On Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:23:05 +0000 Fil Lupin via Replicant <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi there, Hi, > following the instructions on the wiki to build a new Replicant 6 > binary, I encountered a few issues I wrote here : > https://redmine.replicant.us/boards/15/topics/16123?r=16126 I noticed > that repo now use guix, does that mean we could use it with minimal > work on any GNU Linux distribution? Regards, Normally it should. However as the README states we only managed to build Replicant 6.0 on Debian 9 (stretch). I think the main issue was that the previous Replicant maintainer did a lot of work to get rid of some of the compilers binaries provided by Google, and that made Replicant more dependent on Debian. Since Debian 9 was not FSDG compliant I tried to at least build it on one FSDG compliant distribution, so I did a lot of work to solve build issues on a Trisquel version(s) of the same era (I don't recall which one) but more work was required and I've no idea how much was still required as I solved one issue at a time. Another route would have been to build it on PureOS Green which was based on Debian 9 (stretch), but the binaries have been lost. Building Replicant 6.0 on a recent distribution will not work because it depends on packages that are unmaintained and also packages versions that are unmaintained, and the more we wait, the more this becomes impossible. If the goal is to build Replicant on a recent distribution (without chroots, containers, VMs, etc), the easiest way would probably be to finish updating Replicant to a more recent Android revision. This is because at least here we can have a vague idea of the amount of work required. In contrast trying to fix the build can take an unknown amount of time and it could be huge. As for the status of the port of the Galaxy SIII on Android 11, it can boot, 3D worked, sound was extremely primitive (only speakers worked), and I managed to make the modem work under GNU/Linux on top of the same upstream kernel, but a lot was still missing. For instance we could not call in Replicant but we could at least bootstrap the modem (things were still missing in libsamsung-ril). In addition power management was never tested, I'm unsure if graphics were reliable, and most non-critical things probably didn't work (camera, accelerometers, etc). An alternative that is much less work than all that is to learn how to install Debian 9 on top of an existing distribution with debootstrap and use libvirt/virt-manager "LXC" container to start it. This also enables to share resources with the host (network, file system, RAM, CPU, etc), so it's way more light than a VM. If you're concerned about security here, something possible would be to see if downloading the Replicant source code with a more recent repo on the host works (and find a workaround / fix it, if it doesn't), and only use the network inside the LXC container for installing the Debian packages required to build Replicant, and make the container offline for everything else. If at the end of the day you want to upgrade from a Replicant 6.0 release to the image you built, you also need to read on how to transition from release keys to your keys, and that is documented a README[1] in the Replicant source code and the wiki also has the RestoreApplicationInternalData article to recover your data in if you mess up with the keys. Ideally I would really have liked to finish making it work on Trisquel instead of Debian 9, because having a Replicant version that cannot be built on an FSDG distribution is bad, but nowadays most of my time is taken by GNU Boot[2]. References: ----------- [1]https://git.replicant.us/replicant/vendor_replicant-scripts/tree/images/gen_key_migration_script/README [2]And I ended up in GNU Boot because I needed to provide a bootloader to for the Pinephone for Replicant. And the more I worked on GNU Boot the more issues I found that badly needed fixing, and many of these issues affect most boot software distributions. For instance only HEADS have reproducible builds and it's not 100% free nor general purpose, and reproducible builds for boot firmware is order of magnitude more important than GNU/Linux for instance, lot of things are still undocumented (supported filesystems with GRUB, how to not damage laptops when installing boot fimrwares with a flash chip programmer, etc), etc. Denis.
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