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.
Excellent! As nice as PmOS is, Mobian seems more at home for me and I am definitely looking forward to try it on my Fairphone 5 sometimes in the nearish future.
Awesome work! If you don't mind me asking, what help/sources did you use to get this far in porting efforts? I have some free time on my hands and would like to try porting a newer phone such a pixel 4a or similar
Help: A lot via the Mobian Ports ( #mobian-ports:matrix.org ) Matrix room and the postmarketOS offtopic ( #offtopic:postmarketos.org ) Matrix room.
Sources: Not much there yet. As soon as there are official builds for the Pixel 3a, I will start writing docs. I already have a lot of notes on what I had to do. But first I need to have someone merge the Kernel patches, as I don't know C, which makes resolving merge conflicts really hard, it turns out. Once that is done, there are just a few smaller merge requests left and builds will appear magically.
That was easy as dmesg will just tell you what files it cannot load because they are missing. Just find those, write the config, run droid-juicer, reboot... boom. Display, Wifi, LTE and so on working.
That's all not that hard, my main difficulty was finding out what to do.
Everything I did so far would be an afternoon of work, if I had just found the necessary information much quicker. Instead I spent two weeks, of which 95 % was finding info, lol.
Just join the Mobian Matrix room, we should be able to help you, even though I know far less than the others there...so far. :p
I do hope that's helpful and I'll happily try to answer more questions. :)
I know C and I have a pixel 3a. I could probably help out with the kernel patches if you want. I'm not totally clear what work needs to be done. You just need someone to help get those patches merged against the mobian upstream kernel?
Impressive! I'm looking at postmarketOS wiki and it's amazing how many phones are supported now. But it seems they are not working as well as PinePhone or Librem 5 yet.
forgot to turn it off at around 80 % and a few days later it was at 58 %
Damn, I wish my PinePhone was this energy efficient!
A64 (the SoC for PinePhone) is mostly intended for set-top boxes (i.e. smart TV), so it is really not designed for power efficiency.
It's really a bummer that most "smartphone" SoCs cannot easily be purchased, and have no proper documentations. Thinkers and smaller manufacturers are stuck with mostly Allwinner and Rockchip SoCs (most of which are engineered as embedded processors) if they want to design something from starch at all.
The keyboard addon helps a lot, but it makes the phone big and heavy. I wonder what it's like with those extended battery cases that you can buy or 3D print.
You could join the Mobian Matrix room or the PostmarketOS room I have mentioned in another post on this thread (or whatever the right term is... Comment on a post? Sub-post?). I did not know anything about porting two weeks ago, but asking dumb questions helps learning.
Both use the underlying stack:
gnome-session, g-c-c, network and modem manager, etc.
And both follow the gnome design patterns for mobile.
But the shell's themselves, gnome-shell and phosh are different, phosh is written in gtk and gnome-shell is not.
So sharing code between the two shells is hard.
Very much not. GNOME Shell Mobile was funded by the German Prototype Fund in 2022 IIRC, way later than Phosh was created (funded by Purism for their Librem 5). GNOME Shell Mobile will eventually be part of GNOME proper (meaning it's Mutter, and GNOME Shell, patched to work on small devices), currently it's a patch set on top of multiple GNOME components that's packaged in postmarketOS and the AUR (if you consider AUR stuff packaged).
Phosh was created on based on wlroots (which is also used in Sway and other wayland-native window managers) and GTK3, as a Mobile Shell. Ironically, this way was pursued because Purism developers where told by the GNOME Shell people that an adaptation of GNOME Shell for Mobile would not be feasible.
Both rely on designs created by (at least then) Purism-employed designer Tobias Bernard IIRC, and thus may seem quite similar despite being based on a different tech stack, and both are hosted on GNOME's Gitlab, using all the same apps.
Not exactly. But while UBPorts has a good looking user interface, they don't have many UBPorts apps yet. A regular distribution can often be more useful, but as always it depends on the use-case.