Debos recipes for Fairphone 2

This repository allows you to build a debian or ubuntu image to be flashed on the fairphone 2 userdata partition. It uses a pre-built kernel and initramfs.

After building, you should use img2simg to create a sparse image before flashing it with fastboot.

It is part of the android-sdk-libsparse-utils on debian bookworm so be sure to install it with:

sudo apt install android-sdk-libsparse-utils

Or the equivalent for your linux distribution and version.

Prerequisite

You need to have lk2nd flashed on the boot partition of your fairphone 2 for these images to work. Download it here and run:

fastboot flash boot lk2nd-msm8974.img
fastboot reboot

Building

debos debian.yml # or ubuntu.yml
img2simg debian-fp2.img sparse-debian-fp2.img # or ubuntu.img ...
fastboot flash userdata sparse-debian-fp2.img
fastboot reboot
# Enjoy running debian or ubuntu on your fairphone

Flashing pre built images

Go to releases on this github page, select one, download either sparse-debian-fp2.img or sparse-ubuntu-fp2.img and flash it with fastboot as explained above.

Connecting to your fp2 via usb

A static IP is assigned to the usb0 interface with a dhcp server on the phone so you can just plug your fp2 to your host via usb and use:

ssh root@10.0.42.1
# password is root

Using Wifi

The networking setup is done with Network Manager's nmcli and to have wifi working you will need to ssh to your fp2 using the method above and use the follwing:

1. Make sure you can ssh to your FP2 by following the previous section
2. Use nmcli --ask dev wifi connect <YOURSSID>

You should now be connected to your wifi network.

Using the modem

The modem configuration is also done with Network Manager's nmcli and to connect to your APN, you can use the following:

1. Make sure you can ssh to your FP2 by following the previous section
2. Use nmcli connection add type gsm ifname '*' con-name gsm apn <YOUR APN> to create the connection
3. Then type nmcli connection up gsm

And you should be connected to your APN.

Resizing the rootfs to take all the userdata empty space

By default, the image rootfs is only a few 100MB. In order to extend it to the full remaining size of the userdata partition, run the following:

kpartx -d /dev/mapper/mmcblk0p20p2
growpart /dev/mmcblk0p20 2
kpartx -asf /dev/mmcblk0p20
resize2fs /dev/mmcblk0p20p2

if it fails the first time (it happens, I don't know why yet), then run those commands a second time and you should see your / taking several GB now.

Disclaimer

This is a very early stage support. Use it at your own risk.