Couple of weeks back I installed PostmarketOS on my idle phone Leeco Le 1s , which was paper weight for some time now.

It all started with a roadtrip to Pondicherry (I will soon write about this trip). As I was sitting on the front seat where Praveen’s Librem 5 kept charging on the car dashboard. And we had a small discussion about PostmarketOS and how much new ports are available now.

My idle phone came to my mind. After reaching home I started setting up porting pmOS to this device. Going through pmOS website, to my surprise there is already a port for this device.

The OEM unlock is quite easy even though a little hiccup at begin (I suspect it is solely of my cable). The Xiaomi users knows the pain of unlocking bootloader.

With the pmOS community preferred practice of using pmbootstrap, I built image for my device, flashed it. And phone boot stopped with pmOS logo. I thought I went to bootloop. I tried sxmo, xfce4, everything same nothing happening after boot logo splash.

The pmOS troubleshooting wiki is quite good. They have documented most issues. Though screen is stuck I can still ssh to the phone. From wiki I came to know its a screen refresh problem. I installed msm-fb-refresher package and ran it as a daemon.

Voila, I have a mate desktop.

Mate desktop is not at all touch friendly even though I tried to scaled up to read and tap things on the screen. Wiki suggest xfce4 is little more touch friendly. I started moving to xfce. Then again same problem, stuck at boot loop.

This time it was with lightdm, I turned off CanGraphical issue warning and now I have xfce desktop. pmos xfce seems great comparing with mate.

Nothing works as of now from a Mobile phone point of view. The phone maintainer says the battery is working, but I couldn’t get it working. Its always in battery mode and 50% status.

I thought the hardware buttons will never work. But with xev, I can see the hardware key event triggering.