
219 days of postmarketOS - ajr0
https://www.postmarketos.org/blog/2017/12/31/219-days-of-postmarketOS/
======
AdmiralAsshat
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.

~~~
veeti
The Xperia phones are very developer hostile if you ever intend to return back
to the official software. Unlocking the bootloader wipes the TA partition
which is required for camera and many other features on stock ROM.

~~~
throwawayfinal
It's required for the proprietary camera algorithm software. The camera still
works.

~~~
veeti
That's true of older models, but unlocking the newest ones seems to break the
stock camera entirely:

[https://forum.xda-developers.com/xperia-xz1-compact/how-
to/h...](https://forum.xda-developers.com/xperia-xz1-compact/how-to/how-to-
root-xperia-xz1-compact-t3712385)

------
TuringTest
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.

~~~
gcb0
that's the dumb (sorry) idea that hold Linux on the desktop for so long.

lots of time wasted without any big increase in adoption.

companies making the devices standards (apple, google, samsung) all make lots
of money from ads, and subscription services. both of those things get huge
advantage if you can lock in your customer.

we are still living the main frame age on mobiles. even if you can install
your os on old and new devices, it doesn't matter, because they can cut you
out of whatsapp or youtube (see Amazon firephone)

the os is irrelevant to adoption. but it must have the or dictate killer apps.
when foss solve IM, social and ugc video streaming, then the personal computer
era will begin on mobiles.

~~~
saagarjha
> companies making the devices standards (apple, google, samsung) all make
> lots of money from ads, and subscription services

I think that’s only true for one of the companies in your list.

~~~
gcb0
see imusic and ipay revenue projections for apple. and see how much they
invested (and projected) for iAd before giving up.

samsung also tried it all. and they make a killing selling pre-installed
bloatware in PCs as phones. which is pretty much advertising.

------
badsectoracula
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
> 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
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.

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

------
floatboth
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)

------
_wmd
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

~~~
lawl
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/)

~~~
XorNot
I mean what I really want is the ability to have my phone just be native
Linux/GNU with android in a container. Ideally I'd like to be able to have 2
androids in a container so I've for somewhere to dump work apps and other
invasiveness.

------
Abishek_Muthian
[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.

------
ocdtrekkie
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
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)

------
Fragoel2
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)?

~~~
spurgu
Making calls is ironically one of the least used features on my phone,
personally speaking. SMS I only use for 2FA.

~~~
khedoros1
In contrast, those are the reason that I carry a phone and pay for service. An
internet connection is a bonus, but the phone features are the only thing I
use it for that I wouldn't rather do on a more traditional computer.

------
rsync
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 ?

~~~
shravj
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.

~~~
josteink
I tried those just for kicks many years ago.

Long story short: The lack of HW acceleration made the UI (and thus everything
else) extremely sluggish. It wasn't even near usable for anything you'd like
to do on a regular basis.

It was a good gag to confuse co-workers with though.

------
zeveb
Argh, the site specifies its own background colour but _not_ its own
foreground colour, making it unreadable with a default dark theme.

~~~
ollieparanoid
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
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
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
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
Same here, I've got my old one lying around that I'd like to revive just for
fun.

------
peatmoss
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
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_(appl...](https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Apple_iPod_Touch_1G_\(apple-
ipt1g\))

[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
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
Awesome! \o/

------
greenhouse_gas
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
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-
postmar...](https://postmarketos.org/blog/2017/12/31/219-days-of-
postmarketOS/#libre-drivers-and-libhybris)

~~~
greenhouse_gas
>right now there are no blobs running in the userspace. Firmware blobs are
needed for Wifi for example.

What about kernel space?

~~~
ollieparanoid
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)

------
znpy
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
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
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-...](https://matrix.org/blog/2017/08/24/the-librem-5-from-purism-a-
matrix-native-smartphone/)

------
leeoniya
> 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)

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

------
miguelrochefort
Why do all of these OSes have to be so ugly?

It's a major turn off.

~~~
klez
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
> 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.

------
rnotarog
Dead link?

~~~
ztoben
Works for me. Must be getting more traffic than they expected.

~~~
MartijnBraam
My server got a magnitude more traffic than expected for a few minutes and
started swapping

~~~
snvzz
Time to dial down the threading then.

