Music. Photography. Thoughts.
Made me smile:
“This section describes how to set up your local work environment to build the Android source files. You must use Linux; building under either MacOS or Windows isn’t supported. Keep in mind the important change to the
https://source.android.com/docs/setup/build/initializing/usr/bin/pythonbinary as well.”
And yes, that’s Google, on how to build your own version of Android for phones or tablets…
I wrote about testing /e/OS on the older Google Nexus 5 device which we still have, and I like it a lot. The privacy aspect alone, using microG instead of the Google services, is wonderful. However, the latest official Android from Google is version 6 (codename ‘Marshmallow’), and the latest /e/OS is still based upon Android 7 (codename ‘Nougat’), so they’re both quite old even when the build on /e/OS is from October 2021.
But on the XDA developers’ forum, I found a much newer ‘unofficial’ version of LineageOS for the same device, based on Android 11. To install that, you need a bootloader which can repartition the device a bit, and then you can find links for the image and also for the ‘pico’ sized version of OpenGApps here. And together with the usual tools from Google and the howto from LineageOS, this is quite doable…
So by now my old phone looks a bit different again, in fact, *much* different from /e/OS:
And, checking the OS version, it indeed shows Android 11 (the build is only a few days old):
So *that* is interesting, isn’t it? Ok this is an unofficial build – thanks z3DD3r from XDA devs – but I’m very curios to check out this one…
This would have been a bit easier with the Pixel 3a which we just gave to my brother, because for that one you’ll still get official builds, even LineageOS for microG (that would be the ‘sargo’ image of LineageOS 19.1 (based on Android 12.1) from the LineageOS for microG pages…)
How cool… I’ll play around with the one a bit now, and keep an eye on the folks over at LineageOS – will they offer Android 13 for ‘sargo’? And next year, Android 14 for both ‘sargo’ and ‘sunfish’ (codename for my Pixel 4a)? I’ll keep you informed.
Edit, from 19:18 same day:
I rearranged the home screen a bit, and now that almost looks like my Pixel 4a phone with its original Android 13 from Google. Have a look:
As always, thanks for reading.
Also to Gnome…
Found via “Bits from Debian“, thanks to Laura for the reminder, thanks to Juliette for the awesome artwork! And thanks to the whole team for the whole thing.
And also a happy birthday to Gnome which was yesterday I think.
… Intel Alder Lake laptops if you want to use their webcams under Linux. See Phoronix.
Currently trying out Syncthing on both my mobile phones and on my machine. And it works beautifully on all devices; now photos taken with one of the phones are sent to my machine automagically…
As always, thanks for reading & viewing.
So starting this morning, I’m trying out /e/ on my Google Nexus 5 phone. Haven’t tried much so far, but set up a few contacts, email – the provided mail program is a fork of k9 which is nice, and I took some screenshots:
Of course the battery of my older phone isn’t as good as a new one, still have to see how long that will last between recharges. And the geolocation – see weather widget – is also not very precise, but that isn’t the phone’s fault, every other machine here which uses IP based geolocation based on the router’s address would show the same. The weather by the way is drawn from OpenWeatherMap, same as the weather widget in Gnome on Linux – very nice.
And yes, it looks like an iPhone, doesn’t it? But it’s an ePhone instead, with only free and open source software. So far I like it, even if it hasn’t (yet) all the bells & whistles of a modern Android, but let me explore more about it first…
As always, thanks for reading.
Update, from 13:49:
Not missing much so far… I’ve downloaded my own albums into the /Music folder on the phone, and the app shows them nicely:
So far, this all looks like a fully functional mobile phone. Have to interrupt for now, so more later…
Update2, from 16:11:
Just sent Mitchie to work, taking only the Nexus instead of my Pixel phone. And I had installed OsmAnd for offline navigation:
And what shall I say? That older phone with /e/OS connected to our Yaris Hybrid with Bluetooth, it played my music over the car stereo system and told me the route via OsmAnd, warning me about every pedestrian crossing (you can silence that if they’re too many). Perfect, and all of that without even inserting a SIM card into the device! Wonderful.
Again, thanks for reading – and more later.
A week ago, we swapped some phones. Mitchie got a new one, Zuleikha got her Pixel 4a 5G, and Zuleikha’s 3a went to my brother Willi in Cologne after packing it like this:
Which means that by now, I have the oldest phone in the household. Mine will still be supported until August next year, and by then I’d have to decide what other system to put on it. I wanted to test some, but not on my working phone – instead I grabbed for the much older Nexus 5 which we still have:
This isn’t supported even by LineageOS anymore, except if you’d install some unofficial custom ROM or even build one yourself. But that is currently a bit too much even for me, so I checked and found a supported environment in the e.foundation which looks like this:
So this afternoon I first charged that device, and when turning it on I first got a bist nostalgic, seeing that cute animated robot during the boot process, but anyway, it had to go. And now I have /e/OS on it:
What you can also see in case that you know /e/OS is that I already installed two more apps, namely F-Droid and Zapp (and by now, also Firefox Focus).
So – it will be interesting to see how this goes with no Google services on board. The installed MicroG fakes some of them, so that you can still get notifications, or run Google Maps if you’d need that – but I’ll try to keep it safe and simple. Will be interesting… and who knows, maybe I’ll even prefer this newly found privacy? And there’s no reason to dump a perfectly fine phone which isn’t even 10 years old… and it has a screen of under 5 inches which is FullHD and beats the current iPhone SE, go figure…
Anyway, like always, thanks for reading.
The problems that we all have with our “smart” mobile phones are two-fold – first, their vendors decide on how long you can use them with their support, second, they spy on you, me, and us all.
I wrote about the first problem lately, with Zuleikha’s Google Pixel 3a being supported until recently. It still runs Android 12 which is newer than what the vast majority of people have on their phones (according to Google’s stats), but it won’t get the next version 13 or any further security updates, thus it will be increasingly insecure.
There are mostly two alternative operating systems to remedy that, namely LineageOS and /e/ which is also based on LineageOS (and both are based upon the Android Open Source Project, or short AOSP). The differences between these are mostly that LineageOS by itself doesn’t use Google services (if you don’t install them), and is a bit harder to install especially for beginners, while /e/ comes with microG services which mostly replace Google’s services (which spy on you). There’s also a fork of LineageOS with microG, keep that in mind as well.
About that ‘spying’ and privacy part: here are two videos in German which concentrate a bit more on that part, and less on the sustainability aspect, so the first one also mentions GrapheneOS and CalyxOS, two alternatives in regard of security rather than longevity:
So yes, both GrapheneOS and CalyxOS run fine – on Pixel devices as long as these are supported by Google. But if the sustainability *and* the security aspects are equally important to you (as they should be to us all), then have a look at /e/ and/or at LineageOS, with or without microG.
/e/ by the way has its ‘Bliss’ launcher which looks much more like iOS rather than Android, but that could be changed with a few (non-mouse- but finger-) clicks. The look of it really reminds me of the iPhone SE (2020) I had for a while from my former employer, while LineageOS has the same ‘MaterialU’ (or whatever the name is) design language that the AOSP and also Google’s own Pixel devices are using. So choose your poison here, can’t discuss about aesthetics…
And /e/ also supports a number of devices still older than the ones supported by LineageOS, like for instance Google’s Nexus 5 (made by LG which was wonderful). It will still run a fork of Android ‘Nougat’, but hopefully by now a bit more secure than the original one…
There are many more videos, also in English, which explain all the differences between these operating systems, just wanted to push some of my own relatives into the general directions with the two from above.
And as always, thanks for reading, and for viewing.
The Linux kernel 5.19 is out. And it seems that Linus wrote his announcement on a Mac (with the newer M1 architecture) running Asahi Linux…
See also on lwn, The Register, or Phoronix – and probably soon all over the media… but don’t run and buy Macs for that right now, Apple does still not support Linux. And buying the latest and greatest hardware is – as we say in Germany – like “stitching with a hot needle”.
As always, thanks for reading.
The Debian developer team have been uploading videos from their latest conference, and so far I’ve seen two of them which I found very interesting, these were
The current state of Debian on smartphones by Guido Günther, and
Lenovo Linux 2022 by Mark Pearson.
See the whole list of talks in case you are interested, which I’ve found via Planet Debian and Bits from Debian. Always interesting to see some faces I know, even if I haven’t seen them in years (hello Steve!) 🙂 And thanks to all of you Debianistas for all of the great work you’re doing!
Edit, from July 31st, 2022: Phoronix also reported about Mark’s talk from above.
