Hello friends
As you can see, we download Linux and install it on laptops and tablets with completely different hardware. And we see that after installation, we do not need to download and install any drivers.
Is there an Android firmware - Android ROM that can be installed on all smartphones and use all its features?
Can non-official developers produce such an Android? Especially now that the internal memory of phones is 128 GB or more?
There are GSI ROMs. They can run on any Project Treble supported device. However, some things don't work. For example, there is no Sony camera DRM implementation in official AOSP, so the Sony phone camera won't work on GSI. If you want to use a GSI, I recommend trying Phh-Treble.
Also, when I set up my Microsoft Surface on Linux, I had to mess around with kernel modules to get the touchscreen to work. So, Linux does require some configuration depending on your hardware.
$cronos_ said:
There are GSI ROMs. They can run on any Project Treble supported device. However, some things don't work. For example, there is no Sony camera DRM implementation in official AOSP, so the Sony phone camera won't work on GSI. If you want to use a GSI, I recommend trying Phh-Treble.
Also, when I set up my Microsoft Surface on Linux, I had to mess around with kernel modules to get the touchscreen to work. So, Linux does require some configuration depending on your hardware.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for answering my question.
Please tell me is there any pre-rooted version of GSI?
I think it must available pre-rooted because maybe we need install drivers and reconfigure system files.
Related
Hello all!!
I'm new to Android and i'm interested in learning a bit and maybe get involved with it but there are some things that i don't get about android and can't find the answers.
My main question is why Android which is based on Linux is so hard to get updates for all devices at once?
For example we got ICS lately why it's only available for Nexus S and not for all devices that support android?
In pcs if there is a new Ubuntu version every pc can get it no matter the hardware it uses as there are drivers for it.
Is it so hard to have drivers for all the android devices?
Why do we need to wait forever for the X company that makes the phone to build a new kernel?
Is it about the libaries?The drivers?
Say i got a device that is not supported by ICS what would i need to make it supported? I got my libs from 2.3.5 can i toss them to overlay compile and works? If not y not?
Thanks in advance for your answers and sorry if my questions are too noobish, everyone has to start from somewhere
Serafym said:
Hello all!!
I'm new to Android and i'm interested in learning a bit and maybe get involved with it but there are some things that i don't get about android and can't find the answers.
1. My main question is why Android which is based on Linux is so hard to get updates for all devices at once?
2. For example we got ICS lately why it's only available for Nexus S and not for all devices that support android?
- In pcs if there is a new Ubuntu version every pc can get it no matter the hardware it uses as there are drivers for it.
3. Is it so hard to have drivers for all the android devices?
4. Why do we need to wait forever for the X company that makes the phone to build a new kernel?
5. Is it about the libaries?The drivers?
6. Say i got a device that is not supported by ICS what would i need to make it supported? I got my libs from 2.3.5 can i toss them to overlay compile and works? If not y not?
Thanks in advance for your answers and sorry if my questions are too noobish, everyone has to start from somewhere
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
1. Manufacturers don't release updates for all their devices all at once (some not at all).
2. It's ready (most stable so far) for that device (SDK ports; (almost) official update)
- Not true. If you tried to place Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on a PC with a 368 MHz and 32mb ram, it would not run .
3. Yes. Android is on devices from many different manufacturers with many different designs and hardware.
4. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel (to know what it is). Different hardware will require different commands, etc. If the manufacturer doesn't release the kernel source, development cannot be done on that device (properly).
5. Yes and yes (much more too).
6. Create a working port from some other device (with similar hardware) which is supported. Sometimes. Some versions of android have backward compatibility of those files but ICS isn't really backward compatible which is why many ports of ICS (for various devices) don't have a working camera, etc. See the 2nd paragraph here: http://www.cyanogenmod.com/blog/cm9-progress-update.
Hello
Here is a little question, is it possible to create a universal android rom.
Today, cyanogenmod allow us to have different flavour of android for many devices. But cyanogenmod is not universal and requires specific hacks for each device.
I know that Android is based on a linux kernel, that kernel should beallow an automatic detection of the devices specifications....
Moreover, Motorola initiates its Ara project. This new concept should be linked to an evolutive version of Android.
Is there anyway to see one day an android repository to upgrade and costumize your phone/phablet/tablet. With an essential package (OS) and options (launcher/Touchwiz....).
An universal evolutive OS should be a way to solve
- android fragmentation.
- security update
- Easy update without formatting your device
- OTA update for all devices (Samsung, Cube, HTC....) even for olders or chinese models
bart47 said:
Hello
Here is a little question, is it possible to create a universal android rom.
Today, cyanogenmod allow us to have different flavour of android for many devices. But cyanogenmod is not universal and requires specific hacks for each device.
I know that Android is based on a linux kernel, that kernel should beallow an automatic detection of the devices specifications....
Moreover, Motorola initiates its Ara project. This new concept should be linked to an evolutive version of Android.
Is there anyway to see one day an android repository to upgrade and costumize your phone/phablet/tablet. With an essential package (OS) and options (launcher/Touchwiz....).
An universal evolutive OS should be a way to solve
- android fragmentation.
- security update
- Easy update without formatting your device
- OTA update for all devices (Samsung, Cube, HTC....) even for olders or chinese models
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm not going to be the one to say its impossible but its very unlikely. Different devices use different modems, kernels, and other system requirements. The CM team may be able to come up with something like that but you won't see it anytime soon if it happens. There are some ROMs out there that are in 1 big AROMA zip file and they all have the same features but the bases meet the requirements of the specific device.
bart47 said:
Hello
Here is a little question, is it possible to create a universal android rom.
Today, cyanogenmod allow us to have different flavour of android for many devices. But cyanogenmod is not universal and requires specific hacks for each device.
I know that Android is based on a linux kernel, that kernel should beallow an automatic detection of the devices specifications....
Moreover, Motorola initiates its Ara project. This new concept should be linked to an evolutive version of Android.
Is there anyway to see one day an android repository to upgrade and costumize your phone/phablet/tablet. With an essential package (OS) and options (launcher/Touchwiz....).
An universal evolutive OS should be a way to solve
- android fragmentation.
- security update
- Easy update without formatting your device
- OTA update for all devices (Samsung, Cube, HTC....) even for olders or chinese models
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I doubt it's possibility. Different phones have different kernels/coding for hardware. All Android phones uses Linux kernel, but are coded differently, and that's why we have different/custom kernels. Phones/phablets/tablets have different UIs, which will result in larger updates. Furthermore, u said "essential package" which is hardly possible due to large file size and company issues. For example, Samsung has TouchWiz (and all it's bloatware ), while HTC has Sense (and the bloatwares ), and to stuff everything in a single ROM /Update, it's simply too much. (A update from Samsung would cost 100-300mb, and if what u say is true, OTA updates would cost 600mb~. (Take into account the stock Android launcher.)) I doubt Samsung would like this idea too. Companies like Samsung and HTC have their own launchers to differentiate themselves from others, and if consumers have a choice, they might use other launchers other than their own. (E.g. a Samsung user wants to use Sense, while preserving the Samsung hardware.) Though I would very much like to see this in the future, this is technically impossible. Hoped this explained your question.
Smack that thanks button If I helped!
Always make a nandroid backup before trying anything risky
Sent from my fabulous N7105 powered by Illusion ROM and Plasma Kernel.
Sent from dat small country called Singapore.
P.S. Quote my post for replies ASAP.
This is literally impossible, All devices would need to be designed to perform for that rom. Not only that but not a single one of those companies would agree to it. They'd actually attempt to make their own os before doing that, and the reasoning is simple, each company is in this race for themselves not as a team effort. For this to happen would be going the route of IOS, which android is not.
Sent from an Xposed LG-G2/LS-980
Announcing Sailfish for the Sony Xperia Z3 Compact!
This is not Android!
This should be thought of as a development experiment. It may be useful if you are a developer and want to write/port apps the the Sailfish operating system. It is not an end-user product, however, if you wish to experiment and try something different then feel free!
Please do not contact Jolla Care or Jolla Developer Care, as this is not the Jolla phone.
Special thanks to:
rss351 and locusf for the collaborative effort in porting SailfishOS to the Z3 compact
Everyone from the SailfishOS team/community, sledges and mal- in particular.
All Cyanogenmod devs, since SailfishOS uses drivers from Cyanogenmod to talk with the phone's hardware
Known issues:
Bluetooth isn't turned on, cause i've put no effort in for that so far
Camera doesn't work, cause it's not hooked up to interface.
No recovery inside hybris bootimage (you need to flash manually to return to cm/use recovery)
Sensors dont work (auto-adjust brightness, etcetera)
The Jolla account/store functionality is not enabled. This is being worked on by Jolla. In the meantime: use openrepo's warehouse (see bottom of this post)
What works:
Booting, basic usage of the OS itself (browsing, etc)
Texting, calling, data over mobile network (2g and 3g tested, 4g should work but is untested)
Wifi (both 2,4 and 5 GHz)
Power management seems to work fine (not tested much though)
Looking around and getting a feel for SailfishOS
Using your phone to develop and debug SailfishOS apps.
Installation guide/checklist:
Insert default warranty void message here. Your warranty is now void
Make a backup (just to be sure)
Depending on what you need from your phone, this may not be a rom suitable for daily driving with. But installation is non-destructive to your existing rom, so if you're curious, give SailfishOS a try
I have not tested this on locked bootloaders, but since I needed to modify the kernel, I guess that you need an unlocked bootloader.
Note this is not an official Sailfish OS build, and the Xperia Z3c is not a Jolla phone, so please don't report bugs to Jolla. If you want to report a bug, this thread is perfectly fine for that.
BEWARE: this image is NOT optimized for security. The phone boots in development mode by default. There is a root shell on telnet port 2323. This is not secure and will give anyone who wants it remote access to your phone. When the port matures this will be fixed.
The Sailfish OS image does not provide recovery, and since the Xperia Z3c does not have a recovery partition, you need a bootimage with recovery on it to flash cm/stock/sailfishos upgrade. I highly recommend using Nut's Xperia files for this. Use the boot.img from your Cyanogenmod installation.
The Sailfish OS image is based on a recent version of Cyanogenmod 12.1, so update your Cyanogenmod installation while you are at it. Use cm-12.1-20160523-NIGHTLY-z3c.zip if you encounter issues with other versions. Using another rom is not guaranteed to work, even if this rom is based on Cyanogenmod.
You can find the required zip in this Mega folder: https://mega.nz/#F!ucoRnDjD!WAHNWgxLQX5SK1Vdu8MRWw
Use your favorite recovery (but not CM's recovery since that checks for signatures, which this image does not have) to flash the zip.
If you want to return to Cyanogenmod, extract boot.img from your cm-12 zip and flash that with fastboot. Alternatively you can restore a previous backup. There is no need to re-flash Cyanogenmod because it was not removed by installing SailfishOS. You can remove the /data/.stowaways/sailfishos/ folder afterwards to reclaim disk space.
FAQ
You can find a FAQ which mentions most common user questions for SailfishOS here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/jolla-sailfish/general/qa-sailfish-n4-thread-devices-t2727330 . It's mainly aimed to the Nexus 4 and 5, but it's fairly applicable for all other ports as well.
Contributing
If you think this is awesome, and want to help fix the issues currently open: come by in #sailfishos-porters on irc.freenode.net!
Sources
You can find all used source code (may not be up-to-date to the latest image, but all key components are there) here: https://github.com/xperiasailors/
Installing OpenRepos warehouse
OpenRepos warehouse is like what F-Droid is versus Google's Play store. An unofficial, community-driven repository of open source apps.
Go to settings->developer options and set a password. Then open a terminal or connect over ssh to your phone (ssh [email protected]_of_phone).
Download the latest version of the warehouse app from here: https://openrepos.net/content/basil/warehouse-sailfishos
When you are asked to terminate packagekit anywhere in the steps below, answer yes.
Code:
$ devel-su
# zypper rr adaptation0
# zypper in <location_of_rpm_you_downloaded>
After this Warehouse app will be in your app launcher.
Impressive work! :good:
Sent from my Sony Xperia Z3 Compact using XDA Labs
Just having a go now.
Edit: just stayed on sony screen. Would it be because I came from SLiMM 1.8 ROM and not from a CM based ROM?
mrrflagg said:
Just having a go now.
Edit: just stayed on sony screen. Would it be because I came from SLiMM 1.8 ROM and not from a CM based ROM?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Probably, yes.
SailfishOS uses libhybris for hardware communication, which in turn uses the existing Cyanogenmod installation for drivers and proprietary blobs. But hybris is compiled against a certain Cyanogenmod version, so using other roms as a base might fail.
I've updated the TS and put the exact CM version I used in there, that should work fine.
There are any news? The project is in development?
Alexander3273 said:
There are any news? The project is in development?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No news, I don't spend much time on this port, every now and then I fiddle around with it an evening.
I'm currently trying to get AOSP based Sailfish port because Cyanogenmod for Z3c seems unmaintained, but progress is very slow.
Thank you for the info. Do you know when a version (sailfish port) comes out?
Hello! Thanks for your work. May i know the progress ?
it would be great to see a real "european" OS coming out of the dust...
i hate the thought that any company from the other side of the atlantic are wheels in the monster of patriot act...
@maikoool Any news about new build or something?
Yes, look here:
https://nokius.net/SFOS/scorpion/PreAlpha/
But still no Cam, no BT, No Sensors and No video playback
AFAIK is the 'scorpion' the Z3 Tablet compact, so not the Z3 compact. The base images will probably be the same.
I've recently rolled a build using AOSP 5.1 from the Sony Xperia developer pages, but my Z3c has developed an issue where the top and bottom of the screen don't function, so I cannot test properly.
Aries is device name, right? What's scorpion ?
kskarthik said:
Aries is device name, right? What's scorpion ?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Aries = Z3 compact, Scorpion = Z3 Tablet compact
I'm waiting eagerly to see SFOS on aries Do you know anything about our device support on jolla's list ?
Hello... Since I'm not very familiar with cell phones I'm curious about something. With a desktop computer, one can build their own or have a manufacturer type ( Dell, HP and so ) Now if you take the custom build system you basically can decide which OS you want, why can't cell phones be similar to that be able to install whichever OS you like, Or can you? Like in Android is it possible to install just a basic OS onto a phone? one that doesn't have let's say Google ( Google store)? Is there an Android build without Google? Also, does Android have an OS with its own browser, if not, why not? thanks
Dude905 said:
Hello... Since I'm not very familiar with cell phones I'm curious about something. With a desktop computer, one can build their own or have a manufacturer type ( Dell, HP and so ) Now if you take the custom build system you basically can decide which OS you want, why can't cell phones be similar to that be able to install whichever OS you like, Or can you? Like in Android is it possible to install just a basic OS onto a phone? one that doesn't have let's say Google ( Google store)? Is there an Android build without Google? Also, does Android have an OS with its own browser, if not, why not? thanks
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You're thinking about it along the correct route. There are plain, unbranded Android builds known as Vanilla Android. These are the builds you see on Nexus and Pixel devices, built from the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) and have no carrier or OEM bloat.
If you're looking for a lightweight Android OS with no GApps (Google Apps), there are a ton of custom Android builds available, the most popular in the world being LineageOS. However, it should be noted that you can't simply flash a vanilla or custom Android build to your device and expect it to boot and function properly. Android ROMs need to be ported to a specific device. This is due to the vast hardware differences between various manufacturers and models.
To see if any custom Android builds are available for your particular device, search your model device in the Search Plus option. If any custom ROMs, kernels, recoveries, etc., are available for your device, you'll find them here on XDA.
MotoJunkie01 said:
You're thinking about it along the correct route. There are plain, unbranded Android builds known as Vanilla Android. These are the builds you see on Nexus and Pixel devices, built from the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) and have no carrier or OEM bloat.
If you're looking for a lightweight Android OS with no GApps (Google Apps), there are a ton of custom Android builds available, the most popular in the world being LineageOS. However, it should be noted that you can't simply flash a vanilla or custom Android build to your device and expect it to boot and function properly. Android ROMs need to be ported to a specific device. This is due to the vast hardware differences between various manufacturers and models.
To see if any custom Android builds are available for your particular device, search your model device in the Search Plus option. If any custom ROMs, kernels, recoveries, etc., are available for your device, you'll find them here on XDA.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you for your input it gave me more of an understanding and I will do as suggested
Hello everybody. I love this community and I have been lurking for a long time.
I have noticed on a foreign language forum that some people were offering a custom rom for my android 9 TV box.
The chinese box is based on a s905x3 CPU and has a mediatek wifi chip for which it is hard (if not impossible to find the wifi drivers).
The site claims that the image was made by modifying the stock rom that came with the box. Is this possible or do all custom roms need to be build from the source?
The custom rom I want to make is going to replace the launcher with kodi.
I am prepared to build the whole rom from source but I do have a couple of questions.
Since the mediatek wifi drivers cannot be found how would I go about including the binary for the wifi?
I have noticed that the box that I have uses a .ko (kernel object) module to drive the wifi chip.
Can I include these kernel objects in build? It is a shame that the kernel is built as a 32bit system. Would that mean that I can only compile a 32bit kernel if I were to reuse those kernel modules and binaries?
Another idea is to perhaps use the kernel from coreelec in my build since it seems to include a lot of drivers.
Is it possible to use a kernel from something like coreelec but use the source from AOSP for the rest of my build?
Is there anything else that I should be aware of?
Thank you all!!!!
Can anyone give me any hints to any of the questions?
Essentially I want to swap out the stock launcher for Kodi. What is the easiest way to do so?