I thought this thread would be good for discussing resurrection of older smartphones with newer Android versions. Older phones are still usable today with many new ROMs (most libre/open) and with kernel customizations. They also don't have some of the botnet that newer devices have.
I'm currently typing from a Galaxy S5 SM-G900FQ. I retired my trusty old I9300 (Galaxy S3) a few days ago, because it was getting really slow with Android 7.1, and the MicroSD slot and MicroUSB broke. I built my own Lineage build.
By the way, it's really a great time to own a klte. New ROMs with enhancements are popping up everyday, official LineageOS will start from next Tuesday, there is a camera mod on XDA that allows 720p@120fps slow motion or 1x speed, and many kernels for optimization (currently running SmartPack with zzmoove with its native hotplug).
I think this is similar to resurrecting old ThinkPads with Linux, albeit with a bit more botnet (baseband), so I thought it would be interesting to discuss.
What about you? Are you running a custom ROM? What device? How's the speed? My current device is blazing fast right now compared to TouchJizz.
Resurrecting Old Phones
Other urls found in this thread:
lineageoslog.com
en.wikipedia.org
f-droid.org
f-droid.org
fdroid.libretro.com
blog.forkwhiletrue.me
planetcom.co.uk
twitter.com
Indians eat the most chilli peppers, does that make chilli peppers stupid?
But more on topic, I think that lineage isn't very light weight, it just android with more settings, I'm curious to hear about non android based OSes or a stripped down android one
Lisp phones when? :^)
Its literally AOSP with a file browser and built-in terminal (that needs to be enabled through developer settings) but bro its pretty damn barebones
There should be build instructions on how to build the kernel for your device. But I don't think it would be quite as simple as putting GNU in there since its all Googles own BSD-licenses libraries like Bionic
And also permission manager and some small settings like 4x4/5x5/6x6 lock patterns.
Running official experimental build for my XA2, works fine. Waiting for promised Saifish OS port, it should be less botnet and have more familiar Linux userspace, with coreutils, systemd, RPM and so on.
LineageOS and CyanogenMod before it have been very solid. I've gotten extra years out of all phones with those without major problems. Both my previous and current phone are going to die from hardware failure, not because unsupported outdated software.
I will admit, I did install LOS 15 on my LG G5 recently and it really does make a massive difference vs stock in terms of stability and smoothness. Its shocking how much carrier bloat can make a massive difference. Easily hundreds of MBs of RAM being used up by it. Its frustrating, because I do have experience with iOS devices, and usually the iOS end user experience really is significantly better than Android simply because Android lets carrier bloat onto it/ But it doesn't fucking have to be this way. Android CAN exceed iOS in terms of UI responsiveness and stability. I ONLY felt like the 500 bucks I payed for this device was worth it after installing LOS onto it. that's fucking sad. why is it so popular among Pajeets anyways?
You dumb nigger
I will get my brother's broken Samsung Galaxy A3 (2016) for tinkering soon. It's not supported by Lineage OS, but is there a guide on how to port Lineage OS to a new device? Or at least something to point me in the right direction?
en.wikipedia.org
iPhones are still devices that are by their nature tracking devices. Just because Tim Cook claims your iPhone is not spying on you doesn't mean it it will never have info on you. In order to get apps on the thing, you have to make an account. And since it's a phone it has to connect to cell towers meaning you can be located to some degree. At least with Android you can get away from Google once you flash a custom ROM.
Are you saying we shouldn't take things at face value? What the hell goy user, do you not believe Tim Cook? Are you a bigot?
no guide for porting, you're on your own basically
Good luck.
If pointing out reality makes me a bigot, so be it. If a person chooses to use a smartphone, it should be with the understanding that privacy is a massively uphill battle between software issues like OEMs keeping bootloaders locked, market issues like average joe blows buying into smartphones with said software issues, and of course the very nature of phones (connecting you with people). If you need a smartphone because of your family or job, then get a smartphone but don't pretend for a second that it's never getting info on you in some way.
But that data is used to make the Products and Services I use Better! Why would I not try to help my best ally, Google?
That said, you can probably ask around on #lineageos-dev and someone may help you. You may have to maintain the device, though.
Fuck Google, even if we forget the insane amount data they have on everyone, the company is like a kid hyped up on coffee and can't even make up their mind with products. With all the data they have and they still haven't realized that a lot of people enjoyed using Hangouts over their other failed shit like Duo?
And again, ignoring data hording and other bad things, at least MS and Apple can at least focus on one or two "decent" products.
I will give that a try then. Sage for OT
If the hardware was more "open" for lack of a better word, it would be relatively painless to roll your own distro based on Gentoo.
Imagine that, cross compiling Gentoo for your 8 year old phone and running your own program that is compatible with the meme communication of the season like matrix or similar.
My PC has the latest updates.
ARM is not mature so PC MASTER RACE !
It's ad business prints money, it has great capability to expand and try new things. I'm impressed that Google is smart enough to regularly kill projects without profit potential in "spring cleaning" without batting an eye and transfer gained experience to things that have. Google Wave (dead) pioneered a lot of tech for Google Docs suite (alive, churns profits). Hangouts experience transferred to Allo/Duo. Maybe those fail too, who knows, so what.
A retarded adult is no better than a smart kid.
Hey Anonymous,
You misspelled "it's"! The correct usage is "its".
downvote me to delete this. check /r/commonmisspellingsbot for more info
Good bot
Jesus christ why has it taken so many years for someone to figure out "hey maybe we shouldn't make everything an immutable bright white"?
No way to do it besides writing your own free drivers.
Normies are too retarded to allow any sort of quality control in any market, and they're in charge of phones.
I don't even think it's worth submitting a bug report, this shit is going to kablooey itself soon enough. Time for a fairphone or one of those Gnometrash Librem devices
I was pretty surprised there's already Oreo build for my Samsung Note 1.
I didn't use it that much due to the screen burn-in (yellowish whites and greenish blacks) but there's a screen calibration feature built in on Nougat and to my surprise I was able to calibrate it quite perfectly.
They sell Note 1 and 2 for around $40 and even less even with good condition. Even lesser if there's software and/or battery issues though there are variants which aren't exynos (avoid if possible).
IIRC samsung still have supplies for battery replacements,
I'm looking forward to acquiring a Note 4 which I think should be future proof
I'm still on my Nokia N9. Fuck fagdroid.
Hello russian hacker friend.
Someone has to tell mr kallikrates about package managers.
Good luck with your backdoored, unmaintained botnet phone. Android might be bad, but at least we can amend some of the issues. Whereas you're intentionally using malicious software for the sake of contrarianism.
Why are android people so retarded?
No one mentioned the Galaxy 5. OP mentioned the Galaxy S5. Pretty big difference, the Galaxy 5 is much older. Pics related.
What the fuck are you talking about? You think the N9 runs Windows Phone?
I found an old motorlla X2-01 in the trash. Pic isn't it, but it's the same model. I didn't find a charger but I plugged it into an usb port and it turns out it can charge through its proprietary charger aswell as the usb port. It seems like it's not beat up but it obviously saw heavy use, the screen is perfect but everything else is covered in scratches and the corners of the phone are rounded. The previous owner was smart enough to factory reset the phone, but dumb enough to leave a 2GB microsd in.
What fun things can I do with it? I instantly turned it into a microsd adapter because I don't have one and unlike android phones its "usb mass storage" option actually works. It seems like it supports those oldschool (as far as 10 years ago is oldschool) J2ME phone programs. It has a camera, bluetooth, no wi-fi, it somehow can play among other audio formats apple lossless.
And funnily enough its battery life is a lie, but not in the modern sense. It lasts more than what the phone claims. I've heard people claim it plays music for 7 hours but I left it playing an apple lossless encode of a led zeppelin CD on loop for 9~ hours while I slept and the battery was still at 4 bars.
Please bully me it's not a motorolla it's a nokia.
I thought I was in Zig Forums, not /g/.
There are no RYF certified phones yet but people are painstakingly working on it.
That's a defeatist attitude. Phones play a major role in technology so it must be given attention unless you're a cuck who get off from defeat and think avoiding botnet is a 'powerful' move
the charger isn't proprietary. You could cut up a USB cable and cold solder the charging pin (voltage + and -) since it's also 5V. Their chargers are actually better since you can move around the phone while micro USB charging pin and cables usually get crappy.
there are ROMs that have pic related - is an Orange mobile version of a Nokia phone.
Nokia N900 would be a better find though since you could fit there a linux kernel and a distro.
The first thing I usually do is send a blank.nol (blank image) operator logo via bluetooth so you won't see that telecom operator name on your home screen
You can buy from chinese online stores like ali
All phones are inherently a botnet. Even if you manufactured your very own custom phone, by law the phone has to be a botnet. It is impossible to have a phone that isn't a botnet. Now if you want a personal digital assistant that doesn't have any kind of phone facilities, that would be a different matter.
Has anyone tried making one out of an Android smartphone? It seems that you only need to remove a modem from the board.
Aren't the modems part of the SOC in some devices though?
At that point just buy a chingling palmtop that runs Linux.
Which brings the question, are there any 100% free software ones?
That's you.
What modern palmtops do you exactly know? Android "ecosystem" is far more preferable than GNU/Linux since it is more optimized for pocket pcs, without always-on radio such devices could score a week of lifetime on single charge. And you could even use proprietary Android applications in airgapped manner.
Sometimes they're separate. Check the teardowns and datasheets.
What exact solution for cellular tower network would be freedom respecting?
Communally-run hot spots connected to an interplanetary mesh network?
Freeing modem firmware is not enough, the power is still in hands of those who own communication channels.
I'm aware the market is dead, the only recent one I know of is the GPD Win
It's a toy for manchildren, with short battery life. Both traditional PDA and smartphones are more optimized for one-handed operation and fit inside pockets, some even have styluses like Samsung Note.
I've seen this happen in person. Or at least to a very similar device.
There is the OpenPandora, and its successor the Pyra. Other than those, there's really not much.
GPD released another palmtop, the Pocket.
You are wrong, there is two phones that are not botnet and have a FOSS cellular modem software implementation, the samsung galaxy S2 and S3.
For the record, both are still stuck with some blobs and a proprietary bootloader, nevermind the inherent abuse in cellular. The only Replicant phone where I think a more authentic freedom via Replicant would be viable is the GTA04, and it's pretty obscure nowadays, not to mention not fully supported by Replicant, yet.
Poor bait.
Recommend some botnet-free bloatware-free software.
f-droid.org
Lightweight launcher. It's just a list of icons with a search bar using the system theme on top, it's one of the smallest launchers at ~100KB.
f-droid.org
xterm-based terminal emulator with good keyboard shortcuts, its own home folder and a built in package manager. Someone's going to say the package manager is bloat but it allows you to install a good portion of software you'd expect in a linux PC and get the same usability you would get out of a linux PC. Mine has things like sshd, ffmpeg and irssi for instance. The home folder is a necessity because on android the terminal is basically useless, but a package manager + a working home directory turn android into a linux distro. At the very least install the Termux:Boot extension which makes tmux start on boot and run scripts in one of its folders (I use it for sshd, you can use it for things like crond), but you might want to look into Termux:Styling for better looks.
fdroid.libretro.com
Multiplatform emulator collection, has a nice android UI.
I'm almost botnet-free with replicant. Need non-communist implementations for the wi-fi/camera/gps/bluetooth/bootloader and it's a fully freedom-loving anti-stalinist phone.
One day It'll happen.
Anyone try installing Kali-Linux on a Samsung Galaxy S-3 yet?
I have one.
I think it would be fun.
You know.
Testing out my home network and shit.
How did you flash the ROM properly? I have i9300, but it's stuck in a boot loop regardless of what I try to flash it with.
The first thing I did was mount the phone via go-mtpfs and put the zip at the root of the directory, but that isn't relevant because I never got past that point.
After that, I set the phone into recovery mode and plugged it in. I passed heimdall flash --BOOT recovery-i9300.img --RECOVERY recovery-i9300.imgBut that didn't work (I don't remember the output), so I passed the command as super user, and the dialogue said everything was okay, but it never booted past that.
That sounds almost as stupid as your sentence structure.
Are you sure you're rebooting to recovery? I can't help with heimdall, I first flashed my s3 way back in 2012 with ODIN when heimdall didn't even exist and I've been using the recovery I had to flash a new one ever since then.
It's the same shortcut as ODIN mode but with the other volume button.
As soon as you see the Samsung Galaxy S3 text on your screen let go of the reboot button or it'll actually reboot again. If you let go of your key combo before that the phone doesn't register the buttons you were holding either. This is valid for rebooting to recovery, odin aswell as normal reboots. It's due to some retardation in samsung's proprietary bootloader.
If the S3 bootloops it doesn't stop bootlooping until it's out of power so remove the battery from the phone for 30 seconds and put it back in, the phone will stay turned off when you put the battery back in. Try booting into the recovery while it's not bootlooping.
I think it's not news to anybody that samsung is retarded when it comes to software, but I've had such weird things as the S3 not booting Android unless I go to TWRP and tell it to reboot to the system partition at least once, after which every reboot works.
Android just works, I'd wait until the s3 is properly mainlined to try a real linux distro. This guy is working on it and his work will also help a lot of similar devices. There'll come a time when random batches of devices samsung made between 2010-2013 get all mainlined at once because samsung reuses a lot of hardware.
blog.forkwhiletrue.me
There's also the Gemini. It dual-boots Android and proper GNU/Linux.
planetcom.co.uk
you must be 35+ to post here
nah