Building a Linux Phone

I'm sure you are already aware, but just in case, there's a lot of prior work in getting a truly Linux mobile phone.

There are ready-made devices like PinePhone (the PinePhone Pro looks the most promising one of the bunch), Librem 5, and Liberux Nexx. I think at least some of those companies publish schematics for their boards, you should probably check those out if you want to design your own.

There is also another direction, taken by postmarketOS and the like, to install Linux on a phone that shipped with Android out of the box.

It should be easy enough to install postmarketOS on your device, since it seems to have support for raspberry pi. The benefit of postmarketOS here is that it makes it really easy to install mobile Linux UI shells, like phosh, gnome-mobile, plasma-mobile, or sxmo. This will let you try all of them out and maybe pick one as a starting point for your software stack.

What I wouldn't give (or pay) for a 1. sleek, modern smartphone 2. running a pure Linux distro 3. that's feature complete enough to daily drive

All of the current options available fall down in one of the three areas. Usually 2. and 3... mostly 3.

i just want a linux phone with a slide out physical keyboard.

This is a sexy device. But can I ask you to make a repo on codeberg ? Github has been taking down repos that might be a threat to Big-Tech monopoly

I suggest adding a license . i recommend a copyleft license (there are copyleft licenses for hardware. for example the cern licenses).

I also suggest setting up a open collective. i suspect people might be more inclined to donate to a non profit then to for profit companies like purism and Pine64.

there's a youtuber working on something similar, maybe yous can join forces: https://youtu.be/OgMdO0ckICg

can't see from the pic (more of them appreciated), but it looks like you can desolder the ports to save on space.

Ah, the thicc phone.

What are the dimensions of the case?

you could try one of these guys and a cm5 saves you some space https://www.pi-shop.ch/nano-base-board-a-for-raspberry-pi-compute-module-5

This is a really cool idea. Any work in the direction of more linux phone technology is always good. There are some linux phones out there already, and these devices have had some problems which is why there hasn't been more adoption. If there is a way to do this with RISC and have decent battery life, that would be really exciting. Have you tried installing Phosh on it?

The newest, and most exciting, option right now is flx1s (https://furilabs.com/flx1s-update-2/).

One of the biggest problems is that, to my knowledge, there is no standard linux mobile App standard or, if there is, it's not often used. There is a group working on this issue right now (https://www.fierce-network.com/wireless/mobile-linux-standards-group-formed).

For example, if I am using mobian or something similar and download thunar using sudo apt install thunar, then if I run thunar, it will run, but certain menus won't display easily. In phosh, any sub-menu boxes will also pop up as a smaller pop-up box and to close it, you have to scroll through Apps to find the pop-up box and then close it. Generally I may be able to see the file structure on the left in Thunar but have a hard time seeing what's on the right.

There are also things that can happen in which default panels (like the side panel) take up so much room that you can't see what's going on. For instance, if you try running gimp in phosh, you can barely see the image panel by default.

There are some Apps designated as mobile-friendly but even these sometimes don't display correctly. Perhaps there should be a way to make it harder for Apps to be installed that don't meet mobile standards and have weird menu glitches, such as making it harder to download Apps from repositories that are not mobile.

I'd really like to be able to run something like "flatpak-mobile install librewolf" and just get something that at least had a file with it to tell phosh how to display menus in the best way, if not a slightly altered librewolf.

Many people who used phosh would say "well just use waydroid" but the problem is that with play integrity api, many of those Apps won't work.

In order for banking Apps and other Apps to run on linux and people to develop software, there really needs to be more adoption of mobile linux.

And yes, battery life was atrociously bad and completely unusable on the linux mobile devices I tested, which were a few years ago. It also got way too hot when just not doing anything, which was terrible. (In other words, if I took the device with me to Starbucks and got a coffee, it might get way too hot in my pocket; if I took it out and used the Internet for 20 minutes, the battery could die, and even if it didn't, if I were waiting for a call during that time there was a good chance I wouldn't get it. After getting back home, it would be totally dead and need a full recharge.)

Right now also, the main competitor to linux phones is Graphene OS with FOSS Apps and Graphene OS has better security features if someone is worried about their phone being stolen or seized. Data security is important to me and Graphene OS has a rate-limiting throttle to the password entry that even cellebrite can't easily bypass and a function to auto-reboot. If the political situation in my country deteriorated even more, and arbitrary arrests started to happen more often, I would much rather be arrested with a Graphene phone than a typical linux mobile phone. Mobile linux for certain distros such as Mobian still offers robust encryption in before first unlock (bfu) if the password can withstand brute force attempts, but since there's no hardware rate-limiter, the password has to be much more complex. Also, most people who use their phone frequently are not in BFU mode.

Graphene OS also requires a Pixel which does not have hardware switches and so a person must trust that there's no exploit allowing certain components to be turned on or off which can be concerning when there is no way to definitively measure what the cellular modem is transmitting. Call me paranoid, but given what I know about how easy it is for someone smart to exploit computers, I actually don't want a cell phone microphone to have power when I am talking about sensitive things or inputting passwords into computer systems and I do not want a camera that is built into the lcd part of the glass screen and can't be easily covered because of the need to swipe up nor turned off without a switch, even if the cell phone has an incredible operating system that is very secure. Graphene, unlike most mobile linux distributions, is mostly very usable with no battery life issues, no weird display problems where Apps don't display correctly and menus don't work correctly, and no random reliability problems, mostly. I understand not wanting to rely on anything involving Android, however, given Google's recent aggressive anti-privacy stances.

I'm excited about FuriPhone (https://furilabs.com/) and Purism's Librem 5v2.

The thing that I believe would help Mobile Linux most right now is people having conferences and getting to know each other and discussing standards, specifically on user experience, linux mobile app standards, battery life, and reliability. There is now a group, the Mobile Linux Standards group (https://www.fierce-network.com/wireless/mobile-linux-standards-group-formed) that was formed last month that wants to standardize the Application layer to hopefully help with some of this.

There are so many smart people in mobile linux and eventually it will get great but right now there are major problems with the user experience because of how Apps are displayed and battery life as well as things like reliability.

So any way to gather people to discuss the mobile linux user experience, like conferences or groups etc, and to come up with standards to reduce these issues would help, or even to help list all the different problems so that they can just be enumerated and acknowledged and worked on would help.

Another way that would help is to have a mobile linux security group or conference to discuss things like standards for making mobile linux more secure from brute-force attacks if stolen or seized after being unlocked.

When planning to go into mass production?

If you're really going to do this you need a RISC-V processor SOC. If you look around online there's a few places where you can obtain these.

since the rpi5 cannot make phone calls and sms, i wonder if you or someone would design a attachment to add calls and sms (like to gpio pins for example)

Not trying to dump on your efforts or anything here, but you'd be better off first defining a scope of what you're trying to do, and then work off an existing hardware or software platform.

You can get phone dev kits for cheaper than $200 if you just want to build something that works without Android, but if you intend to take that further and design some of the software experience, you'd be better off just working or contributing to something that already exists.

A single person can't even begin to touch on the fundamentals of what it takes to run a phone experience in that that we currently understand and use them. Touch UX, software<>hardware integration, peripherals like cameras...it's A LOT. Doing it well as a single developer is just not going to happen.

If your goal is simply to not have to buy another shit Google-infested phone, you can get a cheap that runs other things right now.

I'm interested in this. Especially at that price point. I didn't see any photos of device though.

Been wanting to do something similar in a small pelican case for my friend and us. Couldn’t figure out what to do for phone signal though which stumped us.

it's cool that you're making the phone, but for $200 it's no cheaper than the more expensive version of the Pinephone.