Hello internet,

what is the current state of re-locking bootloaders on devices that previously ran Android?

Any implementations? How does that work?

This is a follow-up to my earlier post: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/12809764

(I re-used the photo as it was quicker and because the UI still looks the same, anyway, five months later.)

Time for an update on where I got with the Pixel 3a / 3a XL so far:

I Am Getting There.

There isn't that much missing anymore. Will probably soon try this out as my daily driver, just did not yet have the time to configure all the applications I need. :)

This Works

• booting
• display
• touch
• modem
• plymouth
• battery/charging
• mobile data
• wifi
• torch
• suspend
• SMS (only receiving was tested, but I don't have reason to believe sending wouldn't work)
• vibration (udev rule needs to be added to the corresponding package)
• audio (ALSA config not packaged, but I'll get to that...)
• Bluetooth™ (mac address has to be set after each boot, one single command, should probably package a script, still thinking about the right path)
• eSIM (supported, but needs a bit more testing)
• camera (front camera buggy, back camera works but patches not in git yet)
• GPS (needs some improvements to accuracy)

This Does Not Work (Soon)

• USB host mode
• call audio (requires packaging q6voiced to get audio from the modem, but of course VoIP would already work)
• full disk encryption (no installer images yet, once the other stuff is done this will magically be there)

This Has An Unknown Status

• Fingerprint Sensor
• NFC (no idea what software I could use for testing, but should work, does so on pmOS)

This Is Missing And Will Come Later

• accelerometer
• magnetometer
• ambient light sensor
• barometer

The Main Issues That Prevail

• A systemd unit with a hard-coded value, that has to be manually edited for now
• ALSA config not yet packaged, has to be manually copied for now
• few things to do for kernel packaging and then submitting that to Mobian
• no call audio yet, as the daemon (q6voiced) is not yet packaged, but can be manually added for now (I'm considering just using VoIP until I can get to that :D)
• simple script that brings up Bluetooth has to be added somewhere

Other than that, I cannot think of anything else that would be missing.

The Sources (Use The Source, Luke)

• My efforts of packaging a device-specific kernel: https://salsa.debian.org/erebion/sdm-670-linux (which will be used until all patches are part of upstream Linux and we can finally use a regular mainline kernel)
• mobian-recipes, which is used to build images: https://salsa.debian.org/Mobian-team/mobian-recipes
• droid-juicer, which retrieves some important files from some partitions: https://gitlab.com/mobian1/droid-juicer
• https://wiki.postmarketos.org (lovely folks, thanks for sharing everything you found out the hard way :D)

Thanks For All The Fish

Huge thanks to be sdm670-linux project and flamingradian who runs the project (just one person!) to make sure the Kernel works on those devices! :)

I don't know how Kernel development works, so I would have never started porting without this project.

Find that here: https://gitlab.com/sdm670-mainline/linux

Questions Accepted / Ask Me Anything About The Project

I will gladly answer all questions, I hope that more people will start porting if it becomes clear that this is not arcane magic. It's mostly just arcane. And a community of friendly people that try to be helpful.#

I personally don't use it, but I often see people complaining that they cannot use it on their Linux phone and that might help.

I stumbled across a project which implements the client connection, like the app does, for WhatsApp: https://github.com/WhiskeySockets/Baileys

That would allow building a third-party WhatsApp client.

That should also be relatively simple to integrate into a Matrix bridge such as mautrix-whatsapp. Apparently it uses the same API as the app, but it authenticates as a web client. If someone were to implement the authentication of the app, people could start using WhatsApp without the app and also comfortably bridged to Matrix.

You can still link the bridge to the app currently, but the app needs to be online or the bridge will get disconnected after a few days. And if you don't want to have a phone constantly running, you probably want a VM for the app and then that all gets fiddly.

Also, I recently found a blog post on how to build Matrix bridges, so that should be feasibe if anyone wants to implement that as part of the existing bridge: https://mau.fi/blog/megabridge-twilio/

Most parts work, still not sure why Bluetooth gives me errors in dmesg, audio out works, microphone input not yet... I'm getting there.

But graphics, charging, low standby power consumption, LTE, wifi... those all work already.

The fact that postmarketOS has support and also that there are people working on mainline support, makes this a task that is not as difficult as I thought, as most work was already done for another distro.

Otherwise it runs more fluid than Android ever did on it and it has a great standby time (forgot to turn it off at around 80 % and a few days later it was at 58 %).

For now stuck on merging the Kernel patches from the sdm670-mainline project with those from Mobian, not really something I can do without knowing C. I just hope someone with the right skills does it at some point.

Then I just need to make some smaller merge requests, like one to add a udev rule for vibration support and so on.

Not much missing before I can finally use it as a daily driver.

What is the current state of Gnome mobile?

Will the patches get merged to the main branch, so it just becomes available on all diatributions?

Why has only PostmarketOS packaged it so far?