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Since Linux seems to be the theme of the week (and if not, I'll make it so *sips Early Grey*), I'll do another post about it.
/Cockney Accent/:
Got an ole mobi/handy sitting in a drawr sumwher with no sim? Chalkin' up dust, cryin in a corner, sippin on to the last drops of it's battery life? Sounds like you need to flash it with a new OS, mate.
/Normal Accent/:
Usually, LineageOS¹ is the way forward here. You'd flash your recovery partition with TWRP², and then flash your root file system with Lineage, and you'd have a modern android OS without any of the google bloat.
Problem is, you're still using google code and you're still dependent on them to not make a breaking change that makes your phone completely redundant.
Enter PostmarketOS. This is as close to pure linux on an android phone as you are likely going to get. It supports only a handful of devices³, but it is surprisingly accessible to build your own image, you just need to write a "pmaport" with flashing offsets⁴⁺⁵ and kernel parameters
As of yesterday, I resurrected one of my phones with one of their pre-built ports, though with great difficulty: the vendor disabled fastboot in the newest over-the-air (OTA) update, so I had to resort to using the fantastic EDL⁶ library to manually talk to the device.
I'm running a desktop flavour called Phosh⁷ based on Gnome which was written for Librem5 phone from Purism. It's a bit cluttered, though it's very easy to switch between concurrent apps.
There's no real email app, so I installed evolution, and that was clearly not designed to be run on a smartphone. Firefox works well. The media player is good. The terminal is built-in.
For my phone with low specs, the desktop might be a bit overkill, so I might try one of the many others (Plasma Mobile, or Sxmo)⁸ later.
Still, it's been fun to have a device I can SSH into, do X11 forwarding, and treat as mini-webserver.
If you've looked at the compatibility list in reference (3) you'll notice that barely any pmOS devices have camera capabilities due to the closed source nature of these devices (a damn damn shame...), but one thing I will try is to hook a USB camera via the USB-on-the-go capability of the device and use it as a mini home security/surveillance device using the motion⁹ tool.
That's all for now!
[Footnotes]
https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/LG_Fx0_(lg-madai)
I have this phone stock as it came out of the factory, rather neat looking IMO but less special with the Nothing phone out now. I would happily ship it to you to mess around with and to archive the software on it.
All that (including the Update) sounds danged fun and interesting, if I only had a brain.
And I say that sort of analogy-istically, as last Friday "I" wound up groveling around in what might be called a biological substrate zone, some odd seizure-istic state prompting my wife to hail an ambulance - whose ride I don't remember save for something like half a moment what I want to say was about 2/3rds the way down our street.
So I was somehow removed from bed, out the front door, into the vehicle, driven some 10 miles (sorry... don't remember the metric conversion factor at the moment...), into a hospital, and didn't "come to" until, sheesh... not even sure... was it midday?
I dunno.
Somehow it all seems remotely related to your describing old USB limitations, hence my fumbling with da keyboard again in order to make allegedly intelligible text magically appear on your screen.
So much I'd like to write. But then I remember just how private our individual instantiations of a common language are. It's like what for me is an indirection operator might be exponentiation for you. Something like that. Except we're both convinced the other is attempting to mean what we'd mean with the same symbol(s), but just not very good at it, just being intentionally difficult, etc., etc.
Check out this example (he says in his mostly private language):
I applied for some position in weworkremotely.com, and was eventually told it was already filled... but that I should contact some so-and-so because I sounded like I'd be a great assistant for them.
And so I did.
But the reply I received, well, it was a textural nightmare, sort of an amalgam of what I'd forwarded to said person from the person who recommended me, and a string of not-well-delimited thoughts laying half dead in a minefield of typos... and of course the first thing that came to mind was "Holy fucking shit, I'm being scammed!"
So, you know.. a couple more email exchanges.. and I'm maybe sorta kinda thinking the situation might be legit.. but for the life of me can't understand how to trust whoever's communicating with me on the other end. I'm under the impression (clarity has been damned hard to come by so far) they're out of the (i.e. my) country, but soon returning, they're allegedly preparing a list of things for me to pursue on their behalf, but I can't think of a single thing they've sent my way that gives so much as a 50% sense of legitimacy.
About the best they could do to garner trust was to stammer along the lines of why else would they be speaking so candidly from their core - which, of course, to me sounded more like poorly assembled ramble-mania. :-)
Anyway, this is part reply to this thread, part reply to the other wherein the notion of corruption came up.
Am I really to the point where I don't trust anyone save my wife, dad, and siblings? I mean, whoa, holy fucking shit.... And yet that's roughly where I wind up whenever putting more than a little thought into it.
The USB-on-the-go (OTG) webcam idea is dead in the water. The problem is that when the webcam is plugged in, it draws power from the phone and the phone just cannot output that much to make the webcam functional.
There are USB OTG "splitter" cables, that split the data into one cable and the power into another, and this *would* solve that problem (i.e. data is plugged into phone, power is plugged into a plug socket)...
Then I realised that there's another problem: There's no way to power the phone when something else is plugged into it. I searched around, looking for micro USB OTG cables that can simultaneously host devices and draw power, but it just doesn't exist for older USB.
USB-C I think can act as both a host and peripheral, but older USB operates under a distinct slave/master relationship.
So now I need to get creative again.
Ooh, sounds like fun. Sadly my experience with PostmarketOS on the pinephone has been a bit too unreliable for me to use it as a daily driver. (Though I'm running it as my daily driver on the pinebook pro and it's been awesome for that.)
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