[Swlug] Installing Linux onto Android smartphone

[Sam Braithwaite]

You probably don't want a general-purpose desktop Linux distro (Ubuntu 
etc) as even if you could get that installed and running, you'd have 
immediate usability problems (as the OS would be designed to work with a 
mouse and keyboard) and as you point out wouldn't be able to run Android 
apps, or use the phone functionality etc very easily. (Android *is* 
Linux by the way, just not what you might think of as a traditional 
desktop Linux distro. As an aside, Canonical did promote Ubuntu Touch 
for a few years, which they intended to ship with certain mobiles and 
allow for "convergent computing", where you could dock your mobile and 
use it as a desktop PC, but as far as I'm aware this got discontinued 
after one model was released.)

What might be worth looking at to keep getting updates for old Android 
mobiles in general is something like LineageOS or Replicant, which are 
free & open-source mobile OSes based on Android. I used to use the 
predecessor of LineageOS, Cyanogenmod, on my old Samsung S3, and it 
always worked reasonably well. With these you can definitely install a 
package manager such as F-Droid for Android apps or install the .APK 
files directly if you have them, and with Cyanogenmod it used to be 
possible to install the Google apps so you could use Google Play 
normally (although as I've never used LineageOS I have no idea whether 
this is still possible).

Anyone else have any more recent experience?

Cheers

Sam


On 07/03/2019 15:11, Bill Thomson via Swlug wrote:
> Hi team,
> I have a smartphone (Fairphone FP1U) which runs on Android. The current 
> version of Android on the phone is 4.2.2, kernel version 3.4.5
> 
> Fairphone have stopped updating the Android system on the phone, and I 
> wonder if there is a way of installing Linux as the OS instead of 
> Android whilst still being able to download apps from sources outside  
> of the Linux environment. A bit of a tall question to ask, I know.
> 
> I'm particularly interested in YouVersions Bible App, and the HTB Bible 
> in One Year app. Obviously I would like something to take notes, a 
> calculator, WhatsApp, and the other usual bits and pieces that are now 
> routinely packaged with smartphones - and of course the abiity to use 
> the phone as a phone!
> 
> Hope to hear from you soon,
> 
> Cheers,
> Bill Thomson

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