TLDR: I need help porting Droidian to FP4 (or FP6)
I want to run a Linux dist on my phone, so I recently bought a FP4 so I could try port Droidian to it.
In my opinion Ubuntu Touch has done a lot of great work bringing Linux to Android phones - but to me it doesn’t really feel that close to being “normal “ distro.
Since neither PostmarketOS or Mobian has all the hardware working on just about any phone, Droidian seems like the best opportunity. Like Mobian it is a Debian derivative for mobile devices.
It runs on an Android kernel with Halium (same as Ubuntu Touch), and since UT has all the hardware working, it seems very possible that the same could be achieved with Droidian without too much hassle.
The latest branch of Halium on their github is based on Android 14, so probably won’t be seeing a FP6 port for a while.
It also makes life a lot easier to build Halium for device if its supported by LineageOS.
So for the time being its a waiting game, both for Halium 15 and a FP6 port of Lineage 22, the latter being nearly complete.
I’ve played around with H13 but never got a successful build, happy to help if you have any surface level questions though as my knowledge about all this isn’t deep.
For now, I’m trying to build for FP4 since that’s what I got.
I’m using UBports kernel source (Android 11), since that is working with Ubuntu Touch, but I’m getting “ValueError: DTB image must not be empty.” after a few minutes of compiling.
I’m not quite sure where to find the DTS files or where to put them. My best guess is arch/arm64/boot/dts/qcom/ ..
Any help you can give me would be awesome, thanks !
Hi.
I had EXACTLY the same analysis and ended up thinking Mobian was the best linux distribution (glibc instead of apline’s musl) but due to the incomplete hardware support, I started to look into droidian.
Unfortunately, droidian does not seems really active these days. I have opened a PR to correct an issue in their documentation, and no return since one week.
I agree that FP6 seems out of the game for now, But would be nice if you could try on your FP4
Have you tried flashing the recovery flashables builds on FP4 ? They seems to be like the GSI (Generic system images) of android. It’s what droidian recommends to do if there is no specific image for our phone
I tried to do that on my FP5. The most recent version is api33 so android 13. I have downgraded the FP5 to the original A13 firmware, then followed the instructions to install lineage recovery and then attempted to do an adb sideload.
I tried to flash droidian 101 (patchlevel 2025-11-30) but ended up with recovery: error in /sideload/package.zip (status 1)
I also tried the last nightly build, but same issue at 25% progress
They say to do it on TWRP, but I was unsuccessful installing TWRP. Will try again later.
I have quite some experience in compiling roms, but not really in porting, so I’m quite a noob but highly motivated.
Hello!
I’m curious too about Droidian.
And it seems that some people are already working on a port, I found this looking for Fairphone keyword in the telegram group
tu11ebukk on Fairphone 4
tu11ebukk: Hi, I’m porting to Droidian to Fairphone 4 and and a lot of stuff is working (camera’s, fingerprint, sensors, gps, waydroid, data up to 4G)
I have calls and SMS working on 2G, and trying to get VoLTE and 5G working by using the ofono-binder-plugin-ext-qti from UBports - anybody had any luck getting that to work on Qualcomm devices on Droidian?
I see people have been writing about it in the chat before, but it doesn’t look like anybody posted about any successful attempts.
but highly motivated.
