After months of struggling I finally got a kernel working on the device, figured out all the weird device quirks and managed to boot Ubuntu touch. Getting USB to work for debugging was a nightmare. Barely anything is working at the moment, but I have display, touchscreen, and WiFi.
Setup: i talk to it via telegram from my iPhone and carry the Ubuntu Touch phone with me.
The phone is on at all times and battery seems to last.
It was hard to make it work in the background, but now it does, even when the phone’s screen is off.
Unlike having it on a computer at home, this feels different. It has access to camera, microphone, gps… any sensor the phone has. It can nanny cam, detect things and also use the speakers.
I gave it 50k tokens of headroom directly injected into context with a fractal and continuous summarization dedicated exclusively to our conversations (just messages, it holds months of conversations without missing almost anything), so it feels like a person with no separate sessions.
Hey everyone,
I’ve been working on bringing mainline Linux + postmarketOS + Plasma Mobile to the OnePlus 7T Pro (hotdog), using my own European HD1913 as the test device.
This is not an Android ROM and it’s not Linux running on top of Android. The goal is to boot a normal Linux kernel directly from the OnePlus bootloader and progressively support the phone’s hardware using upstream/mainline-style drivers.
At this point, quite a lot is already working:
✅ Direct boot from the stock OnePlus bootloader
✅ Persistent postmarketOS installation
✅ Native 1440×3120 display
✅ Adreno 640 hardware acceleration
✅ Plasma Mobile
✅ Touchscreen + power/volume buttons
✅ Wi-Fi
✅ Bluetooth
✅ Stereo speakers
✅ Handset microphone
✅ Battery level / voltage / temperature / current reporting
✅ USB networking
✅ USB-C dual role
✅ USB 3 SuperSpeed
✅ USB host through a powered dock
✅ USB mass storage
✅ DisplayPort output at 1440p60
And more recently, the cameras started becoming real rather than theoretical.
The Samsung S5K3M5 telephoto camera can now capture full RAW10 frames at 4208×3120, manual focus works through its actual LC898217XC actuator, libcamera controls exposure, and Plasma Camera can use it.
The Sony IMX586 main camera is also now streaming real 4000×3000 RAW10 frames through the mainline CAMSS pipeline. Libcamera automatic gain control works and Plasma Camera reaches a usable capture-ready state.
There’s still plenty left to do. Suspend/resume is currently broken, telephony isn’t usable yet, the ultra-wide and front cameras still need work, and sensors/NFC/haptics/fingerprint/Warp Charge are at various stages of not implemented or not validated. So this is definitely not a daily-driver OS yet.
The long-term goal is to get the device into a state where the support can be cleaned up/upstreamed and eventually submitted properly to postmarketOS rather than remaining a pile of device-specific hacks.
Project/research repo:
https://github.com/Sr-0w/hotdog-linux-bringup
I mainly wanted to share it here because the 7T Pro is still such a nice piece of hardware, and it’s pretty satisfying seeing it boot a completely different operating system years later. And it is surprisingly still really powerfull
on Linux, it's way faster than my Raspberry Pi 4B in a smaller form factor.
If anyone here has experience with Qualcomm SM8150, CAMSS, modem/WWAN, sensors, libcamera or mainline mobile Linux, contributions/reviews are very welcome.
And yes — the pop-up camera is absolutely on the TODO list. 😄
I read that the EU is discussing regulations that would force operating systems to verify your age. I will resist and refuse to comply on my desktop, which runs Artix Linux (systemd-free). They have made a commitment to refusing such measures.
I have a Volla Phone Quintus in ubuntu touch. What will happen to this phone if these laws come into effect? I might have to order a new US-made Linux phone so I don’t have to deal with this
Could this be a big problem for Ubuntu Touch?
In recent times, the US seems better than the EU, TBH
https://odysee.com/@AlphaNerd:8/eu's-digital-id-is-killing-the-open:b
hey guys, i have been thinking about having a backup or secondary device for a while now. my main is a nothing phone 3a pro, and i want something thats cheap to buy, amazing for the price, and with excellent (80-90%) ubuntu touch support.
also, does ubuntu touch have KDE connect support (standalone app, no waydroid), or can you install the plasma mobile WM on it? (correct me if im wrong on the WM part as i dont have any experience with linux phones)
thanks for all the recommendations you can give me!
It’s not time to upgrade my phone yet but I am trying to come up with a plan. I want to get out of the Apple/Google ecosystems and Ubuntu touch seems like a good open source avenue for that (currently switching my pcs away from Windows to Linux for similar reasons). The problem I’m facing is that all of the supported devices are much less performant than my current phone.
I have an iPhone 16 pro. Since it’s iPhone, porting it myself isn’t an option.
Even if I run this phone into the ground, the currently supported devices seem years behind current gen devices on the market, and I’m not sure they would catch up by then (and I get it: it’s a volunteer job and no one wants to risk their new and expensive phone to experiment so they port it to an old one, I’m not complaining or ungrateful for the work being done)
So do I wait and see if anything catches up before Apple software updates my phone into obsolescence? Is there a brand that is consistent enough that even though the current models aren’t officially supported it’d probably be pretty straightforward to port? Is there something on the list of supported devices that is comparable and I missed? Or do I just need to give up on the idea entirely?
Thanks!
Edit: also I’m in the US which makes getting a lot of the more supported devices (Volla/fairphone) difficult
I'm trying to install Ubuntu Touch on my POCO device using the UBports Installer (v0.11.2) on Windows 10 (Build 26200.8894). The installer detects my device fine in normal ADB mode, but when it reaches the step where it reboots the device into fastbootd ("Rebooting... Rebooting to fastbootd"), the installer freezes indefinitely on that spinner and never progresses. The phone itself does show the "POCO / Powered by Android" fastboot screen, so it does enter fastbootd. However, when I manually run fastboot devices in Command Prompt at that point, the result is inconsistent — sometimes it correctly returns the device ID (e.g. a69c0857 fastboot), and Device Manager correctly shows "Android Phone > Android Bootloader Interface" with no driver errors. But on retry, running the exact same command with the phone sitting on the same fastboot screen returns nothing at all, and the installer hangs again at the same "Rebooting to fastbootd" step. I've already confirmed OEM unlocking and both USB debugging toggles (including "USB debugging - Security settings") are enabled in Developer Options. This intermittent detection makes me suspect a USB cable/port or driver enumeration timing issue, but I wanted to check if others have run into this specific fastbootd hang with UBports Installer on Windows and what fixed it for them.
Found the phone just today and since it runs horribly on Android I thought I might as well try to get Ubuntu running
Problem is that the supported Ubuntu Touch device is the *E*4.5 instead of the *M*4.5 and I suspect it not working because of that - it basically crashed when I tried installing it towards the end with a (I think) very useless error code