@grenudi Thanks for linking that thread, though I've not had time to read it fully now. I am aware of the Halium approach vs. the mainline Linux approach, and I am somewhat (at least superficially) familiar with the downsides and upsides of each. I will try to read it in its entirety during the week to gain more insights.

I am mostly interested in a mainline distro on my phone, but my plan with this second hand device is to familiarize myself with all possibilities available that will run on my device. postmarketOS is what I plan to try after Ubuntu Touch. I've been quite stoked about the recent progress posts on Mastadon by Luca Weiss (and his FOSDEM talk) on getting stuff like the camera and the battery gauge working. I understand these things are not trivial with the locked down mobile chipsets, even for someone directly employed at Fairphone. I'm testing them out in this order in hope of being able to contribute over longer time to testing stuff for postmarketOS.

@grenudi Thanks for linking that thread, though I've not had time to read it fully now. I am aware of the Halium approach vs. the mainline Linux approach, and I am somewhat (at least superficially) familiar with the downsides and upsides of each. I will try to read it in its entirety during the week to gain more insights.

I am mostly interested in a mainline distro on my phone, but my plan with this second hand device is to familiarize myself with all possibilities available that will run on my device. postmarketOS is what I plan to try after Ubuntu Touch. I've been quite stoked about the recent progress posts on Mastadon by Luca Weiss (and his FOSDEM talk) on getting stuff like the camera and the battery gauge working. I understand these things are not trivial with the locked down mobile chipsets, even for someone directly employed at Fairphone. I'm testing them out in this order in hope of being able to contribute over longer time to testing stuff for postmarketOS.

@gpatel-fr Cheers! I'll stop by an electronics store tomorrow to get a proper cable that will be my dedicated flashing cable. Guess there is no need risking anything.

Hi all! I recently got a hold of a second-hand FP4 for the sole purpose of testing out Linux-distros, and I'm starting out with Ubuntu Touch. I hope to first play around with it as a secondary phone (without a permanent SIM installed), but if it seems I would be able to daily drive it, I will attempt to do so for some weeks.

I have a couple of questions before I get started though, and was hoping these would be easy for you answer and help me get going:

1. It is stated I need to be on the Android 11-version of Fairphone OS in order to install it. The phone I got came with Android 15 installed, and before I proceed with downgrading to 11, I just wanted to confirm that this is in fact a requirement, and that it is not just a case of the instructions not having been updated since Fairphone has updated their OS.

2. On Fairphone's website, it is stated that I will brick my device if the security patch of the OS is behind whatever I have installed now (with Fairphone OS 15). Would going from Android 15 -> Android 11 -> Ubuntu Touch allow me to relock the bootloader?

3. There's a lot of emphasis on proper data cables, and I've had issues with this before when installing custom ROMs. Is there a way to test the cable beforehand? Am I at risk of bricking the device if I use a bad cable? When I previously had issues, the flashing would just be unable to finish properly, but no harm was done, and I could retry with another cable.

Looking forward to trying this out.