This is a port of Ubuntu Touch for the Sony Xperia X (suzu/F5121 & F5122).

Sources:
Kernel:
https://github.com/fredldotme/device-kernel-loire

Device:
https://github.com/fredldotme/device-sony-common
https://github.com/fredldotme/device-sony-loire
https://github.com/fredldotme/device-sony-suzu

Halium:
https://github.com/Halium/halium-devices/blob/halium-7.1/manifests/sony_suzu.xml

Status:

Working:

• Audio
• Calling
• SMS
• Wifi (sometimes requires a reboot)
• Wifi hotspot
• Bluetooth (sometimes requires a reboot)
• GPS
• Vibration
• Orientation sensor
• LED
• USB/MTP
• USB/ADB
• Video decoding
• Photo camera
• MicroSD support
• Flash light
• Anbox
• Libertine

Missing:

• Video recording

Install:

• Make sure to upgrade your device to the latest stock Android 8.0 before continuing:

  • Windows: https://developer.sony.com/develop/open-devices/get-started/flash-tool/
  • Linux: http://www.flashtool.net/downloads_linux.php (run with GTK_IM_MODULE=ibus ./FlashTool) and https://xperifirm.com/tutorial/install-xperifirm-linux/

• OEM unlock your device: https://developer.sony.com/develop/open-devices/get-started/unlock-bootloader/

• Boot your device into fastboot mode by shutting it down and keeping the Volume Up button pressed while plugging in a USB cable between your phone and PC. The LED should be on and blue.

• In case of flashing issues please wipe system, data & cache partitions using TWRP

• Flash the OEM binaries from: https://developer.sony.com/file/download/software-binaries-for-aosp-nougat-android-7-1-kernel-4-4-loire/ using fastboot flash oem SW_binaries_for_Xperia_AOSP_N_MR1_5.7_r1_v08_loire.img

• Run the UBports Installer (0.4.5-beta or onwards): https://github.com/ubports/ubports-installer/releases/tag/0.4.5-beta

Now that the port has reached a certain state I'd like to present the status of this project to a wider audience,

Current status:

• Full AppArmor support
• Adequate Mir performance
• Full ofono/rild support
• Passing most hybris tests

Known issues:

• Unable to enumerate rotation status and updates
• Calling doesn't work
• Audio doesn't work
• Camera doesn't work
• Click package support incomplete

The full build instructions are available on the Halium project management issue page.

Halium port project management, HAL port specific issues:
https://github.com/Halium/projectmanagement/issues/98

Calling now works (with caveats). For the time being you need a test version of telepathy-ofono on your device to enable calling:

sudo ubports-qa install xenial_-_haliumfixup

Even better news: The wipe won't be needed.

Existing v1 policies continue working and should even be compatible with Waydroid once they're stored in the filesystem keyring. Even if they're not, that's not a blocker for v2 to land early, as existing users can enjoy their devices with the same feature set as before.

I'll go ahead and merge this.

Good news! Over the last few days we enabled initial support for SMS & MMS on the Pixel 3a & 3a XL on US carriers. A bunch of other fixes made it into the current release candidate to perfect it but this is the big one.

SMS work reliably on 4G now and MMS partially work (lacking proper Group MMS support right now). The phone doesn't trip off the carrier with its incomplete IMS support too.

If you want to make sure you can reliably receive MMS please make sure your APN settings are compatible, either by changing the settings or, if the system-settings GUI doesn't work, by editing the /var/lib/ofono/<number>/gprs file manually, or by disabling the Internet APN completely. Staying off WIFI is also reported to work reliably.

EDIT April 3rd 2021: NFC support is now in the devel channel and will be released with OTA-17
Please use this thread as a place to exchange ideas regarding our NFC implementation.

Original post:

Hey! I have something new to play around with for people on Halium 9 builds of Ubuntu Touch: you can now test your device for NFC functionality!
The only prerequisite is that your device needs to be on the devel-based rootfs, not the edge one.

To install:

sudo ubports-qa install xenial_-_android9_-_nfcd
sudo mount -o remount,rw /
sudo apt install nfcd nfcd-tools nfcd-binder-plugin nfcd-repowerd-plugin

To get console output from nfcd:

sudo stop nfcd
sudo /usr/sbin/nfcd -p /usr/lib/nfcd/plugins -v

App developers can try the QtNFC integration module to develop apps based on this technology. This requires the following change to be made to the rootfs before it can be used by (currently only unconfined) apps:

sudo mount -o remount,rw /
sudo apt install qml-module-qtnfc

The API documentation is located here: https://doc-snapshots.qt.io/qt5-5.9/qtnfc-qmlmodule.html

Please use this thread to share your experience with NFC enablement and even ask for help.

Hello there!

I am using the Fairphone 4 as my daily driver at the moment, and I want to ensure good security of the device. Henceforth I am updating the kernel from 4.19.157 to the last stable release 4.19.325 from December 2024. While no major update this will ensure added patches to known CVEs.

Please be aware that this is a tedious process, taking incremental patches from upstream kernel.org, applying them, checking conflicts, building them and testing them on the device. It will take some time until we reach 4.19.325, so please be patient.

If you think that's a worthwhile thing to do, please leave a donation (I could really need it). Links below in my signature.

Hello all!

I've created a little script to aid in the recovery of data, should one choose to enable encryption on their device.

It's available here: https://gist.github.com/fredldotme/7bc4e5aee515d8b74a7b091599e67382
Save the script as chroot-into-system on your PC.

The guide assumes you have adb installed on your PC. The steps are as followed:

1. Boot your device into recovery mode
2. Mount your system partition by going to "Advanced" -> "Mount/unmount system"
3. Open a terminal on your PC and switch to the directory you saved the script in
4. Push the script to your device: adb push chroot-into-system /tmp/
5. Run an adb shell
6. Execute the script: sh /tmp/chroot-into-system
7. Now it's time to unlock the home directory: fscrypt unlock /home/phablet
8. Enter your PIN or password and hit enter
9. The home directory contents should now be decrypted and visible

Please try it on your device and let me know of any issues.

As we are approaching full support the build and flash instructions on https://github.com/Halium/projectmanagement/issues/98 have been updated.
This should get you a working image with audio support.

Remaining issues:

• Media player support (videos in Morph Browser work fine)
• Camera

Hello there!

As many of you might know, 24.04-1.0 on the Fairphone 4 launched with filesystem encryption that conflicted with Waydroid. In the meantime I've successfully been able to bring fscrypt policy v2 support to the Fairphone 4 kernel, meaning that this issue will soon be a thing of the past.

I announce this here to educate people who already encrypted their devices. Phones with v1 policies will have to be wiped (or reset back to normal via some advanced Terminal/adb/ssh trickery) because only one type of policy version can be supported at a time.

Should you be interested in encryption while being able to use Waydroid, then wait for a while. I will push the changes once I feel comfortable I am not badly surprising users who didn't get the memo yet.

I've updated the kernel to 4.19.242 now locally, will test further and merge this ASAP.

Some hours, 4 cans of XL energy drink, and some patience later and I upgraded the kernel to 4.19.198. That's 41 patch versions fresher than before!

I will do these updates in stages. First I'll update until I feel comfortable with it, test it for a day, then merge it into the release branch. Also I've been able to catch some discrepancies I wouldn't have been able to catch otherwise if I just merged the latest upstream git into our kernel. Leaves me some peace of mind.

Hello there!

I am using the Fairphone 4 as my daily driver at the moment, and I want to ensure good security of the device. Henceforth I am updating the kernel from 4.19.157 to the last stable release 4.19.325 from December 2024. While no major update this will ensure added patches to known CVEs.

Please be aware that this is a tedious process, taking incremental patches from upstream kernel.org, applying them, checking conflicts, building them and testing them on the device. It will take some time until we reach 4.19.325, so please be patient.

If you think that's a worthwhile thing to do, please leave a donation (I could really need it). Links below in my signature.

@gpatel-fr I agree your approach using overlayfs is better, puts the file in the same place we would regularly put our customizations.

@pparent a technical explanation as to why this app will always be slow with Xwayland:

X11 historically uses GLX for passing buffers from the client to the server, and GLX inherently is tied to Desktop OpenGL. Desktop OpenGL and OpenGL ES as used on Ubuntu Touch devices are different. The only way forward would be EGL and that would require changes to Xwayland to handle the Android driver's/libhybris EGL implementation.

I tried bringing hardware acceleration to Xwayland once and it resulted in only one device (the JingPad) being remotely capable of doing it, with render artifacts. Since then we run Xwayland in shm mode which guarantees software rendering in all cases. So whatever you perceived as hardware accelerated before must have been a placebo.

@nielsbasjes you can use systemd mount units for this, we allow writes to /etc/systemd/system:

• Copy your modified NetworkManager.conf to /etc/writable as a safe spot
• Create a file /etc/systemd/system/etc-NetworkManager-NetworkManager.conf.mount with the following contents:

[Mount]
What=/etc/writable/NetworkManager.conf
Where=/etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf
Type=none
Options=bind

[Install]
WantedBy=local-fs.target

• Enable the mount unit: sudo systemctl daemon-reload && sudo systemctl enable etc-NetworkManager-NetworkManager.conf.mount

Let me know if it works for you, a quick reboot with this applied on my FP4 resulted in the same IP assigned as before.

@Thomas I presume your choice between a de-Googled Android and Ubuntu Touch should revolve around whether you want Ubuntu as your Operating System on the phone or not. We take security seriously and we're slowly catching up, see encryption of your data being a thing on 24.04.

@arubislander Regarding containers not having access to the internet: It might be the device is using "Paranoid Android Networking" in the kernel, stemming from Android, which limits use of sockets to a special group ID.

To device maintainers wanting to support LXD, you will want to check whether CONFIG_ANDROID_PARANOID_NETWORK is in your kernel tree (simply grep recursively for it) and if so, set CONFIG_ANDROID_PARANOID_NETWORK=n in your defconfig. I've since fixed this on the FP4 and verified working networking on the FP5.

And here a little success story on combining the Clickable Snap & the Docker Snap, allowing to build AND test a click package directly on the device (in this case a JingPad). Photo courtesy of Sander:

Hello again!

I've been working on bringing Docker to Ubuntu Touch, with success! Although not completely finished, I'd like to share what is possible today.

This requires a device with snapd installed, so either Ubuntu Touch 20.04 with Snapz0r (untested) or Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.0 and up.

This required changes to the Docker Snap, with a PR on GitHub that has received two heart reactions by the maintainers, so the chances of this PR landing upstream are high. For those interested in what was necessary: https://github.com/canonical/docker-snap/pull/327

I've shared a preliminary build of this Docker Snap on Google Drive and my private NextCloud instance, until the PR is merged upstream. Download links are below.

For this Snap to work on all devices, one will currently have to install it in "devmode", a mode which disables confinement for this particular Snap. This effectively means that it will run with the same privileges as an apt-installed Docker package. For confinement to work this will require additional work in snapd which I'm currently waiting for input on: https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/getting-docker-snap-to-run-on-ubuntu-touch-with-k4-19-5-4/49243

Kernel support

For Docker to work your device's kernel requires a certain set of features enabled. I've tried to list them here: https://gist.github.com/fredldotme/5dffc8bfa410cfa8f541276407154494

Also, if the device uses CONFIG_ANDROID_PARANOID_NETWORK in it's configuration, it might be beneficial to disable that also since otherwise containers won't be able to connect to the internet.

Download

Download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/15WkBrBWVsz8WQCLpULF9AYsbnJFqI-M1/view?usp=sharing
Slow mirror: https://beimfredis.oisanfochnurscheis.se/index.php/f/30467

How to

1. Install the Snap on your device: sudo snap install --dangerous --devmode ./docker_28.4.0_arm64.snap
2. Hook up permissions:

sudo snap connect docker:privileged :docker-support
sudo snap connect docker:support :docker-support
sudo snap connect docker:firewall-control :firewall-control
sudo snap connect docker:network-control :network-control
sudo snap connect docker:docker-cli docker:docker-daemon
sudo snap connect docker:home

sudo snap disable docker
sudo snap enable docker

3. Use legacy xtables for firewall rules:

sudo snap set docker nftables=false
sudo snap restart docker

4. Test whether Docker works: sudo docker run hello-world

5. For running Docker without sudo, set up your user appropriately:

sudo addgroup --extrausers docker
sudo adduser $USER docker
newgrp docker
sudo snap disable docker
sudo snap enable docker

6. You're done!

If you feel really adventurous you can now even install the Clickable Snap (sudo snap install clickable) and develop your Ubuntu Touch apps directly on your Ubuntu Touch device. How awesome is that?