smartphone without any google connectivity

[ChrisJumper]

Thank you erm67, Thank you sao98021!

It was just some kind of first intuition. Ill check that side and checksums sounds good. Right know i thinks everytime its strange that official Apps are often only availalble on Google Play Store without a Check Sum or official Link to the developer and so on. I am just too fastidious with the Linux Standard through the package Managers and open bug Lists.

[erm67]

Well, there's the play store for that
Actually most of the times the apps itself are tracking you, it doesn't matter where you get them from.
An app like netguard that blocks network access for selectede apps can be more effective.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/eu.faircode.netguard/

[josephg]

For my daily driver, I now use a Custom Rom with microG. I am still surprised at my Battery Life savings. I think Google Play Services is the worst battery drain and doesn't respect any policies about when to run or not. If it wasn't from the Google stables, I would term all Google Apps as malware due to their behaviour and bloat.

I only need those Google Services for Contact Sync and Calendar Sync. I can wean myself off contacts sync, but calendar sync seems to be more tricky. There are many 3rd party apps much more efficient and well behaved than Google Apps. For example, I use K-9 Mail instead of Gmail.

[erm67]

Did you check with kernel adiutor if the custom ROM is using the same cpufreq settings as the original one? You know most vendors tend to use aggressive settings to improve their antutu benchmark score, while custom ROMs tend to cut frequencies a bit so users are happy since the battery lasts twice as much.
I am using lineage 14.1 with full gapps and now I go 2 days without recharging .... It is a bit slower maybe but the CPU freq settings of the custom ROM are a lot better.

[josephg]

Did you check with kernel adiutor if the custom ROM is using the same cpufreq settings as the original one? You know most vendors tend to use aggressive settings to improve their antutu benchmark score, while custom ROMs tend to cut frequencies a bit so users are happy since the battery lasts twice as much.
I am using lineage 14.1 with full gapps and now I go 2 days without recharging .... It is a bit slower maybe but the CPU freq settings of the custom ROM are a lot better.

i was using stock gingerbread rom and kernel adiutor to get 1-2 days. my phone is old, like my computers. i now use omnirom kitkat which has sane defaults and i no longer need kernel adiutor to change the various kernel settings. i was referring to using full gapps on this custom rom vs microg on this same custom rom. full gapps eats my battery too much. with microg, i get 2-3 days and sometimes almost 4 days without charging.

[josephg]

If you want gentoo on your phone, for now the best is that gentoo RAP https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Android (as i'm sure you know). i prefer the prefix

I would like Gentoo on my phone, but I want to use it primarily as a Phone! Can you actually use your Gentoo as a phone for calls, texts, etc?

Also, may I ask why you prefer the Prefix over RAP?

[DaggyStyle]

gentoo on my phone is a really bad idea.
I'm pretty sure microg isn't supported on my phone

[sao98021]

If you want gentoo on your phone, for now the best is that gentoo RAP https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Android (as i'm sure you know). i prefer the prefix

I would like Gentoo on my phone, but I want to use it primarily as a Phone! Can you actually use your Gentoo as a phone for calls, texts, etc?

Also, may I ask why you prefer the Prefix over RAP?

well yes and no, gentoo, following that method runs side by side android, there are terminal applications like termux:float that basically keeps a term as a widget on your screen so if you'd like you could always have a gentoo comand line there, that doesn't get interrupted with phone calls/texts/whatever else your doing, and likewise it doesnt interupt with anything android is doing. so really your phone is still your phone, it just has gentoo on it as well ;D.

for me, i like the prefix mostly because it's all ive used, as prior months and months ago was stuck on windows 10 for a while, i had a WSL gentoo layer on that installation but the cross toolchain wouldn't work. but for the time i was using it, it was just because simplicity. you get the prefix extract it in /data/gentoo64(orgentoo) and then to start it its simply $/data/gentoo64/startprefix now you have access to all things you would normally on your pc you can even (apparently) setup an xserver for some kinda gui with either framebuffer(with phones that support it) or vnc, i've only tried with vnc could never get fbuffer to work.

edit your make.conf to match your phone and your good to go, but beware not ALL things are on arm/arm64 yet, some emerge -uDNav world might end up failing because whichever package that hasn't been ported potentially breaking other dependencies.

now that i remember WHY i was using prefix, i'm going to go build the other method later lol.

keep in mind you have to be rooted, there are a few setbacks however. such as androids RAM management, you might find long compiles being killed because android saw it as an opportunity to free the ram, with 2gb on my phone, it doesnt happen all the time but it did happen on a few specific packages, there's a method to take away androids greediness thats laid out in that wiki page, (such as killing android so it shouldn't be able to have power over ram)but it still didn't make a difference

also microg should be supported on all devices, if you have the ability to flash it via custom recovery. There are standalone apk files that they have aswell, but i never tried them and also heard they didnt work for other people and that flashing the zip was the way to go, if your going to use it

[josephg]

so then why would you (or anyone) want gentoo on your phone? if it is to use the spare processing power to compile, that would have a huge hit on the battery. and i'm always thinking of how to stop, the various stuff running amok on my phone without my permission, draining battery.

[erm67]

Well there is termux (like sao98021 said), it is based on debian IIRC and not gentoo but it is a linux environment installed on the phone side by side android, there also api that let you access some phone functions from bash or dash scripts. However without root rights it's not so useful.
Maybe you can bootstrap a gentoo stage3 on it
https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Main_Page

[sao98021]

so then why would you (or anyone) want gentoo on your phone? if it is to use the spare processing power to compile, that would have a huge hit on the battery. and i'm always thinking of how to stop, the various stuff running amok on my phone without my permission, draining battery.

it has nearly no visable impact on battery unless you are compiling, i typically do not do anything with gcc unless my phone is plugged in.

i use it for a lot of things, nmap, nano, i actually enjoy using Links on it lol, there are alot of reasons to want it it just gives you access to stuff that android should have in the first place.

like erm said, you can just use termux if you want a gnu/linux enviroment, there's another thing i use to like called linux deploy, which installs actual near fully functioning distro's in a loop file complete with a DE really easily, like a few button taps easy, which is a bit more than termux.

linux deploy also has a option for gentoo, i think its options were gentoo arch ubuntu debian kali and a few more, you can get that from the play store.

but i still like using the prefix/rap more as it doesn't require any 3rd party applications, although the dev of linux deploy is a good guy.

i can get up to 6 days on my phone depending on what i'm doing, i usually just web browse /stream youtube music. but this is with a custom kernel with cpu hotplugging and smartass cpu governors, and aokp rom, if my screen is on 6+ hours though, cut about 3-4 days off of that time, and the battery is 2 or 3 years old.

oh yeah, also no gapps or microg

i wont lie though, a big reason is just because i want gentoo in my pocket, and because we can do it. i kinda get a kick out of it lols and if I had the option to completely remove android and just turn it into a gentoo phone with a working phone and text messaging service and modem packages I would go for it in a second, or any distro for that matter that's why it sucked when Ubuntu phone got canceled and only a few devices supported, I'm waiting to see what happens with plasma-mobile, I hope it makes it further than canonicals endeavour

[erm67]

For me it depends a lot from what I download, every time I download a lineage os daily over LTE it drains the battery .... also the wifi hotspot is a battery killer since I use it mostly as a modem and I have 40G/month

[sao98021]

For me it depends a lot from what I download, every time I download a lineage os daily over LTE it drains the battery .... also the wifi hotspot is a battery killer since I use it mostly as a modem and I have 40G/month

Yeah last month I had no WiFi and I only get 4gb of 4g data, it was horrible got throttled down to literally kbs a second. So I only use tethering in emergencies and I don't download roms with the phone unless there's no options. I use adb push/pull for everything I need to take on/off.

I've been on this ROM about 3 months now, I'm not planning on flashing another for the time being unless a update is posted in the telegram group, I'm thinking of upgrading once I get the money for it. I want that 4gb/6gb ram lol

[josephg]

i use it for a lot of things, nmap, nano, i actually enjoy using Links on it lol, there are alot of reasons to want it it just gives you access to stuff that android should have in the first place.

uh i can't imagine using the console without a keyboard. you can have terminal emulator, bash, busybox installed as apps.

i can get up to 6 days on my phone depending on what i'm doing, i usually just web browse /stream youtube music. but this is with a custom kernel with cpu hotplugging and smartass cpu governors, and aokp rom, if my screen is on 6+ hours though, cut about 3-4 days off of that time, and the battery is 2 or 3 years old.

did you compile your own aokp kernel/rom? i would like to do so too, and would appreciate some how to pointers in gentoo.

i wont lie though, a big reason is just because i want gentoo in my pocket, and because we can do it. i kinda get a kick out of it lols and if I had the option to completely remove android and just turn it into a gentoo phone with a working phone and text messaging service and modem packages I would go for it in a second, or any distro for that matter that's why it sucked when Ubuntu phone got canceled and only a few devices supported, I'm waiting to see what happens with plasma-mobile, I hope it makes it further than canonicals endeavour

yeah 'cause we can!

i was extremely disappointed too, when ubuntu phone went down the drain. i was hoping that would be my next phone. i understand it has been resurrected as ubports but i'm not sure how sustainable that might be in the long run, seeing as they are still stuck inside ubuntu and can't seem to break out of that mould. it would certainly make their community more inclusive, if they could make their framework become distro-independent.

plasma always seems to play hide and seek.. now you see me, now you don't! didn't gnome3 start off on an entirely different tangent wanting to be a distro for tablet/phone/touch screens etc?

i think the real breakthrough will come when handheld devices get smaller more efficient self-hosting ndk toolkits. that should help folks developing on their devices for their devices. http://landley.net/aboriginal/about.html#selfhost

[sao98021]

did you compile your own aokp kernel/rom? i would like to do so too, and would appreciate some how to pointers in gentoo.

I did not do these ones, I have compiled lineage before but not aokp nor android kernels, though for kernels its a similar straight forward process like makeconfig on pc, I think its called defconfig for droids

As for compiling ROMs, there's a few steps to do first you need to git clone whatever ROM and release you want, say lineage 15.0, then you need to clone your device tree (if it exists and this is a problem sometimes if no tree is available for your specific device) you do that with a XML file, inside the file you define what it is that will be syncing with repo sync.


Basically the only thing that'll differ between building on gentoo vs other distros is the SDK manager.

Iirc I think you need the dev-util/android-sdk-update-manager that's standalone apart from android studio, I think you need shedtool as well.

One thing to keep in mind is that you need a decently sized amount of ram, lack of it can cause builds to fail and hang. Compiling can take a really really long time. I haven't done it in a while but that's basically the giest of it. A lot of the required things needed on other distros to build are just already on gentoo by default

You could probably get by, by following any lineage guide, aokp is probably similar or even the same process.

After you have everything its

Code: Select all

source build/envsetup.sh

breakfast {your device code}

brunch {your device code again}

Unless these commands have changed recently, I remember it can differ on a phone by phone basis, some samsungs use 'make brunch' or make bacon or somthn

[josephg]

I have compiled lineage before

well i didn't necessarily want aokp process. lineage is as good as any.

As for compiling ROMs, there's a few steps to do first you need to git clone whatever ROM and release you want, say lineage 15.0, then you need to clone your device tree (if it exists and this is a problem sometimes if no tree is available for your specific device) you do that with a XML file, inside the file you define what it is that will be syncing with repo sync.

i wanted to know how to setup my gentoo before the git clone step. from there on, most custom roms describe their own steps.

Basically the only thing that'll differ between building on gentoo vs other distros is the SDK manager.

Iirc I think you need the dev-util/android-sdk-update-manager that's standalone apart from android studio, I think you need shedtool as well.

so that's all i need: dev-util/android-sdk-update-manager and shedtool? i can't find shedtool in portage though. did you mean sys-process/schedtool?

One thing to keep in mind is that you need a decently sized amount of ram, lack of it can cause builds to fail and hang. Compiling can take a really really long time. I haven't done it in a while but that's basically the giest of it.

can it do with upto 4g ram? i don't mind however long it takes, unless that be many days.

A lot of the required things needed on other distros to build are just already on gentoo by default

that's what i was hoping might be an advantage of having a working gentoo already with me.

[sao98021]

did you mean sys-process/schedtool?

yup thats the one, typo. if anything else is missing it'll be easy to find, the build will error out and tell you whats missing but as far as i can remember thats all.

as for ram, i dont know if 4gb would be enough, you can try it and let it go overnight but don't be suprised if you wake up to a failed build.

i know that the android open source project states you need atleast 16gb of ram, the lowest i've ever done it with was 8gb, i've heard of people doing it with 6.

but it wont hurt anything to try, from a physical damage standpoint lol, i'm not sure if you can or cannot compensate with a big swap partition, if it fails with 4gb you might want to try that.

as the future of android stuff gets bigger, so will the ram requirement needed to build, its grown alot over the last 8 years i think they just changed the req to 16gb in 2016 or 17.

[erm67]

kernels are normal linux kernels, make defconfig compiles everything for the current arch, there is often (always?) a vendor defined model_defconfig that can be used and lots of binary blobs

basically you get the kernel from the vendor (under GPL rules) or XDA, try to find as many patches and backports for that kernel version, find the most recent binary blobs or drivers from roms and kernels of other phones that use the same devices and recompile it without messing too much with the config.

I will also stay on Nougat until Oreo is stable for my phone ... hopefully once Treble is working update to Pie will be a breeze ...
Hardware upgrade only for a phone with a better camera (or several cameras)

google uses LTO a lot that's what the memory is for.

[josephg]

well, my phone is old. so i've only recently moved up from gingerbread to kitkat.. which i'll stick with. so hopefully i can start with a much less bloated code base, than the later android versions. i have arm6 and arm7 devices, all 32bit. do i need to be on 64bit gentoo, or can i use my existing 32bit gentoo?

[sao98021]

well, my phone is old. so i've only recently moved up from gingerbread to kitkat.. which i'll stick with. so hopefully i can start with a much less bloated code base, than the later android versions. i have arm6 and arm7 devices, all 32bit. do i need to be on 64bit gentoo, or can i use my existing 32bit gentoo?

if your phones are 32bit, and your computer is 32 bit, i think you are fine. pretty sure its the opposite if you have a 64bit pc and need to build 32bit roms, thats when you need a cross toolchain, maybe.

either way 32bit for 32bit is fine.... i think.

but that said, once i was attempting to build lineage on windows 10 inside of my old gentoo layer, which for whatever reason required me to use a 64bit version of bison... but i think that was only because WSL is 64bit only, so yeah. you should be good

[DaggyStyle]

also microg should be supported on all devices, if you have the ability to flash it via custom recovery. There are standalone apk files that they have aswell, but i never tried them and also heard they didnt work for other people and that flashing the zip was the way to go, if your going to use it

how can I check for sig spoofing support?

[josephg]

how can I check for sig spoofing support?

i'm not up-to-date on android anymore.. most stock roms won't. lineageos does not want to. so your options are other custom roms. check your custom rom, as those who do explicitly do so. apparently there are security hazards, but i think security hazards are greater in closed source black-holes than open source code like micro-g.

[sao98021]

also microg should be supported on all devices, if you have the ability to flash it via custom recovery. There are standalone apk files that they have aswell, but i never tried them and also heard they didnt work for other people and that flashing the zip was the way to go, if your going to use it

how can I check for sig spoofing support?

Code: Select all

You need a ROM that supports signature spoofing. Some custom ROMs are patched to support signature spoofing out of the box, however most ROMs will require a patch or a Xposed module. Please ask your ROM developer if unsure.

The following ROMs have out-of-box support for signature spoofing.

CarbonROM MicroG will ask for Signature Spoofing authorization
OmniROM 5 (Must be enabled at the bottom of the developer settings first)
OmniROM 6/7 (Must be enabled in Settings>Apps>Advanced(gear icon)>Additional permissions>Spoof signature)
MarshRom (Must be enabled in Settings>Apps>Advanced(gear icon)>Additional permissions>Spoof signature)
crDroid (Must be enabled in Settings>crDroid Settings>Miscellaneous>Allow signature spoofing. In addition, spoofing permission must be granted to the app: Settings>Apps>Advanced(gear icon)>App permissions>Spoof package signature)
AospExtended (Must be enabled in Settings>Apps>Advanced(gear icon)>App Permissions>Spoof package signature)
LineageOS bundled with microG
Also there is another maintained list of a custom ROMs that include the signature spoofing patch.

If you have the Xposed Framework installed, the following module will enable signature spoofing: FakeGApps by thermatk

You can also patch your already-install ROM by flashing NanoDroid-patcher, without any computer interaction. It will auto-patch every updated ROM.

Finally, if you have Root, but are not using Xposed, you can try patching your already-installed ROM using Needle by moosd (or its fork Tingle by ale5000) or Haystack by Lanchon. Haystack can optionally add a simple UI to control spoofing similar to the one offered by OmniROM 5. Note that all 3 patchers require that the ROM to be patched is not odexed.

If you are a ROM developer or just do custom builds for whatever reason, you can download and include the patch from here.

microG GmsCore tests and diagnoses signature spoofing, but unfortunately it cannot be installed on devices that have Google services. For testing on such devices you can use Signature Spoofing Checker instead.

from https://github.com/microg/android_packa ... e-Spoofing

oh, there is an app to check https://github.com/Lanchon/sigspoof-checker

get it from https://f-droid.org/packages/lanchon.si ... [code]This app tests the signature spoofing capability of your Android OS as required by the microG Project. It attempts to fake its own signature and reports whether it succeeds. Simply launch the app to see the result of the test. You can find more information about signature spoofing here.[/code]

the "here" at the end of that statement is a link to whats said in that github page above it^^

[josephg]

Follow the forum for any queries that you might have.. probably already been asked and answered here.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/android ... s-t3217616