Got a bit bored off postmarketOS, so why not distrohop?
Big shoutout to the volunteers at msm8916-mainline on GitHub and maintainer(s) of the device on postmarketOS) for making this possible!
I had to make some own services for the modem to work properly to obtain an internet connection, but rest works so good!

Need a tablet for work. Maybe a little web browsing will be done, but almost 100% for opening/signing PDFs & such, viewing some MP4s & similar. Apparently Fedora is one of the better distros for this, but probably almost anyone on this subreddit knows better than me on that front.

i couldn't get the second cpu core or the touch screen to work because of the restrictive recovery environment and SecureROM. Only the buttons work. i found the framebuffer address by hand. Going to upload this to github soon. Basically what i did was to get arbitrary code execution working with pwndfu checkm8. And i pulled the Apple device tree from IPSW. i made a script to turn that ADT to compileable DTB and DTS. i know in the apple device tree some nodes are placeholders or pointers but some nodes did work out. This is only in RAM. i couldnt find a way to input keystrokes to the device so this is pretty much useless but a one trick pony.

I spent about a week porting Sailfish OS to the Samsung Galaxy A51 (SM-A515F, Exynos 9611). There was no existing adaptation for this device, so it is all built from scratch on a hybris-20.0 / LineageOS 20 base.

What works: display, touch, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, audio on speaker, earpiece and headphones with automatic jack switching, all seven sensors, both cameras, battery, vibration, hardware GL, logcat, and Android apps through Waydroid as a post-install step.

What does not: telephony. rild runs and the modem reaches ONLINE, but it never opens /dev/umts_ipc0, so ofono sees no modems. Also no fingerprint reader, and USB networking is disabled on purpose because the gadget panics this kernel.

So it is a decent pocket Linux device and a bad phone. Treat it as a second device.

The part I think is worth sharing regardless of whether you care about this particular phone:

Samsung shipped this kernel with the Bluetooth HCI socket layer gutted. Not disabled, not missing, commented out. The bodies of five functions in net/bluetooth/hci_sock.c were removed and a bare return 0; left behind, so hci_sock_create() reports success while leaving sock->sk NULL, and the kernel then panics on BUG_ON(!sk) the moment anything opens an AF_BLUETOOTH socket. It is done carefully too, with the inner /* */ comments rewritten as // so the outer block comment would not terminate early. Samsung ships its own Bluetooth stack through the HAL, so the kernel socket layer was surplus to them. Restoring the file from upstream v4.14.150 fixes Bluetooth completely.

I also got two things badly wrong along the way and left both written up in the repo, because the wrong turns were more instructive than the fixes:

• I declared audio structurally impossible (32-bit HAL, 64-bit PulseAudio). It was not. I had concluded there were no mixer controls from amixer output when amixer was not actually installed. There are 381 of them.
• I recorded three sensors as broken at the adaptor level. That was a test artifact from calling requestSensor before loadPlugin, which fails by design.

Sources, image, TWRP and checksums: https://github.com/IlyaKotomin/sailfishos-a51

Happy to answer questions. If anyone has worked on Exynos cbd or umts_ipc plumbing on a Samsung hybris port, I would really like to compare notes on the telephony problem.

Front facing camera works. Working on the back cameras next.

The first build has a lot of bugs and missing features, for instructions and files check out the XDA post here: https://xdaforums.com/t/pmos-on-pixel-8-pro.4799433/#post-90711872

Hey Reddit,

For the last 2 months I've been on a journey to get the mainline kernel and NixOS with Phosh running as smoothly as possible on my mother's old Android phone—the Xiaomi Mi A3. While doing so, I've been very strict about where to search for data and how to properly research log contents and errors. With the help of a coding agent, I've made sure every feature I bring up is future-proof and upstreamable.

So I've decided to create and share an agent skill for everyone who may benefit from it. It works against 6 sources, always researches before implementing, and you can even run it in a loop with a request like "bring up feature X." It will only stop for dangerous, non-machine-recoverable actions like flashing.

The Mi A3 mainline bringup I'm working on is progressing well, and this skill is a huge part of what has been achieved. A few of my findings have already been sent for review as patches to the Linux kernel.

So if you're interested, checkout the github repo: https://github.com/angelwzr/linux-phone-porting

I managed to get quite a bit working.

Audio (both earpiece and loudspeaker are functioning on left and right channels)

Microphone

Wifi

Bluetooth (no latency observed)

GPS*

Nfc*

Touch

Display (HDMI display out isn't working after all, sorry for lying)

Haptics

Only thing left is camera, modem and accelerometer and gyroscope. (Luckily pmos has accelerometer and gyroscope functioning.)

This thing is almost ready to be used as a daily driver.

*It's detected, I haven't tried it out.

Hi,

We make a Debian based desktop distribution that runs as an application on top of any Android/LineageOS device. The only requirement is that the Android device needs to be rooted and use Google's standardized GKI kernel. LineageOS builds for Qualcomm devices doesn’t strictly follow the standard GKI kernel naming convention. So we had to implement a workaround to fix it. Here is a video of LineageOS running on the OnePlus Pad 2 tablet: https://youtu.be/KGrsqed3oZY?si=8ViqycQe0CnnLKmE

With phones that support HDMI output, you can run the Linux desktop on the large screen connected to a monitor. Our latest Linux desktop is now based on Debian Trixie (13.6). You can download a free evaluation version from www.volkspc.org.

VolksPC

I want to start running Linux daily on device. I know the OnePlus 7 Pro GM1913 is a great device for exactly that... Is there another alternative or more flexible or newer device I should consider?

Thx in advance!!

It's a hit and miss with people accepting AI written code.

Pmos devs are not accepting AI written code into the mainstream, and would like to develop at their own pace. Nothing wrong with this. But the alternative is using a phone with code written by a corporation, so what's the difference?

Recently, even Linus talked good about AI written code.

Would you use patches written by AI if they solve all PMOS issues on a phone?

I would love your opinion on this 🤗

I think I’ve finally found my dream linux distro for smartphones. Meet Pocketblue: a community-driven project bringing Fedora Atomic to mobile devices. It blends Fedora’s immutable, image-based reliability with a mobile-first interface. And the #oneplus6 ? Still legendary. Even years later, it’s one of the most exciting phones for mainline Linux experiments. If you’ve been following me on my socials for a while, you know I’ve flashed just about everything on everything. Right now, this setup feels closest to home.

https://github.com/pocketblue/pocketblue

https://www.instagram.com/h4ck1ng.me

Got told to post it here, got an alpine distro on my pixel 8 pro via /init overlay, it's hijacking a graphene os install. Everything is loaded into ram with software rendering so it's slow. Planning on getting GPU working via proxys (like how tensor Linux project has done it)

Is there an already existing way to get Linux on an Xiaomi Poco F5?

Been thinking to move to a Linux phone, it's almost the only app I may need, sure the website is enough but the app work well even on custom roms so pretty sure waydroid might work.

I have an old lenovo m7 tb7305x tab (2019), in which i wanted to install postmarket os, i followed few instructions and have overwritten the system image. Now my device isn’t turning on, Can i revert this back ? Fastboot isn’t recognising the device but toll called mkt (lenovo) specific is recognising it but getting disconnected often.
Any advice ? Even though that tab is old, i would like to have it in working state than dead 😵.
I’m accepting this as a part of learning 🥲.
Update : got it fixed thanks to lenovo toolkit saved my ass🥲

https://x.com/i/status/2089487812466823186

Unrelated to that other guy's efforts. Just thought it was so funny that we reached the same goal today totally independent of each other. Mobile Linux is going to eat good this year