Virtualizing Pinephone Operating Systems?

[BaronAlbatross]

Hello all, first post after a long lurk!

I am planning to preorder a pinephone, and in preparation I would like to be able to explore the OS options so I can quickly settle on a daily driver. I am hoping to fully replace my android and this is basically the last step in my de-googling process. I do need some functionality for work however, so again, I would like to explore the available operating systems while I wait for shipping to begin.

Is anyone aware of a method of running any of the supported OSs in a virtual machine such as KVM? I tried to get iso files but could only get installer tools and .img files for the ones I was most interested in. If anyone has any insight I would very much appreciate it!

[ryo]

If you're on Gnome (or some other Gnome-based shell like Cinnamon or Unity), you can just download the source code, compile, and run as instructed in the README file.

You can run Phosh inside of Gnome/Cinnamon/Unity/whatever using:

Code:

SKIP_GNOME_SESSION=1 ../phoc/_build/run -E '_build/run -U' -C ./data/phoc.ini

The application menu will show apps you have on your own PC, but some of those that support libhandy will run inside of it and kind of behave like their mobile versions.
Apps without this support will simply open in a separate window like usual.
The reason is simply because Phosh is really just a Gnome shell for small touch displays.
Everything beyond that is literally the same as on a PC with a Linux distro running Gnome DE.

Edit:
In case somebody starts attacking me for helping you like last time, I'll add this page as an alternative option:
https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Develo.../qemu.html

However, I didn't test this method.

[kern707]

If you want to sandbox it, maybe try with something like QEMU and an image of your choice? I know someone who have used this method to successfully do it in order to test a keyboard layout for squeekboard