[0]: "In contrary to most Linux on smartphone projects, almost all these photos and the video are taken off devices which do not run proprietary code on the main CPU. The only exception is the Droid 4, which @NotKit owns. He is actively working on making proprietary Android drivers usable in postmarketOS with libhybris. Libhybris allows devices lacking FLOSS drivers to make full use of their hardware." "While we don't welcome binary blobs and prefer to sandbox them where we ship them at all, we embrace this solution for people who want it. However we intend to keep closed source components entirely optional, so you can run pmOS as libre as you want it." [0]: https://postmarketos.org/blog/2017/12/31/219-days-of-postmarketOS/#libre-drivers-and-libhybris https://postmarketos.org/blog/2017/12/31/219-days-of-postmar...
  - greenhouse_gas 9y ago
    >right now there are no blobs running in the userspace. Firmware blobs are needed for Wifi for example. What about kernel space?
    - ollieparanoid 9y ago
      For most devices, we're running the vendor forks of the Linux kernel (mostly Android). The source of all of them is available, just like the mainline Linux kernel. With that being said, the stock Linux kernel and its vendor forks contain obfuscated code and even (small) blobs. To get rid of that we would need to package something like the Linux-libre patchset [0]. From what I know, no one is planning this currently, but if someone is interested in this, I don't think anyone in the community would be against having this as option. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_libre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_libre
XorNot 9y ago
I love this project. A genuine practical option for open source on mobile is something we desperately need.
Abishek_Muthian 9y ago
[Off-topic] Most manufactures when they had small consumer base were developer friendly, it is when they gain significant market they stop being one. I can think of few technical reasons as well, 1. To sustain competition they have build their IP (e.g camera blob, Personal Assistant) . 2. Security as a commodity, especially for enterprise customers. OnePlus has deep relations with XDA community, Oppo's Find series phone was actively contributed and If I'm right; the mods got free devices then. Oxygen OS team was by itself Paranoid Android team. OnePlus devices could be the best 'modder' friendly phone right now, the question is how long they would be able to keep it that way.

298 points by ajr0 9y ago

Site is struggling. Mirror link: https://web.archive.org/web/20180122151517/https://www.postmarketos.org/blog/2017/12/31/219-days-of-postmarketOS/ https://web.archive.org/web/20180122151517/https://www.postm...

rnotarog 9y ago

Dead link?

ztoben 9y ago
Works for me. Must be getting more traffic than they expected.
- MartijnBraam 9y ago
  My server got a magnitude more traffic than expected for a few minutes and started swapping
  - snvzz 9y ago
    Time to dial down the threading then.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago

Really cool to see Glass hit this list, I'd love to break mine out again if I had a way to use it without Google tracking. The thing I recently got to play with wearable computing is a Vufine+ and an Intel Compute Stick, both of which can be powered by a regular external phone battery.

ollieparanoid 9y ago
If you are interested in this and have some time to spare: You should be able to flash something like your regular desktop Linux on it already. It's no where as functional as the original device was by now, but it's free of the tracking. From there on you could try to make it as functional as you need it to be. https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Installation_guide https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Installation_guide

zeveb 9y ago

Argh, the site specifies its own background colour but not its own foreground colour, making it unreadable with a default dark theme.

ollieparanoid 9y ago
Thanks for letting us know, we'd love to fix that. Which browser and OS do you use, and how did you turn on a dark theme there? Bug reports can be made here btw: https://github.com/postmarketOS/postmarketos.org/issues https://github.com/postmarketOS/postmarketos.org/issues But you can also reply here, then we'll open an issue for you.
- zeveb 9y ago
  Thanks for the response! I'm using Firefox 57 on Linux, with the default theme, using the Arc-Dark gtk+ theme. I was able to fix it by applying a Stylus theme which sets foreground dark and background light, which I think is what your CSS expects. Best!
  - ollieparanoid 9y ago
    Unfortunately we couldn't reproduce it with Firefox 58. If this still happens, please reply here: https://github.com/postmarketOS/postmarketos.org/issues/48 https://github.com/postmarketOS/postmarketos.org/issues/48

breakingcups 9y ago

This is such a cool project. I'm looking forward to trying this on my old i9300, which is in the list of supported devices.

Outpox 9y ago
Same here, I've got my old one lying around that I'd like to revive just for fun.

TuringTest 9y ago

May this be the way open source arrives to the masses? As a solution against planned obsolescence? If people gets used to giving their old devices a second life by lending their old devices to a fellow geek, to install this "weird app" that allows them to keep using it, that could become huge exposure for FLOSS operating systems.

bacongobbler 9y ago
It's the exact same story with Windows and Linux. Many old PCs running Windows XP that cannot handle Windows 7's minimum requirements are being wiped by geeks and are installing Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, or some other distro onto these devices. As long as Linux, postmarketOS or LineageOS are the "weird apps" geeks install for their friends' devices, I highly doubt they'll ever gain any real exposure outside of tech circles.
- JoelTheSuperior 9y ago
  In fairness though I'd say the issue is far less pronounced with desktop and laptop hardware than it is with mobile devices. I can get a PC from 10 years ago and install Windows 10 and it'll most likely run absolutely fine - really rather well in fact. On the other hand, many people would probably be quite frustrated if they had to use a phone that's even three or four years old. It amazes me how people react even when I tell them I'm still using an iPhone 6 Plus that I bought in 2015.
  - SomeHacker44 9y ago
    I am using the same phone. I just wish I could get Spectre fixes on an iOS 10 release.
  - dejv 9y ago
    I am still using iPhone 5S, 16GB and it still works great. Marketers did a great job convincing people that they need to renew their phones every two years (or less)

_wmd 9y ago

Is there good documentation anywhere regarding the minimum set of blobs (kernel, HAL, modem, display etc drivers) necessary to gut an Android device back to its bare shell? I love these alternative OS projects, but really I think a lot of that effort may be misspent for non-purists like myself. Maybe sometime after a simple, basic UI and apps are running on the phone, then a complex project like Microsoft's Android app sandboxing could be attempted Would love there to be something that provided just enough glue code between HAL and, say, Qt, alongside a bunch of shell scripts for gutting images of common handsets. But getting there myself, I've really little clue about this stuff, but I'm sure there is tribal knowledge buried all over the forums the Android dev community use

magmastonealex 9y ago
It's not super clear which blobs are needed for particular devices - and it's different for all of them. I'm not aware of a single place to find what's needed - though the LineageOS device repositories can help a lot. The plan, especially when it comes to modems and graphics acceleration, is to package these firmware blobs separately. Then, a user can choose at install time if they're alright with non-free blobs running on their phone. This has already been done for many phones for WiFi/Bluetooth chipsets. This method also has the advantage of letting us move quicker - we don't need to wait years to reverse engineer modem firmware, or be required to spend the time mainlining every device we want to add in order to get the "essential" features for a phone. (I'm a developer on the project)
lawl 9y ago
That depends on the chip and what you really think you need. Me personally I'm fine with framebuffer drivers, I don't need hardware acceleration. So that needs no blobs. For some Qualcomm chipsets you can get 3D acceleration working without blobs using freedreno. I personally started working on getting the qualcomm modem userspace blobs working under pmOS[0]. If you just want pretty much everything to get to work, there's also the halium project[1] which runs a stripped down android in an LXC container to provide that stuff. This could easily be ported to pmOS too. It really depends on how libre you want your phone to be. Android applications could probably be run on pmOS too using e.g. Anbox[2]. [0] https://github.com/postmarketOS/pmbootstrap/issues/1054 https://github.com/postmarketOS/pmbootstrap/issues/1054 [1] https://halium.org/ https://halium.org/ [2] https://anbox.io/ https://anbox.io/

Fragoel2 9y ago

Project is really cool and I am looking forward to it. Still, rather than make 10 different desktop environments run, wouldn't be better to implement critical features that are currently missing (i.e. calls)?

jerf 9y ago
I suspect there's a rather large use case that doesn't involve making calls. I've got a few cell phones hanging around the house in case a project like this makes them useful for something again, and I have no intention of making calls with them. After all, a mid-grade android from 3 years ago is still a computer that on most if not all specs thrashes what I called my desktop in 2000. There are uses for such things.
lawl 9y ago
I think ollieparanoid, who founded this project and puts a ton of work into it has a great answer to a very similar question someone had on reddit a while back[0]. I fully agree with his philosophy. This is a project ran completely by unpaid volunteers. And the most important thing is to have fun while working on pmOS. If people have fun getting 10 different desktop environments to run, why not? If you look at his comment from 6 months ago, only one phone had wifi support. Now, quite a few do[1]. I've read similar comments from OpenBSD devs. They get the best contributions when people work on something they simply want to work on, instead of telling people what needs work. Progress on getting cellular working is tracked in this issue here[2], if you're curious what the state of that is. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6ndik4/50_days_of_postmarketos_a_linux_os_for_phones/dk8pn22/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/6ndik4/50_days_of_po... [1] https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Devices [2] https://github.com/postmarketOS/pmbootstrap/issues/598 https://github.com/postmarketOS/pmbootstrap/issues/598
spurgu 9y ago
Making calls is ironically one of the least used features on my phone, personally speaking. SMS I only use for 2FA.
- 9y ago

leeoniya 9y ago

> Sony Xperia Z1 (sony-honami) (fourth below) > Sony Xperia Z3 Compact (sony-aries) looking forward to trying this one day on my Sony Z5 Compact (sony-suzuran)

peatmoss 9y ago

Tangentially related: I keep wondering what to do with old Apple devices. I have an old 3rd gen iPad that is intolerably slow, but has such a nice form factor and screen that I hate to get rid of it. If someone made a swap-out logic board to Android-ify these things, I suspect there’s still got to be tons of them laying around.

ollieparanoid 9y ago
If you have some time to spare and want to learn something new, just try to get postmarketOS on one of them. Here are some loose ends to start with (not only iPod related, Apple in general): [0] If you get stuck somewhere, the community is happy to help you either in the matrix/irc chat[1] or in GitHub issues[2]. [0]: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Apple_iPod_Touch_1G_(apple-ipt1g) https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Apple_iPod_Touch_1G_(appl... [1]: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Matrix_and_IRC https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Matrix_and_IRC [2]: https://github.com/postmarketOS/pmbootstrap/issues https://github.com/postmarketOS/pmbootstrap/issues
- peatmoss 9y ago
  Oh interesting, on my cursory glance I assumed PostmarketOS was only for rootable Android devices. This might actuall be pretty fun to try and get my 3rd gen iPad going. It’s barely usable as is, so no great loss if I brick it. Even then, I assume the screen is still usable for something.
  - ollieparanoid 9y ago
    Awesome! \o/

rsync 9y ago

I was interested in the list of compatible devices and I saw, of course, Android based phones and Nokia Nxxx series, etc. Why not Apple iphones ? Why don't I ever see proof of concept boot loaders or linux init on an iphone ? I understand they only run signed boot loaders / kernels / etc., but that was also true of the PS3 and that was broken wide open some years back ... Has, truly, nobody gotten an alternative OS to boot on any of the 8+ generations of iphone ?

madez 9y ago
The problem aren't the developers of alternative systems. The culprit is Apple.
MartijnBraam 9y ago
There is the iphonelinux project and we have the beginnings of a port to the ipod touch 1G, but the main issue with that port is that we can't get openiboot to build with GCC6
- rsync 9y ago
  Thank you - that's interesting. Again, I'd like to have some sense as to the relative difficulty involved vs. the PS3 break which, IIRC, was the same kind of cryptographic signing issue ... Perhaps Apple just doesn't make those mistakes with their keys ?
  - monocasa 9y ago
    Apple def seems to have their shit together in this regard more than Sony. Sony managed to leak their private key by screwing up the math for instance.
shravj 9y ago
It was possible at one point to run Android on the iPhone 2G and 3G: https://youtu.be/2N2Md2qQ4pc https://youtu.be/2N2Md2qQ4pc Since then it doesn't really look like any progress has been made on running alternative operating systems on the iPhone.

AdmiralAsshat 9y ago

The frustrating part about this is that it's getting more difficult to flash ROMs onto most phones, not easier. For instance, all Samsung Galaxy flagships since the S6 have a locked bootloader. If you have the US-based Snapdragon models, it's nearly impossible to unlock them and load custom ROMs. And if you somehow do, Samsung caps your battery at 80% or so. There are notable exceptions. The OnePlus phones are easy to flash, as are Sony Experia models. But for the average person just looking to get a few more years out of their device, the OEMs have made it very clear how much they resent you keeping your phone beyond the two year mark.

bradfa 9y ago
LG have made some nice improvements to allowing bootloader unlocking on some of their models. It's still definitely well beyond what "normal people" would be able to do, but it's nice to see from a technical standpoint. At least one model from each of the LG V10/V20/V30 and G4/G5/G6 are able to be unlocked in an official way. http://developer.lge.com/resource/mobile/RetrieveBootloader.dev http://developer.lge.com/resource/mobile/RetrieveBootloader....
floatboth 9y ago
HTC also offered easy unlocks since the One m7 (and probably before). Nexuses/Pixels of course are the easiest. To me it feels like Samsung is the exception here.
- AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
  I had both an HTC One M7 and an M9, and while yes, unlocks are easy, that is only true if you buy directly from HTC. OTOH, if you wanted to use them on Verizon's network, you needed a Verizon-branded HTC One, which had a locked bootloader. Getting around that usually required paying $25 to run some tool called Sunshine that could abuse an exploit to unlock the bootloader. So where the OEM's allowed flexibility, the carriers swooped in to fill that void.
  - seniorivn 9y ago

floatboth 9y ago

Nice to see open GPU drivers freedreno and etnaviv being able to run complete desktop environments. Looks like lima might join the party too, eventually https://github.com/yuq/mesa-lima/issues/29 https://github.com/yuq/mesa-lima/issues/29

znpy 9y ago

I would even subscribe a recurring donation via patreon or something similar if only they at least promised to get calls working in at least one model.

ZenoArrow 9y ago
Perhaps it would be good to port Ekiga, to allow for VoIP calls to be made without fully working phone baseband drivers: https://ekiga.im/ https://ekiga.im/
- ollieparanoid 9y ago
  Good idea, added it to the potential apps wiki page [0] (feel free to add more apps!). The upcoming Matrix client for the open and recently funded Librem 5 phone[1] also looks promising. It will be one interface for doing both regular calls, and calls over the encrypted Matrix protocol over network. In theory we should be able to package that as well, since Librem 5 just runs on a Debian derivative. [0]: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Potential_apps https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Potential_apps [1]: https://matrix.org/blog/2017/08/24/the-librem-5-from-purism-a-matrix-native-smartphone/ https://matrix.org/blog/2017/08/24/the-librem-5-from-purism-...
- znpy 9y ago
  Except it still needs an internet connection to work... If you exclude wi-fi and you have no baseband working... It doesn't work.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

miguelrochefort 9y ago

Why do all of these OSes have to be so ugly? It's a major turn off.

klez 9y ago
I guess some project (especially ones where work is done on a voluntary basis) have a different scale of value, that is it's more important to first have stuff work and then make it look appealing or making it usable by non-technical users. EDIT: I think in this case a more interesting question would be: why don't people with a better aesthetic taste or UX knowledge volunteer for these kind of projects?
- ollieparanoid 9y ago
  > that is it's more important to first have stuff work and then make it look appealing or making it usable by non-technical users. Exactly! With that being said, contributions from UX people are welcome of course.

badsectoracula 9y ago

I have a couple unused phones lying around doing nothing. One is cheap "GoClever" phone i bought a few years ago and had it die or something some years ago (it is most likely fixable, but my mother had a phone she didn't want anymore due to upgrading and i got hers instead) and another is the ill-fated ZTE Open with Firefox OS which i bought the instant it was available (through ebay because nobody local would have it available). What i'd really love to do is to replace the entire OS from the ZTE Open one with a barebones Linux, and X server (no Wayland) and a few custom apps to use for music playback, note taking, etc. It was on my mind since i actually got my hands on it and saw how an awful idea was to have an OS that is built around "web applications" (i already knew it, i just hoped it wouldn't be too bad and wanted it for the novelty of having a phone with the Firefox logo :-P). The hardware is theoretically more powerful than the PC i had back when i played Quake 2 in full software rendering mode, yet it was barely usable due to everything being slow (i've actually lost calls because the UI was frozen). I see from the hardware list that some related devices seem to be supported so at some point i'd like to try doing that. It is more for a "here is how to actually make use of hardware resources without sucking" personal statement than something i really need (my 1st gen iPod Touch still works fine after all), so it might take a while for me to bother trying :-P.

MayeulC 9y ago
> and X server (no Wayland) May I know why that is? By all accounts, Wayland is more adapted to embedded devices, with a cleaner architecture. I don't think that you need features such as xdraw, printer and gpu drivers, input handling or a lot of what isn't display related baked into the compositor. I tkink that PostmarketOS could actually fit your goal quite well (you can run a variety of desktop environments on it, with Xorg o'er Wayland, including lightweight ones such as i3). But of course, the project is still in its infancy, although the community is pretty welcoming, and would probably be happy to help you get started ;)
- djsumdog 9y ago
  I can understand why people are hesitant with Wayland, because they look at things like systemd (which is still a usability nightmare, although it does make packaging much easier). I recently ran Wayland/Weston on my home theater PC running Void Linux. For the most part it semi-worked. I have few native wayland apps, so almost everything ran through xwayland. Steam was weird; as the mouse was offset about 300px to the right and down. I'd have to hover away from stuff to click on it. Kodi would often Flicker (my HTPC just uses Intel ingratiated graphics). Most of the Games (both Steam and Humble) worked fine though. Weston, the reference implementation, just isn't that great. I ended up going back to X11/Gnome3 after getting sick of the graphics glitches and bugs, and forgot how terrible gnome is now (I've used i3 on my desktop for years). I might go the Wayland route with Sway (i3 clone for Wayland) on my dev box, but Weston was honestly still too buggy for prime time on my media pc. I do agree though, X11 is old and awful and Wayland is a big improvement over X11. But I do run X11 apps remotely over SSH (something the wayland people assume no one does) and when asked about it, they kind just hand wave everything away like someone just needs to write a plug-in and it will work. postmarketOS might be the big push to really get Wayland mainstream. I'm really impressed by postmarketOS and hope it will be what Linux was for the x86/PC in the mobile world. You could install Linux on everything back in the 90s/2000s. ARM is a cluster fuck of random shit connected to random pins that are different on every SoC. This is a real major step to true alternative mobile OSes.

greenhouse_gas 9y ago

Does postmarketOS use android-based binary blobs, and what does it have over such projects as Google-Free LineageOS (as in, if you don't flash opengapps) or Replicant?

ollieparanoid 9y ago
The biggest difference is, that Android's build system is completely avoided as of now. The system consists of small packages, and you can easily modify those parts without rebuilding the entire system. Regarding blobs, right now there are no blobs running in the userspace. Firmware blobs are needed for Wifi for example. There are plans to both allow proprietary blobs in userspace (to get accelerated graphics for people who want that trade-off), but at the same time to make these entirely optional. Relevant part of the post[0]: "In contrary to most Linux on smartphone projects, almost all these photos and the video are taken off devices which do not run proprietary code on the main CPU. The only exception is the Droid 4, which @NotKit owns. He is actively working on making proprietary Android drivers usable in postmarketOS with libhybris. Libhybris allows devices lacking FLOSS drivers to make full use of their hardware." "While we don't welcome binary blobs and prefer to sandbox them where we ship them at all, we embrace this solution for people who want it. However we intend to keep closed source components entirely optional, so you can run pmOS as libre as you want it." [0]: https://postmarketos.org/blog/2017/12/31/219-days-of-postmarketOS/#libre-drivers-and-libhybris https://postmarketos.org/blog/2017/12/31/219-days-of-postmar...
- greenhouse_gas 9y ago
  >right now there are no blobs running in the userspace. Firmware blobs are needed for Wifi for example. What about kernel space?
  - ollieparanoid 9y ago
    For most devices, we're running the vendor forks of the Linux kernel (mostly Android). The source of all of them is available, just like the mainline Linux kernel. With that being said, the stock Linux kernel and its vendor forks contain obfuscated code and even (small) blobs. To get rid of that we would need to package something like the Linux-libre patchset [0]. From what I know, no one is planning this currently, but if someone is interested in this, I don't think anyone in the community would be against having this as option. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_libre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_libre

XorNot 9y ago

I love this project. A genuine practical option for open source on mobile is something we desperately need.

Abishek_Muthian 9y ago

[Off-topic] Most manufactures when they had small consumer base were developer friendly, it is when they gain significant market they stop being one. I can think of few technical reasons as well, 1. To sustain competition they have build their IP (e.g camera blob, Personal Assistant) . 2. Security as a commodity, especially for enterprise customers. OnePlus has deep relations with XDA community, Oppo's Find series phone was actively contributed and If I'm right; the mods got free devices then. Oxygen OS team was by itself Paranoid Android team. OnePlus devices could be the best 'modder' friendly phone right now, the question is how long they would be able to keep it that way.