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+--- Thread: What OS is the pinephone community edition os based on? (/showthread.php?tid=9876)
What OS is the pinephone community edition os based on? - ljones - 05-16-2020
Hello all!
Just really wanted to ask a quick and simple question really. Does anyone know what os the pinephone/community edition os will be based on? I only ask as I was looking at a video on youtube ;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MXOgb-U2jI
but as I watched something didn't quite seem right. Sure the phone is running ubuntu touch but something just well - it looked just a little bit "android-ish" if you can see what I mean. And lo and behold about 4 mins into the video I see in the file manager a directory called "Android". So .... is the pinephone similar to the Aquaris E5? That old phone ran ubuntu touch but you couldn't use it in the same way as "normal" ubuntu (you couldn't even run apt-get update was one of the comments I heard back at that time - !). And in the end it was revealed that "ubuntu" was just a re-jigged "ubuntu" running in an android chroot. It was pretty ..... terrible. :-( and you're still tied in to google spying and survellience.
https://ubuntu.com/blog/bq-launches-the-new-aquaris-e5-hd-ubuntu-edition
So is the pinephone just running "ubuntu" in a chroot but quitely running android below that? Only reason I ask is I don't want yet-another android spy device and really don't want to get stung a second time (I did buy the E5 back in the day x.x ).
ljones
RE: What OS is the pinephone community edition os based on? - Danct12 - 05-17-2020
(05-16-2020, 06:05 PM)ljones Wrote: is the pinephone similar to the Aquaris E5?
It uses Mali 400, however the SoC used in the PinePhone is fully compatible with 64-bit (Cortex A53).
(05-16-2020, 06:05 PM)ljones Wrote: That old phone ran ubuntu touch but you couldn't use it in the same way as "normal" ubuntu (you couldn't even run apt-get update was one of the comments I heard back at that time - !)
The rootfs is made read only, however you can remount it as rw and do whatever you want, but this is not how you're supposed to update Ubuntu Touch, all updates are done via OTA and not via apt.
(05-16-2020, 06:05 PM)ljones Wrote: So is the pinephone just running "ubuntu" in a chroot but quitely running android below that?
No, it does not use Halium nor Android counterparts, everything is supported by the mainline Linux kernel.
RE: What OS is the pinephone community edition os based on? - Boern - 05-18-2020
If you want real "real" Ubuntu you could do that as well. As far as I know there aren't any ready made images, though. The closest would be KDE Neon, which supplies current KDE packages on top of Ubuntu. If you want to port Ubuntu yourself I'd look at how it was done with Mobian. Basically you just need a recent kernel with some patches, u-boot and then set it up to boot into a graphical environment suited for touchscreen usage.