Call for testing: Samsung S3 Neo (s3ve3g) owners

flohack

@cyclone018 It is not really abandoned, but the S3 Neo is on the edge of hardware support, so I do not invest much time with it atm. That said, its a bit slow and camera is not working (dont start the camera, you will get into a busy-loop that will drain your battery ;)) but other thatn that its a good opportunity to test-drive UT for example.

sunrunner

Just stumbled across this, when looking at ubuntu touch devices and different ports available.

I got a clean samsung s3-neo, which i'd like to experiment with.

I've flashed loads of roms in the past and just trying to understand all the instructions.

Basically I need to get TWRP 3.3.3-1 and install via hemidall in a linux environment (or Odin in windows)
(i understand this part well enough)

Seen your link for the images here
https://twoot.bin.org.in/nextcloud/index.php/s/y6YosPpXFwoLDJW

I'm guessing you use ADB with the *.img files (hallium boot.img and system.img) ??

any help appreciated

Sun

flohack

@sunrunner said in Call for testing: Samsung S3 Neo (s3ve3g) owners:

Hello, nice that you want to try it. So yes the halium-boot.img goes into the boot partition, but here is the guide from the beginning of this thread in case you missed it: https://pad.ubports.com/p/samsung-s3neo-alphatesting

That should explain a lot - let me hear what happened

BR

flohack

God! Someone again destroyed the pad meh! Its missing now information, I quickly restored it from a backup, so I hope you can be successful with it

sunrunner

@Flohack said in Call for testing: Samsung S3 Neo (s3ve3g) owners:

@sunrunner said in Call for testing: Samsung S3 Neo (s3ve3g) owners:

Hello, nice that you want to try it. So yes the halium-boot.img goes into the boot partition, but here is the guide from the beginning of this thread in case you missed it: https://pad.ubports.com/p/samsung-s3neo-alphatesting

That should explain a lot - let me hear what happened

BR

Thanks. Used to doing this sort of things in windows and not messed with it in linux. Phone being a pain, when trying to get it recognised in download mode.
Got the all the SDK stuff installed. Any thoughts re linux recognising device in download mode ? Changed cables and did all that. Running ubuntu 18.

Nathan123

I will try to get an S3... Wanna help.

sunrunner

didn't realise that ADB is such a pain. Updated bootloader on phone. rooted phone, and for some reason cant get the thing to recognise in download mode.

sunrunner

Ok. got to the last step and seemed to fail at the end. "heimdall flash --BOOT halium-boot.img".

got the below message. Any advice !! ?
Many thanks
Sun

Beginning session...

Some devices may take up to 2 minutes to respond.
Please be patient!

Session begun.

Downloading device's PIT file...
ERROR: Failed to send request to end PIT file transfer!
ERROR: Failed to download PIT file!
Ending session...
ERROR: Failed to send end session packet!
Releasing device interface...

sunrunner

Cracked it ! It was a version issue with hemidall. 1.4.2 seemed to resolve the issue.

Huge thanks to @hsce1 for this documentation, it really helped a lot.

Just playing about with Ubuntu Touch and getting familiar with stuff.

Only got about 2 % space free tho .

Mohsen1220

ill jump in SAP , when the camera fix will come ?

flohack

@Mohsen1220 I am not sure now. We are seeing that basically all cameras fail with Halium and wwe need to change the whole camera access to GStreamer and a droid module to interface. While this works reasonably well for Halium 7.1 there is currently no one working on a backport to 5.1 - I can take a look how much work this is, but I cannot tell when

flohack

To all testers, I see a regression regarding the modem, it does not start correctly anymore. Can one of you insert a SIM card and test the functions of the modem?

kitwiz555

@Flohack can't you use helium 9, because all we do knows that s3 neo all 3 models have lineage os 16 so it would help to fix a lot of problems as the camera and ril problems

flohack

@kitwiz555 Maybe, I did not look into whats needed for Halium 9, and how much work it would be, I started the port at a time when support for 9 was not even a thing

bosito7

Hello @Flohack , thanks for the hard work. I was pleased to see that there are some people out there working on porting ubuntu to S3.

I do own an S3 i9300 1GB RAM. I checked and sadly is not the same hardware (CPU/GPU) as S3 Neo so the compiled kernel link on the guide does not work.

Do you know if there is any recent work around i9300 device? If so could you please point me in the right direction? Thanks in advance.
So far the best info I found is this:
https://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-s3/orig-development/discontinued-ubuntu-touch-13-10-builds-t2315397/page23
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Touch/Devices/i9300
But half of the links do not work

I do have some Linux and programming skills and I am willing to collaborate doing a Ubuntu port for i9300. I will need some guidance in the beginning though.

BTW I added some info that might help others on the port installing instructions: https://pad.ubports.com/p/samsung-s3neo-alphatesting
I hope is ok

Regards

flohack

@bosito7 Hi, yes this is only for S3 Neo s3ve3g, which has Kernel 3.4 luckily. Sadly S3 has only Kernel 3.0 I think, and thats really really low, even if you get it ported, it will not be easily maintainable through the major migration to 20.04 that we are preparing.

A lot of kernel patches that might be needed are only available for 3.4 kernel onwards, as well as systemd wont run on this kernel easily. So while it might be fun trying to port it, don´t expect it will be a good daily driver in the end.

I am saying this because I started on the S3 and gave up at a certain point. Also I am not sure you wanna try to run it off a LineageOS 14.1 build, if there is an official one, you could still try it. You basically need to follow http://docs.ubports.com/en/latest/porting/halium_7-1/index.html

Please do not use any ancient resources for this device, this is all outdated and not compatible anymore with how the current Ubuntu Touch works.

hsce1

I have gathered some information for experimenting on the FM radio topic with the S3 Neo. After some digging I came across this documentation https://github.com/mer-hybris/hadk-faq#fm-radio. Is it possible that most of the changes can be done on a running device? Or am I getting it wrong?

11 FM radio
11.1 Qualcomm

Needs a device with suitable FM radio hardware and a kernel defconfig containing CONFIG_RADIO_IRIS=y (CONFIG_RADIO_IRIS=m if fail to build IRIS_TRANSPORT as module) and CONFIG_RADIO_IRIS_TRANSPORT=m (or =y)

If your CONFIG_RADIO_IRIS_TRANSPORT is built-in then this is not needed, however if you have problems try building CONFIG_RADIO_IRIS_TRANSPORT as a module: add (adapt to fit your device if needed) https://github.com/mlehtima/droid-config-fp2-sibon/blob/master/sparse/lib/systemd/system/droid-fm-up.service and https://github.com/mlehtima/droid-config-fp2-sibon/blob/master/sparse/lib/systemd/system/bluetooth.service.wants/droid-fm-up.service

Sometimes device permissions are wrong (root owner), in this case add https://github.com/mlehtima/droid-config-fp2-sibon/blob/master/sparse/lib/udev/rules.d/999-droid-fm.rules to your droid-configs repo (or directly to device for testing)

Add qt5-qtmultimedia-plugin-mediaservice-irisradio to patterns (or install directly to device for testing)

Add https://github.com/mlehtima/droid-config-fp2-sibon/blob/master/sparse/etc/pulse/xpolicy.conf.d/fmradio.conf to your droid-configs repo (or directly to device for testing)

Starting from Sailfish OS 2.0.2 FM radio Media app plugin jolla-mediaplayer-radio can be added to patterns.

On my S3 Neo running UT, it seems that point 1 and 2 are satisfied:
zcat /proc/config.gz | grep -n RADIO_IRIS gives:

2587:CONFIG_RADIO_IRIS=y
2588:CONFIG_RADIO_IRIS_TRANSPORT=y

Regarding point 3. It seems to me that KERNEL=="radio[0-9]*", OWNER="audio", GROUP="audio" would have to be added since
cat ~/../../android/system/halium/lib/udev/rules.d/70-android.rules | grep radio0 returns:

ACTION=="add", KERNEL=="radio0", OWNER="system", GROUP="system", MODE="0640"
ACTION=="add", KERNEL=="radio0", OWNER="fm_radio", GROUP="fm_radio", MODE="0640"

No idea how to check for the other points.

I know there is no FM radio app in the open store yet but could it work to build something quickly using this https://doc.qt.io/archives/qt-5.6/qml-qtmultimedia-radio.html?

Unfortunately I have no experience in porting yet but if someone could give me a bit of guidance through the steps above, I'd be happy to sacrifice my S3 Neo for testing.

flohack

@hsce1 Cool I can change the udev rules for you and then we can try this maybe

Note that I am working on the installer support currently, so if thats done you have it much easier to install newer versions of the system.

hsce1

Cool! Installer support would be amazing! Thanks a lot for all your hard work!

libremax

@hsce1 said :

Thanks a lot for all your hard work!

IT people never work hard, they just fake it!