Last Updated on January 1, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
Since several years, we are interested in Linux phones, and they catch our attention. In Linux, we can do anything. Also the Pinephone is advertised in YouTube videos as a device which can do anything:
If we have time to sit for an infinite number of time in front of our PC and develop it, then we don t doubt, that it can do anything, which we develop. But statements as “it can do anything” trigger high expectations.
But the Pinephone can also cost you a lot of time. In the following video is shown, how to install LibreOffice on a Raspberry Pi.
The developer shows how he installs LibreOffice in 3:46 min on a Raspberri Pi. It took us amost a month, working everyday a little bit, to do the same with the Pinephone. The result is shown here:
The Pinephone costs around 200 USD, shipping last year another around 100 USD, shipping and import taxes, and it took very long. Also for accessoire like the keyboard shipping is expensive.
Looking for alternative, Ubports several times catched our attention. But similar problems here. To unlock the bootloader of Xiaomi phones took us so long, that we gave up.
Another issue with Ubports is that it does not allow to write to the external SD card.
Once upon a time, it was possible to access a phone from a PC via SD card and USB cable. These features where removed by Google. We have read somewhere that it was for security reasons. But is it saver to sync all our files to Google Drive and from there to our PC? We strongly doubt about this. And we reject this options for privacy reasons.
The above video shows how easy it is to access a Raspberry Pi via VNC viewer. We are looking for a similar easy and reliable solution for an Android phone since several years, without success.
Wibble from the Pine64 forum taught us us, that with PostmarkedOS it is possible to write to the external SD card. This would solve our problem. But for the Xiaomi Redmi 9 there is not yet a good PostmarkedOS installation available.
Fairphones are easier to unlock, for older devices, PostmarkedOS is available, they also can be found on ebay, and if we want later on, we can change to Ubports as well.