Messages

1

Cosmo Communicator - General Discussion / Installing Devuan Linux inside Android

« on: February 14, 2020, 05:03:56 pm »

Here are some extra tweaks to improve the Linux desktop experience...

When starting XServer XSDL, the first screen (white background, big Powered by SDL logo) has a button at the top "CHANGE DEVICE CONFIGURATION". Press it to open a menu. Mouse emulation -> Advanced features -> Relative mouse movement turns the touchscreen into a touchpad. Pressing OK allows you to then set the mouse speed and acceleration. I prefer fast speed with no acceleration.

Tap anywhere on the second screen (black background, centered text with the first line saying "Tap the screen to change" and the last line is a 3-second countdown). First you can choose the display resolution. Native 2160x1080 is probably best. On the next screen you can choose font scaling. X0.3 sets the display DPI to roughly 120 (use xdpyinfo to verify) and makes UI widget sizes more consistent, windows generally fitting better on the screen.

Everything is quite small, but that's the downside of using desktop-optimized applications on a tiny mobile screen. Zooming the screen helps interactions with small UI elements. If you enable "Magnify with triple-tap" (Android Settings -> Accessibility -> Magnification), you can triple-tap the screen with one finger for a 2x zoom and pan around with two fingers. Triple-tap again to zoom out.

There seems to be a double tap and hold to drag gesture, but it works very inconsistently. I decided to bind the alt key to a physical mouse button for improved dragging.
This can be done from the command line:

Code: [Select]

xmodmap -e "keycode 64 = Pointer_Button1"
xkbset m
This does have the unfortunate side effect of popping up the app bar. If you prefer a different key, the xev command shows the keycode of any key you press.

A remaining major problem is the inability to enter various special characters, mainly ones that would involve the shift key on a full size keyboard. There are some issues in the SDL library and / or X server, that would be easier to fix if the fn key was exposed as a meta key inside X but it currently isn't. Here are some pointers:

https://github.com/pelya/xserver-xsdl/issues/93
Characters behind the fn key and present in the *sym= statements here seem to be the ones that cannot be entered:
https://github.com/pelya/commandergenius/bl...stuff.h#L66-L86
So depending on the Cosmo's chosen keyboard layout some will be accessible using shift and work, others using fn and fail. Characters not mentioned in the *sym= statements are not affected and their fn key combos work.

2

Cosmo Communicator - General Discussion / Installing Devuan Linux inside Android

« on: February 09, 2020, 02:16:25 pm »

When I start XSDL it says that you can connect to this server over wifi at the current IP address or on localhost. I would prefer to only run the local applications...

Not sure if it actually uses TCP locally, because X11 apps keep working after entering this in the Devuan shell:

Code: [Select]

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport x11 -j DROP
iptables -A INPUT -p udp --dport x11 -j DROP
Can't easily test at the moment whether that blocks X11 over wifi but if I omit the dport it certainly stops Android Chrome from loading any pages, so iptables itself seems to work.

3

Cosmo Communicator - General Discussion / Installing Devuan Linux inside Android

« on: February 08, 2020, 02:07:06 pm »

I created this "devuan.sh" so I could access the Devuan environment after phone has been rebooted. (Yeah, need to check if the bind mounts already exist, but now I have a bigger problem).

Code: [Select]

#!/bin/sh
mount /dev/block/mmcblk1p2 /data/mnt

for f in dev dev/pts proc sys; do mount -o bind /$f /data/mnt/$f; done

export TMPDIR=/tmp
export HOME=/root
export PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin:/system/bin:$PATH

mount -o bind / /data/mnt/android
mount -o bind /data /data/mnt/android/data

echo nameserver `getprop net.dns1` > /data/mnt/etc/resolv.conf
chroot /data/mnt /bin/bash
When I run "tsudo ./devuan.sh" I get
chroot: failed to run command '/bin/bash': No such file or directory.

However, if I instead use "su" followed by ./devuan.sh, it works. I have no idea why.

Haven't looked into setting up a proper user account yet, but noticed that Internet access might not work with that script. I'm always using this as the last command: chroot /data/mnt su -
Otherwise you might not get membership of the inet groups. You can try the "groups" command with no arguments to make sure it's not just "root", and try pinging something.

I've got 3 scripts here. The first is to avoid having to separately type su:

Code: [Select]

#!/bin/sh

su -c ./mount.sh
The mount script is pretty much the same as yours.

Finally, I've got an "enter.sh" script with just the exports and chroot. If you unnecessarily repeat the mount commands a few times, somehow it loses the ability to create new ptys so you can't get any kind of Termux (or adb) shell open at all, and have to reboot. I guess a proper solution would be a single script that checks if they're mounted first.

4

Cosmo Communicator - General Discussion / Installing Devuan Linux inside Android

« on: February 07, 2020, 04:45:12 pm »

I followed your instructions and got Devuan running in my Cosmo.

Thanks a lot!

Only thing so far is that apt-get complains as below, but it doesn't seem to be any sort of blocker...

E: Can not write log (Is /dev/pts mounted?) - posix_openpt (2: No such file or directory)

Sounds like /dev/pts is not mounted. Here's what the mount command prints for me:

/dev/block/mmcblk1p2 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,seclabel,data=ordered)
tmpfs on /dev type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,relatime,seclabel,mode=755)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,relatime,seclabel,mode=600)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,relatime,gid=3009,hidepid=2)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,relatime,seclabel)
/dev/block/mmcblk0p36 on /android type ext4 (ro,relatime,seclabel,block_validity,delalloc,barrier,user_xattr)
/dev/block/dm-1 on /android/data type ext4 (rw,nosuid,nodev,noatime,seclabel,noauto_da_alloc,resuid=10010,resgid=1065,error
=panic,data=ordered)

There's a for loop with mount commands in the first post that you may need to re-run as root in the Termux shell, outside Devuan chroot.

Just edited the first post to add: for some reason I cannot explain, all the mount commands seem to affect only Termux or adb but not both. So if you mount something in adb shell, it's not visible in Termux, and vice versa.

5

Cosmo Communicator - General Discussion / Installing Devuan Linux inside Android

« on: February 06, 2020, 04:20:19 pm »

I may wait a bit for firmware updates to settle down and stabilize before I do this, but this is everything I'm looking for out of my Cosmo!

Actually...to me this looks like it should be possible to survive firmware updates. Of course you need a new rooted image for every new FW version but nothing else. I mean, we are just installing the Devuan on an sd-card and accessing it from Termux.

Are network interfaces completely accessible from Linux side? Mostly I'm interested in running stuff like Wireshark/tcpdump... I guess they are.

Just verified that tcpdump works and Chrome for Android -initiated traffic is clearly visible. Mobile data is using an interface called ccmni0 and wifi is wlan0.

ifconfig reports the following interfaces with all the usual info: ccmni0, lo, p2p0, wlan0.

Wireshark seems to work, but the UI is a mess (window doesn't fit on screen).

After installing wireless-tools, iwconfig wlan0 chan 6 works but iwconfig wlan0 mode monitor gives an error:
Error for wireless request "Set Mode" (8B06) :
    SET failed on device wlan0 ; Operation not supported.

It seems I cannot eavesdrop on other packets on the wlan, only those coming to / from the Cosmo.

I can do more tests if you have specific questions.

6

Cosmo Communicator - General Discussion / Installing Devuan Linux inside Android

« on: February 06, 2020, 03:58:04 pm »

Glad you liked this solution!

Hopefully someone in the user community would maintain an up to date Magisk-rooted boot image. Planet is distributing official Google apps and is likely under a contract that makes it all sorts of inconvenient for them to supply any image with built-in support for circumventing Google's SafetyNet...

Either way, this Linux installation method should work on any kind of rooted Android, including an official Planet one.

Even without rooting there are Linux sandboxes for Android like UserLAnd and Andronix, but rooting avoids some workarounds they use that affect performance. Linux with actual root also gets full access to all partitions of SD cards, external SSD hard drives, and the data folders of all installed apps, which helps with many use cases.

There are still various configuration issues like UI themes and X server keyboard layout that need work and I'd be delighted if anyone can share improvements.

7

Cosmo Communicator - General Discussion / Is it possible to run Android inside Debian?

« on: February 04, 2020, 06:12:47 pm »

That was a silly idea, a Devuan chroot setup probably works better.

8

Cosmo Communicator - General Discussion / Installing Devuan Linux inside Android

« on: February 04, 2020, 06:05:37 pm »

This is a minimal hassle (relatively speaking) way to run Android and Debian style Linux simultaneously on the Cosmo, with reasonably high performance.

Android apps will keep working the same as always, for example to make calls and use a mobile-optimized browser, but you can also use Linux desktop apps, installed normally using apt-get.

As a fan of Ubuntu and Debian I chose Devuan Linux because it doesn't depend on systemd. Other criticisms aside, it's a fact that systemd isn't particularly compatible with Android, which has its own nonstandard ways for handling some of the same features.

Some of the commands were shamelessly copied from this article on Medium.

I'm probably going to stick with this setup even if an official Linux distribution appears, although a desktop environment designed for the Cosmo would work better. Hopefully that would also be Debian-based without relying too heavily on systemd, allowing porting it to my setup for simultaneous access to Android apps.

The first step is to root the device. There are workarounds like PRoot used in Termux, but rooting the Cosmo is easy and improves performance and flexibility.

Easiest way for me, mostly using a Mac, was to unlock the bootloader, install Magisk Manager by opening this link to the APK on the device, get Ninji's rooted boot image and flash it (this file is for Planet-supplied firmware version 19 only):

Code: [Select]

fastboot flash boot boot_200118213137_magisk.img
Next you should get a Linux machine and partition an SD card in two primary partitions, first type c "W95 FAT32 (LBA)" and second type 83 (Linux). The purpose of the first partition is to use as additional storage for Android. You only have one SD card slot and it's good to give Android some extra space as well. I used a 500GB SD card, made the first partition 64GB and gave Linux the rest. Now create the filesystems using:

Code: [Select]

mkfs -t vfat /dev/sdx1
mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdx2
Replace sdx with the correct device name in the previous and next snippets...

Now you can fetch the Devuan version of debootstrap and use it to transfer a base system installer to the SD card:

Code: [Select]

mount /dev/sdx2 /mnt
git clone https://git.devuan.org/devuan-packages/debootstrap.git

cd debootstrap
sudo DEBOOTSTRAP_DIR=`pwd` ./debootstrap --verbose --arch arm64 --foreign ascii /mnt http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged/
The best processor architecture to choose for the Cosmo is arm64. It works and is the most modern one with precompiled binaries available. For example the older 32-bit armel also works, but there's no precompiled Chromium available for it at the moment.

The --foreign flag omits running some setup commands inside the new system. They won't work on most PCs because all the binaries are for ARM processors. We'll run the second stage later, on the Cosmo.

Ascii is the name of the latest Devuan distribution version at the time of this writing.

Now you can insert the SD card in the Cosmo. The next steps can be done from the command line on any computer that has adb installed, with the Cosmo connected over USB (or locally from the Termux shell):

Code: [Select]

adb shell
su
mkdir /data/mnt
mount /dev/block/mmcblk1p2 /data/mnt

echo 'deb http://auto.mirror.devuan.org/merged ascii main contrib non-free' > /data/mnt/etc/apt/sources.list
for f in dev dev/pts proc sys; do mount -o bind /$f /data/mnt/$f; done

export TMPDIR=/tmp
export HOME=/root
export PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin:/system/bin:$PATH
chroot /data/mnt /bin/bash

debootstrap/debootstrap --second-stage
The new path is needed to find any commands inside the Devuan chroot, which has binaries in wildly different places. In the end it references the old path, so that the shell could find the next chroot command still in the Android directory tree.

It takes a while and in the end it should print:

I: Base system installed successfully.
I have no name!@localhost:/#

There's now a base system installed but it's pretty broken in some ways. Exit the Devuan environment back to Android shell to fix it from outside, then re-enter:

Code: [Select]

exit

mkdir /data/mnt/dev/shm
mkdir /data/mnt/android
mount -o bind / /data/mnt/android
mount -o bind /data /data/mnt/android/data

echo nameserver `getprop net.dns1` > /data/mnt/etc/resolv.conf
ln -s /proc/mounts /data/mnt/etc/mtab

# You may need to re-run the earlier mount and for loop here if switching between adb shell and Termux.

chroot /data/mnt su -
The shm directory is required for example to avoid Chromium complaining it's out of memory. Mounting the android directory allows accessing the Android root filesystem from Linux. Fixing resolv.conf is necessary to get DNS lookups working during the setup. You may have to re-run the command when switching between mobile and wlan networks, or switch to using some public DNS server like Google's to keep it working longer term.

For some reason I cannot explain, all the mount commands seem to affect only Termux or adb but not both. So if you mount something in adb shell, it's not visible in Termux, and vice versa. Repeating the command in the other environment fixes this, so you may need to re-run the earlier for loop before the last chroot command.

The permissions are still wonky, the root user and apt-get have no Internet access. Let's fix them:

Code: [Select]

groupadd -g 3001 aid_net_bt_admin
groupadd -g 3002 aid_net_bt
groupadd -g 3003 aid_inet
groupadd -g 3004 aid_inet_raw
groupadd -g 3005 aid_inet_admin

gpasswd -a root aid_net_bt_admin
gpasswd -a root aid_net_bt
gpasswd -a root aid_inet
gpasswd -a root aid_inet_raw
gpasswd -a root aid_inet_admin

usermod -g 3003 _apt
Android has some extra layers of security based on groups, and adding the root user to those groups gives it additional privileges. Apt-get uses its own _apt user and moving it to the inet group is the easiest way to let it download packages. Now exit and re-enter the Devuan environment again to refresh the permissions and initialize apt-get:

Code: [Select]

exit
chroot /data/mnt su -

apt-get update
You now have a reasonable command line Linux setup that can be entered from Termux by running su, the mount and export commands from the above snippets, followed by chroot /data/mnt su -

A graphical desktop environment would be a nice extra. The Play Store has a free and working SDL-based X server called XServer XSDL. This way the native Android will handle graphical rendering. After installing and starting it, here's how to set up and start a minimal Xfce from inside the Devuan chroot:

Code: [Select]

apt-get install xfce4-panel xfdesktop4 xfwm4 xfce4-settings xfce4-session xfce4-terminal

export DISPLAY=:0 PULSE_SERVER=tcp:127.0.0.1:4713
startxfce4
You can get Chromium working like this:

Code: [Select]

apt-get install chromium

ln -s /var/lib/dbus/machine-id /etc/machine-id
/etc/init.d/dbus start

chromium --disable-gpu --no-sandbox
Remaining steps to figure out are setting up a user account and fixing X windows issues: keyboard layout and theme, especially widget and text sizes.

9

Cosmo Communicator - General Discussion / Enabling flashing the Cosmo on OS X

« on: February 04, 2020, 02:05:37 am »

Why not just extracting the boot image with SP flash tool, modify it with magisk and reflash it with flash tool? That usually works like a charm on Mediatek devices, no unlocking bootloader, no recovery required. I have not tried it with the cosmo yet though.

Getting the SP flash tool to work on OS X might actually be considerably more problematic than the instructions in the first post. Not sure if it works in a Linux virtual machine, would prefer to avoid that kind of hassle.

10

Cosmo Communicator - General Discussion / Enabling flashing the Cosmo on OS X

« on: February 04, 2020, 01:58:42 am »

Ninji has made Android images available here.

I used them to update to v19, which seems otherwise impossible at the moment. No tools other than fastboot were needed.

If you're wondering whether those images are trustworthy, later in the thread there are instructions for verifying them against files provided by Planet. Also, Ninji is the one who alerted us to the Digitime issue so you could say he's been more vigilant of our privacy than Planet itself.

11

Cosmo Communicator - General Discussion / Enabling flashing the Cosmo on OS X

« on: February 03, 2020, 08:59:32 am »

Hi
I dont really understand the purpose of this procedure. In order to flash a non stockROM, you will need to root it anyway, dont you?

I was able to flash Ninji's rooted boot partition through fastboot only after the above procedure. Please let me know if there's an easier way.

Original plan was to mess with the boot partition myself for other purposes but decided to postpone that. Either way, in my opinion the above steps are necessary.

12

Cosmo Communicator - General Discussion / Enabling flashing the Cosmo on OS X

« on: February 02, 2020, 05:04:42 pm »

There's a whole thread about rooting on the hardware board but here's all the flashing unlocking steps in one place for a simple method that worked for me without downloading any unofficial tools or drivers.

This method will wipe all your data and settings. I did this immediately after getting my Cosmo so there was nothing to keep.

First in your Cosmo open Settings -> System -> Advanced -> About phone
Press 7 times on Build number.

You can now open a previously hidden menu: Settings -> System -> Advanced -> Developer options
Enable OEM unlocking and USB debugging

It might be a good idea to write down info from submenus under Settings -> Network & internet -> Mobile network -> Advanced -> Access Point Names

Now download This zip containing adb and fastboot.

Unzip it in the terminal and install the commands in your path or just change to the platform-tools directory and prepend ./ to all the following adb and fastboot commands.

Connect the Cosmo left side USB-C port to the Mac. I'm using a 16" MacBook Pro running macOS Catalina, version 10.15.2.

Each command to enter is listed in a CODE block and expected response in a QUOTE block:

Code: [Select]

adb devices

List of devices attached
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP   unauthorized

There should also be a popup on the Cosmo screen:

Allow USB debugging?
The computer's RSA key fingerprint is: ...

Press OK and try again:

Code: [Select]

adb devices

List of devices attached
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP   device

Note the change, unauthorized -> device

Code: [Select]

adb reboot bootloader
The Cosmo should now restart to a black background and tiny white text in the bottom left:

=> FASTBOOT mode...

Now the fastboot command should start working:

Code: [Select]

fastboot devices

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP   fastboot

Code: [Select]

fastboot flashing unlock
The Cosmo should now ask for confirmation in tiny white text. Press right side of fingerprint sensor button. This will confirm wiping your device! Afterwards, verify the unlocked status:

Code: [Select]

fastboot getvar unlocked

unlocked: yes
Finished. Total time: 0.001s

Now it's done. Reboot to get back to Android:

Code: [Select]

fastboot reboot
The planets will spin for quite some time while the device gets wiped.

Afterwards I couldn't get mobile data to work. The fix was to power down, remove the SIM card tray, power on (getting to the homescreen) and off again, reinsert the SIM tray and power on.
You can also compare APN settings (Access Point Names) if you wrote them down in the beginning.

Please reply if there's any problems with these instructions.

13

Cosmo Communicator - General Discussion / Is it possible to run Android inside Debian?

« on: January 24, 2020, 11:50:28 am »

I've found this article on how to use Android kernel and userland with Debian between them:
Running Debian Linux on Android device natively

It should set up an ordinary Debian system, with full access to Android that sits inside it while avoiding performance issues that PRoot-based approaches would have.

I mostly do web development and would like to have hardware accelerated WebGL for working on graphics stuff. Android kernel and browser seem like the most likely way to get that working, while otherwise trying to avoid some Android restrictions.

In Play Store there's a package called XServer XSDL (also on GitHub) that I'm hoping could render the Linux desktop without having to resort to VNC.

Could this work on the Cosmo? I'm eager to test myself but haven't received a device yet.

Probably OTA updates are unlikely to work in such a setup? I'm planning to update manually maybe yearly, and browse the web through a Debian-based browser to keep it up to date and avoid vulnerabilities. Android browser would mainly serve for local web app development and testing.