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A comment on Plasma Mobile – Turns your phone into a fully open hacking device. Parent comment

Re:Plasma Mobile – Turns your phone into a fully open hackin... by djsumdog on Wednesday November 02, 2016 @05:37PM (#12859536)
I think it's a full OS. Look at the forums and they talk about porting. I don't think it runs on Android, but has a Linux base that has to be ported to different arm platforms.
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Re:Plasma Mobile – Turns your phone into a fully open hackin... by hackuser on Wednesday November 02, 2016 @05:40PM (#12859577)
Their own Linux distro?
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Re:Plasma Mobile – Turns your phone into a fully open hackin... by shmerl on Wednesday November 02, 2016 @06:40PM (#12860052)
It's based off Kubuntu. It does use Android drivers and libhybris when it has no access to native drivers.
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Re:Plasma Mobile – Turns your phone into a fully open hackin... by daveloyall on Wednesday November 02, 2016 @08:14PM (#12860567) 

    *> it does use android drivers*
...Wait a minute, that sounds like something I can do, too!

I'm a LFS[0] kind of guy. I'm also just as opposed to proprietary driver blobs as the next guy...

But, for the purpose of getting more use out of my existing phone... I guess I can just root the thing and copy some kernel modules off, eh? Nice.

0: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

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Re:Plasma Mobile – Turns your phone into a fully open hackin... by shmerl on Wednesday November 02, 2016 @08:21PM (#12860591)
See

* https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Adaptations/libhybris

* https://sailfishos.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/SailfishOS...

Lot's of that is rather generic. Plasma Mobile is using the same libhybris to interface glibc system with blobs built for bionic (Android) libc.

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Re:Plasma Mobile – Turns your phone into a fully open hackin... by hackuser on Wednesday November 02, 2016 @07:36PM (#12860371)
Thanks! Is it documented somewhere?
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Re:Plasma Mobile – Turns your phone into a fully open hackin... by shmerl on Wednesday November 02, 2016 @08:23PM (#12860603)
* https://plasma-mobile.org/technology/

* https://plasma-mobile.org/nexus-5/

In the second link you can see a reference to KDE Neon, which is development distro based on Kubuntu.

See also: https://neon.kde.org

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Re:Plasma Mobile – Turns your phone into a fully open hackin... by hackuser on Thursday November 03, 2016 @01:26AM (#12861802)
Thanks for responding. I'm still having trouble finding the information:

> * https://plasma-mobile.org/technology/

This page doesn't mention the OS, afaict.

> * https://plasma-mobile.org/nexus-5/

This page seems to describe installing Plasma Mobile on top of Cyanogenmod, a fork of Android. Neon is mentioned only under "OLD INSTRUCTIONS AND ERRATA (no longer needed)".

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Re:Plasma Mobile – Turns your phone into a fully open hackin... by shmerl on Thursday November 03, 2016 @02:04AM (#12861908)
Old instructions show what it is. The base is the same.

See for example: https://kubuntu.org/news/kubuntu-team-launches-plasma-mobile...

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Re:Plasma Mobile – Turns your phone into a fully open hackin... by hackuser on Thursday November 03, 2016 @02:01PM (#12866341)
Thanks for responding to all my questions. fyi: The dev chimed in later in this discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12861481

It turns out it runs Neon, in a container, on top of Cyanogenmod.

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Re:Plasma Mobile – Turns your phone into a fully open hackin... by shmerl on Thursday November 03, 2016 @11:30PM (#12870149)
Minimal Cyanongenmod base refers to the kernel and some blob drivers, there is nothing else there from CM. So it's actually normal glibc Linux, which uses some hardware drivers for Android through libhybris.

You can read more about the approach here:

* https://mer-project.blogspot.ca/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-an...

* https://mer-project.blogspot.ca/2013/04/wayland-utilizing-an...

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