7 ms·
600 days of postmarketOS
- bodo-rab 8y agoNice blog-post and nice project! Rock on!
- ollieparanoid 8y agoThanks! :)
- priansh 8y agoCongratulations! This is one of the most amazing projects I've seen on here and I can't believe I haven't heard of this earlier, especially since you got the phones to boot it as well! Amazing article as well. I learned 600 new things from this :) Do you have any more information on sh.rt and its use cases?
- wezm 8y agoYou can read more about sr.ht at https://meta.sr.ht/ https://meta.sr.ht/ as well as on Drew’s blog https://drewdevault.com/2018/11/15/sr.ht-general-availability.html https://drewdevault.com/2018/11/15/sr.ht-general-availabilit...
- ollieparanoid 8y agoTo anyone who would like to see sr.ht grow, please note that Drew DeVault is running it on donations. He chose to go work full time on free software with these donations: > I need to clarify that despite choosing to work full-time on these projects, my income is going to be negative for a while. I have enough savings and income now that I feel comfortable making the leap, and I plan on working my ass off before my runway ends to earn the additional subscriptions to sr.ht and donations to fosspay et al that will make this decision sustainable in the long term. https://drewdevault.com/2019/01/15/Im-doing-FOSS-full-time.html https://drewdevault.com/2019/01/15/Im-doing-FOSS-full-time.h...
- Sir_Cmpwn 8y agoThanks ollie <3
- michaelmior 8y agoLooks like this was intended for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18929709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18929709
- ollieparanoid 8y ago> I learned 600 new things from this :) This made me smile, thank you :D
- _bxg1 8y agoMuch as I admire the goal and the scrappiness, doesn't it make way more sense to start with an AOSP foundation (without Google Services) and invest one's energy improving (or even forking) that experience instead of reinventing such an enormous wheel?
- geowwy 8y agoThey give pretty good reasons for what they're doing on their website: https://postmarketos.org/blog/2017/05/26/intro/ https://postmarketos.org/blog/2017/05/26/intro/
- cwyers 8y agoThe reasons don't really seem to address why Android has the issues it has -- device manufacturers don't upstream their code changes to the mainline Linux kernel, Linux doesn't have the same level of abstraction around hardware as eg Windows does, and the state of ARM SoCs isn't like the x86 platform where there's a lot of standards you can follow, everybody just ships bespoke code to boot their SoC and only their SoC. I don't see how shipping a "real" GNU/Linux userland addresses that.
- pjmlp 8y agoIt won't, as proven by netbooks distributions or Treble based handsets. Which has finally driven Google to change their Play Services access contract.
- vardump 8y agoIt's nice to see obsoleted hardware made useful once again. I can see this becoming only more popular over time. Phones show already a slowing pace of improvements, so maybe in the future devices can be useful (at least in some form) way beyond current 2-3 year period.
- eltoozero 8y agoWhat is the best way to help the project? I’ve got an old Sprint Samsung Epic 4G slider (WiMAX, the old 4G), that would love to be a little mobile terminal...might be a little too dated though... Anyway, this is a fantastic project and I’m eager to contribute!
- ollieparanoid 8y ago> I’ve got an old Sprint Samsung Epic 4G slider (WiMAX, the old 4G), that would love to be a little mobile terminal...might be a little too dated though... Give it a try then, here's the step-by-step porting guide: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Porting_to_a_new_device https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Porting_to_a_new_device > What is the best way to help the project? See https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Contributing https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Contributing > Anyway, this is a fantastic project and I’m eager to contribute! Happy to read that \o/
- alrs 8y agoI've found that it kinda-sorta works, on some hardware. I really wish they were targeting Debian instead of something as prone-to-broken as Alpine, but beggars can't be choosers.
- MYEUHD 8y agohttps://postmarketos.org/faq.html#why-is-postmarketos-based-on-alpine-linux https://postmarketos.org/faq.html#why-is-postmarketos-based-...
- ollieparanoid 8y ago> something as prone-to-broken as Alpine How do you come to that conclusion? Sure, Alpine's edge repository has breakage, but so does Debian sid.
- morganvachon 8y agoAlpine doesn't make for a stable desktop OS, however it was never meant to be used on the desktop. I wonder if OP was referring to that.
- ac130kz 8y agoThis is something really interesting and great. Unfortunately, even to get the basic functionality (calls, audio) working, one has to spend a lot of time and effort.
- petemc_ 8y agoReally good idea, fair play to everyone working on it. I generally try to keep my phone as long as possible but the main driver to make me get new phone is the diminishing battery capacity. This isn't helped by the fact it is very hard to get a replacement battery shipped to where I live.
- zozbot123 8y agoIf you control the OS and hardware drivers on your device, you can preserve its battery capacity substantially by keeping its state-of-charge around 50% as far as practicable (keeping it from reaching not just "lows" which you should always do, but "highs" as well). We aren't even close to reaching the full amount of battery optimization that's possible on mobile.
- yorwba 8y agoI wonder how that advice applies if the battery capacity has already degraded significantly. For example, my current laptop's battery reports itself to be "100% charged" at 60% of its original capacity. Should I keep it around 30%? I don't really know enough about battery chemistry to understand how high levels of charge cause damage.
- zozbot123 8y agoNo, keep it hovering around 50% as much as you can, provided that it never ever reaches really low states of charge, 15% or less. State of charge is always relative to the capacity at current time, not the original factory capacity.
- andai 8y agoThat's very interesting, can I read more about this somewhere?
- hawski 8y agoAs my old ARM Chromebook gets nearer to it's EOL I start to look for how to install Linux on it. I'm wondering if postmarketOS could be used to do this. Has anyone tried to do something like this or where should I look? I'm slowly dabbling on my own Linux distribution [0]. I'm using Void Linux packages and build system to prepare a rootfs image. Thanks to how it's done in Void I can build the whole image without root on newer kernels. I intend to have the update model of ChromeOS (two partition scheme, reboot to update), but Void being a rolling release only distribution may bring me same pains as Alpine edge brings to postmarketOS. So I wonder: how's Alpine build system in comparison to Void's? Does pmbootstrap bring the isolation or is it already an Alpine feature? [0] https://github.com/hadrianw/tomatoaster https://github.com/hadrianw/tomatoaster
- m45t3r 8y ago> I intend to have the update model of ChromeOS (two partition scheme, reboot to update), but Void being a rolling release only distribution may bring me same pains as Alpine edge brings to postmarketOS. You're kind of reinventing NixOS, but worse (NixOS has atomic upgrades and allows you to return to any generation of your system, not only the last one).
- hawski 8y agoNo, I'm reinventing ChromeOS. I started on this project with my father in mind, to make it easier for me to maintain his computer. My father would not run NixOS, but maybe I'm wrong. This will give a single image and very little tooling outside of end user parts. It probably will be much simpler. If totally seamless and _automatic_ updates can be achieved with NixOS I'm all ears.
- zozbot123 8y agoThe point of the ChromeOS dual-partition scheme is that ChromeOS system installs are read-only and immutable - they're the equivalent to creating a squashfs live system and burning it to a fresh CD, so it wouldn't make sense to de-duplicate data among them. If you don't care about this property and need more flexibility than that anyway (as with the average Linux distribution, which is updating stuff in /usr all the time), snapshots are the sensible choice and the dual-partition scheme is quite pointless.
- amiga-workbench 8y agoI've got piles of old devices, I wouldn't mind having a go at getting this to boot on my Xperia Z5c and Z3. I'm so glad this project exists, with smartphones being designed to be disposable embedded devices with none of the conveniences the IBM PC architecture provides this is going to be an uphill battle.
- opless 8y agoI am sure I’m missing the point, but surely getting the GSM/3/4G radio working for a voice call would be the whole point here and there’s zero calls made yet by postmarketOS, in over 600 days that’s a pretty bad state to be in. No? Is this supposed to be a Linux phone or not? confused
- em3rgent0rdr 8y agoGetting radio working is not the sole point. The original motivation as was presented to me in early announcements was to give smartphones a 10-year lifecycle [1]. So more about getting extra life out of all these old phones people have laying around rather than specifically getting them to work as people's primary mobile device. [1] https://liliputing.com/2017/08/linux-based-postmarketos-project-aims-give-smartphones-10-year-lifecycle.html https://liliputing.com/2017/08/linux-based-postmarketos-proj...
- opless 8y agoHmm. I can't say I can see the utility of doing that. But if they're enjoying themselves doing it, that's utility, in a way, all on it's own - I guess.
- em3rgent0rdr 8y agoThe utility is that instead of throwing away your old phone every two years, you can reconfigure it into become something else useful.
- opless 8y agoUsually by the time two years are up, my phone is usually not holding much of a charge and the mechanical bits are starting to fail. I'm pretty sure iPhones are not alone in being designed to last around 18-30 months
- pantalaimon 8y agoYou could turn your old smartphone into wireless speaker where you can stream e.g. AirPlay to.
- herogreen 8y agoVery very nice project. Did you communicate with the lead developper of the Zero phone ? (https://www.crowdsupply.com/arsenijs/zerophone https://www.crowdsupply.com/arsenijs/zerophone) These two projects could be a great match I think. I hope to start hacking on my Motorola E 4G (surnia) for which works has started on the wiki but it is my main phone and I need to keep it working :(