On Mon, 11 Jul 2022 17:43:40 -0400 "A. F. Cano" <af...@comcast.net> wrote:
> > > What are the possibly incompatible devices/firmware? > > We have some requirements for officially supported devices, like > > having an isolated modem or having replaceable battery. > > It's unlikely I'll be able to find this out without the phone being > rooted. It's also possible to know that by looking at LineageOS source code instead. For instance I often look to the scripts that extract non-free software from a device to understand what needs to be replaced with free software or avoided. This makes it easy to evaluate devices for Replicant without even having to buy them. And we don't ever need to download nonfree software to do that. The file names of the nonfree software can also give us some indications on the modem protocols being used. > > Though we also accept patches for devices that don't met the > > requirements but it will be up to the people who send these patches > > to make the releases for that device, and to handle the bug reports. > > We'd also have to find a good name for the fork. Replicant can help > > for all the rest. > > It's looking like I'll have to first figure out how to root the stock > firmware, unless I'm misunderstanding something about the process of > installing LineageOS and root access can be gained after installing/ > flashing some components. Decades ago I managed to do it as there were well known exploits that were also free software and easy to compile. I tried again recently but I didn't manage to do it, though I've documented my attempts[1]. I think that it would be really useful to have free rooting software because users should be in control. Without root users can end in situations where they are stuck with software they can't change without loosing access to their data because not all Android applications enable users to export their data. > > > This was then. When I tried doing this again after a factory > > > reset (the only way to get rid of a continously running media app > > > that was making the phone very hot and drained the battery in an > > > hour [1]), flashing the cache doesn't do any of the above, I only > > > see a red message briefly that says "RECOVERY IS NOT STANDARD > > > ENFORCING" and then the phone boots normally. Of course if I do > > > "su" from adb shell, it claims "su not found". So now I can't > > > get back to even the result achieved the first time. > > Note that on Samsung phones more recent than the ones actually > > supported by Replicant, when it boots, the stock boot.img restores > > the stock recovery.img if it was modified. > > This is probably what is happening. But how to bypass this? The > files I found (official and custom recovery + cache) don't have that. You could try to turn off the device after flashing the recovery with --no-reboot. Then you need to do the right button combination to boot in the recovery. > > If for some reasons it boots to the boot.img instead of the > > recovery, the original recovery is restored, so users need to try > > again to flash the recovery and to boot from it. > > I wonder if it's possible to flash a boot.img that doesn't do that. We don't support your phone in Replicant so I don't know if it would be dangerous or not to install the recovery image on the boot image partition. A way to check would be to unpack the boot and recovery images you were trying to flash and see what's in them. If there is a kernel in both, it should be safe to flash the recovery image in both the boot image partition and the recovery partition. Note that if one of your goals is to install LineageOS, you should rather try to get support for that through the LineageOS community instead. It would be safer for your device, here I don't know your device, so we might overlook things and you could end up with a broken device. In addition we don't want to and can't give instructions to install nonfree software (we're not a support channel for nonfree software and Replicant also has to follow the Free System Distribution Guidelines[2]). But if you're interested in rooting your device with free software or if you have questions that are not specific to the installation of non-free software or software that also contain nonfree software, it should be fine. For instance asking how to boot a recovery generally speaking should be fine assuming that there is no instructions to download a specific recoveries that also contain nonfree software. Here, even if your device doesn't meet the criteria for Replicant, documentation about it is still interesting because: - We are open to collaboration with people or projects that want to support devices like that with free software. And here we maintain the library that implements the modem protocol that your device use. Being able to boot with free system distribution guidelines[2] compliant distributions on phones similar to yours just to do quick tests for maintaining that library could be useful for instance, so information or instructions to do that would be useful. - We need to know the status of more recent Samsung devices and smartphones and tablets in general in order to make good strategic decisions in Replicant. Here knowing about the installation procedure of newer devices is useful. If the bootloader unlock procedure is very complex for instance, then it will probably be taken into account when deciding to support a newer Samsung device and then when working on the installation instructions. (Not) being able to install the distribution of your choice (because it's too complicated) also has obvious freedom implications that we're interested in. As for rooting, I think it would be super useful to be able to do that with free software. And rooting software is not an issue for the guidelines if it's free software and has no nonfree dependencies. References: ----------- [1]https://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/RootingDevices [2]https://www.gnu.org/distros/free-system-distribution-guidelines.html Denis.
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