/g/ - Technology

I'll install this as soon as I find some time. It has a lot of drawbacks though.

>>8496

Make a full backup before you install it, especially the modem firmware. The instructions don't mention this, because it would cause them to lose the FSF endorsement.

I got a note2 version a few months back.

I intended to get it so I would give up my reliance on my phone (a terrible platform for privacy and freedom) knowing its limitations.

If you're looking for a dumb smartphone then look no further. If you want a freedom respecting handset, then the pinephone and librem, even at their most disastrous of alphas, are better options. My future plan is to split my cellphone into a pocket FOSS machine and have a VOIP and SMS service I reach behind a VPN.

There are 3 issues w/ phones

- Modems are blackboxes that can snitch on you w/ w/e its connected to so long as its on, and they rarely are ever able to be turned off

- ARM requires blobs period, staring from boot to bootloader, with varying levels of harm and privilege

- Most operating systems ship with non-free blobs that are required for things like vga or wifi to work

Replicant solves the 3rd by shipping w/o blobs for anything, which is the big difference between it and lineageos. As such, wifi, bt, gps, front camera 3d, and some accelerated functions don't work unless you patch it back in. It still has a chinese bootloader, it still has an always on modem.

The pinephone takes it a step further and has a kill-switch on the modem, which is physically isolated, as well a well supported linux cpu w/ a libre bootloader. It still has the GNSS on it (gps stuff), so you lose that when you operate without a modem. It also is forced to load proprietary firmware that can be modified in the boot process. Besides that, everything is open (mali gpu, upstream open wifi, etc...)

The librem 5, and the reason why it costs so much, physically separates every single element from the modem. The GNSS, wifi, and imu (compasses and accelerometer) are separated allowing operation (and physical disablement) even when the modem is killed. It has a chance at a RYF cert from the FSF by having a removable/modular modem (using m.2) && using a separate cortex m4 to act as a ROM when loading proprietary firmware on the main CPU on boot. Apparently, so long as it can't be arbitrarily changed in software, ROMs are considered hardware not unlike silicon and are OK by FSF standards. I'm not going to act like I know anymore than that b/c i'm a consumer and everything beyond that is laden with schizo posts or EE babble

Now of the 3 options, only one isn't vaporware and/or an unfinished product. I switched from a moto z2 to it, and its usable as a cellphone and quick internet searching tool. Anything after that, like video, isn't possible w/o a good data plan to convert it online to a playable format. Also, so far as I could tell, tor didn't work on Replicant. OpenVPN worked fine, and I have little reason to use tor on an already compromised machine, but its something to consider as another trade-off

The rest of this post will be my documentation of what does and doesn't work w/ my usual array of apps. Some apps didn't work on android 6, and i have them noted.

# replicant oddities and notes

- I couldn't get my note 2 to go over 750MB of memory

- OS takes 415MB of storage and idles at 510MB of memory

- Battery lasts a little over 2 days w/o openvpn

- Battery lasts a little under a day w/ openvpn and repwifi

- Front camera will crash phone app

- Firefox forks (as well as tor browsers) don't seem to work right... Use privacy browser

- Wifi app w/ adaptor when used sometimes will kill mobile until phone is restarted

- Wifi app shows data used in mobile data section still, take note of how much data you use off of wifi

- Encrypting phone adds about 90 seconds to boot time

- Pluck lock and derivatives don't work

- Screen recorder doesn't work

- Sometimes /storage/emulated/0/ on ghost commander doesn't work, a workaround is using the sdcard symlink

- SD cards need to be modified with SAF mode on ghost commander or root mode from /storage/

- SD card, when ejected and remounted, requires the OS to reboot before it shows up again

- SD card IS NOT encrypted keep that in mind

- Occasionally simple-xyz apps will not properly export / import (will show empty directory), close and reopen and should fix

- Can't get location from WiFi

- AnySoftKeyboard appears slower (has noticeable lag) compared to AOSP, although functionally they work the same, up to preference if you need the extended functionality or scale of AnySoftKeyboard. AOSP is NOT gboard and doesn't collect data from you

- Blue light filtering doesn't work, red moon can fix this but draws over app in strange way, appears to slow down phone more

- When you do something replicant os doesn't like doing (playing unsupported media or using non-loaded firmware) it has the chance of soft rebooting. This reboot will not encrypt the phone, rather restart within the encrypted partition.

# video playback notes for replicant

Replicant is picky for whatever reason and likes to bug out if you don't feed it the right codecs. You'll want to find a way of automating this or at least install video transcoder to assist you if you happen to need to watch a video on your device.

Containers I verified working w/ VLC:

MP4

MKV

WEBM - sometimes choppy or poor scrubbing

Video codecs I verified working w/ VLC:

VP8

VP9

H265

MPEG2

MPEG1

Video codecs I verified broken w/ VLC:

H264 - sometimes works, most of time doesn't

MPEG4 - sometimes works, most of time doesn't

Audio codecs I verified w/ VLC:

AAC

MP3

VORBIS

OPUS

FLAC

# video transcoding

Using the video transcoder app, I was able to transcoded a 36 minute 360p MP4 H264 to 360p MP4 MPEG2 175kbps in about an hour on my note 2. It took 25% of my battery in the process.

I recommend using a computer with a faster CPU to transcode videos and load on the SD card.

In a pinch you can use website transcoders if you have no reasonable access to a powerful machine, at the expense of your privacy and mobile data. I used https://video.online-convert.com/convert-to-mkv for testing as it allows batch file uploads, and I would recommend H265 w/ Vorbis audio as your settings unless highly restricted on data. The same 36 minute video was transcoded in roughly 3 minutes on the service at low traffic. I do not endorse this service as I do not know how they get money or who owns it, but it might be useful if all your options are exhausted. It allows my VPN through as well.

# applications

This is if I was able to install them, I haven't thoroughly tested all of these apps on android 4 and replicantOS, although I make a note of ones that didn't work either here of in the problems section below it. I have install versions under here b/c I got curious what the stock android 4 could run when I accidentally ordered the wrong model lol

*<number> - cant be installed on this version and lower

! - doesn't work in replicantOS

~ - replacement

aard 2 - offline dictionary

altcoin priced - crypto portfolio tracker in real time

ameixa - custom icons (need a launcher that supports it like open launcher)

andotp - 2FA

ankidroid - flash cards and memory program

antennapod - podcast program (holds position, offline download, speedups)

anysoftkeyboard - keyboard replacement, very adjustable and arrow keys, predictive text and autocorrects, slide / swipe keyboard, terminal keyboard options. Scale is low by default on hidpi phones. Important to use if your phone has a proprietary keyboard (anything other than AOSP or other libre boards)

audio recorder - record mic with tunable settings, playback and edit, silence mode

aurora store - google play store if you have to download from there, anon download

*4 simple calendar - good calendar

~ etar - pretty much the same

call recorder - simple app that records at least your mic when you're in a phone call. Most phones don't support the other person(s) being recorded as well because of a bug in android.

clover - image board viewer

*4 simple contacts - BUG MAKES CONTACT EXPORT NOT WORK RIGHT, NAMES EXPORT BUT ALL INFO IS MISSING good contact manager, important to seperate base contact app to open alternative unless using open android distros, block list, phone dialer

~ open contacts - less features but works

conversations - XMPP client

*4 simple draw - drawing app, including over pictures

etch droid - make bootable image from phone

*4 fbreader - ebook reader and library manager

~ book reader - more minimal eBook reader, I prefer this one to fbreader but if you have large library fbreader appears to work better, experiment for yourself

feeder - RSS feed

finder - SMS phone locate (like find my iPhone, haven't tried though)

!*4 firefox klar - Firefox but without google integation (doesn't want to install on replicant)

!forecastie - weather app (doesn't work on replicant unless GPS blob is enabled)

freerdp - rdp client

*4 simple gallery - good picture and gif browser

~ camera roll - pretty much the same

gadgetbridge - smart watch open source implementation, limited models but works very well

ghost commander - good NFS/SMB and file manager w/ compression ability and fast copy paste (replicant won't go into internal storage when apps have root permissions, workaround is to use sdcard symlink, everything else seems ok)

graph 89 - TI-84, 89, 92 emulator

!icecat mobile - free implementation of firefox, can remove librejs (opens and crashes after 5 seconds on replicant)

keepass DX - password manager

kiwix - offline wiki archiver

*4 kodi - sketch movie streamer, need to load aftermarket repo

kore - kodi network remote

k-9 mail - email client for android

libreoffice viewer - view odt files

libretorrent - torrent client on phone

limbo x86 - x86 emulator using QEMU, good for freedos. if using x86 CPU then KVM is usable and much faster

loop habit tracker - checkmark goals / habits on customizable schedule

*4 MALP - MPD client for android

!maps - GPS openmaps frontend as google maps replacement (requires 3d graphics / opengl, replicant doesn't have this)

markor - good text editor, has markdown renderer and good customizability

Morse - text to Morse (and viceversa)

multiVNC - VNC client

mupdf viewer - PDF viewer

newpipe - youtube-dl & YouTube frontend. Has speedup built in. (replicant can't stream videos, but it can download them, also can open link w/ webpage / straight download if using it from an RSS feed)

!open camera - good camera app with customizability (phone isnt strong enough to run, can only take pictures)

*4 open note scanner - heavy contrast scanner and tagger (crashes replicant if you force a picture instead of autodetect)

open food facts - community database of food nutrition, good for looking up ingredients when planning recipes

!open launcher - nice open source launcher (broken on replicant)

openVPN for android - openVPN, try a few different ports if it doesn't work on mobile

!orbot - TOR VPN (not available through fdroid on replicant)

orgzly - org mobile client

oscilloscope -. 1ms to. 5s oscilloscope

osmand - other openmaps front end. usually works better than maps, but has non-free backend and assets. (Replicant by default cant use GPS or location, but this offers point to point offline directions)

*4 PDF converter - create, encrypt, split, merge, compress, deduplicate, and more PDFs (code isnt open source anymore, last version 201901)

~ PDF creator - convert things into PDF

plumble - unmaintained mumble client

*4 poet assistant - thesaurus, dictionary, rhymer, and TTS poem analyzer

privacy browser - only browser that seems to work on replicant os, has built in global dark theme, js disabler, adblock, and goes pretty fast on slow hardware

!privatelock - plucklock fork, able to hard lock device on adjustable accelerometer amount. Good for places where biometrics don't require a warrant and you use a fingerprint scanner.

radiodroid - internet radio client, nice frontend and saves stations from radiobrowser

red moon - blue light filter, adjustable timing, and selective disable per app. Good for phones that don't have support for it natively in later android versions. Apps that use view finder will experience slow down, replicant devices are going to slow down noticeably in general, up to you if you want it running.

ripple - programmable panic button in bad situations (raid, breach, hack)

!retroarch - emulation client for nearly everything

revolution IRC - IRC client

*4.1 riot.im - matrix frontend

ruler - quick ruler using display in case you really have nothing to measure with

scrambled exif - kill identifiable information on images

secscanqr - create or scan QR codes

semitone - tuner, BPM, and piano keyroll

share to clipboard - share whatever to clipboard

*4.4 signal - encrypted messaging cross platform and default SMS client. requires phone number with centralized AWS server... but Snowden did recommend it at one point.

~ silence - same as above but only SMS/MMS, but it uses encrypted sms/mms if both parties use silence (only available on android). No server is used to communicate

signal generator - create frequency

slide - reddit front end, makes dealing with thread much easier

stocks widget - stock price tracker

street compete - push changes to openmaps

suntimes - use location to figure out sun times (rise, gold hour, set, hours total, etc...)

syncthing-fork - syncthing client for android

syncopoli - rsync client for android

tachiyomi - stream or manage downloaded comics and anime

!*4 termux && termux:boot - command line for android, has an extensive package manager and gnu coreutils

~ terminal emulator - raw terminal command line, very few terminals

~ connectbot - SSH client

torbrowser - tor browser for android

torchie - fast flashlight program, requires elevated permissions so audit code and use only on phones you don't care about

transistor - internet audio stream client, for the rare stations that don't work on radiodroid

trifa - tox client for android

unit converter ultimate - great offline tool to convert nearly anything

!userland - app that runs a jailed full instance of Linux if you need native Linux applications and don't have root (termux is a much lighter way of doing this). It has VNC, SSH, and XSDL support (but you need to supply your own applications. Easy Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, Alpine, and Kali setups. (I couldnt get it to function on replicant, appears to hang while starting distro))

vanilla music - good local music player, can play nearly anything and has lyric follow abilities, as well as audio tagger (replicant can't play wav or opus, VLC can play all of these but doesn't act like a music player)

video transcoder - good for resizing or converting videos, supports h264, MPEG4/2/1, VP8/9, && AAC, MP3, Vorbis. Lots of container options like webm, mkv, mp4, and some proprietary ones if you're in a crunch like AVI.

vlc - video and media player with speedup and networking ability

voice - audio book player with memory

Once they get the Lima GPU driver added to Replicant 9 most of the video and lag issues mentioned in this thread should be deal with. But it's a lot of work and won't be finished any time soon. We'll be lucky if it's done by the end of 2020.

I've been thinking of using Replicant on a phone as a prepper item; loading maps and satellite imagery of local area on microsd cards. The note 2 seems to be the best model they support at the moment and can take 64gb cards max. Put a dozen of them in the back of the case and you can store and access quite a lot of information in a small device without internet access.

>>10967

note 2s have sdxc, i can't promise 2tb but mine has 128gb in it right now! 64gb was just the max size in 2012 iirc

You'll need to patch in the GPS since its a blob. Some people have done it

Depending on what prep you're doing, it might make more sense to get a galaxy s5 w/ lineage os. Its cheaper, more available, also has a removable battery, and has some water resistence. Both phones snitch to the FCC and pre-os boot, the S5 w/ microg has wifi/bt/audio/3d blobs that all are issues only if your prep environment is within civilization and has 3 letter concerns.

If you were in a no / 2g connection area, GPS would work on both but you would have a much more functional computer and be able to hoard / fix / burn them much easier than a note 2.

Another question is, within a prep scenario, can you afford lugging laptops around (one is none, two is one, etc...) to use as your main knowledge source? The note 2, while it can read books and browse downloaded web pages, it does so slowly and w/ app restrictions (no firefox / termux). An s5 could act as a laptop replacement in terms of speed, and a tiny screen is an ok compromise if it means reducing 4-11lb off your bag (2x modern laptops - 3x x200 w/ 9cells)

Personally I'm saving cash to build a prep shelter / homestead in the middle-of-nowhere USA, so I'm fine with extra weight, but if I was doing a nomad/thru-hiker approach I'd have to reconsider, thats enough for a full sized rifle and ammunition