.__ .__ .__ _____.__ ___________ ________/\
| |__ ____ | | | |_/ ____\__|______ ____/_ \ _ \ \_____ )/ ______
| | \_/ __ \| | | |\ __\| \_ __ \_/ __ \| / /_\ \ _(__ < / ___/
| Y \ ___/| |_| |_| | | || | \/\ ___/| \ \_/ \/ \\___ \
|___| /\___ >____/____/__| |__||__| \___ >___|\_____ /______ /____ >
\/ \/ \/ \/ \/ \/
.__
____ _____ ______ ________ __| | ____
_/ ___\\__ \ \____ \/ ___/ | \ | _/ __ \
\ \___ / __ \| |_> >___ \| | / |_\ ___/
\___ >____ / __/____ >____/|____/\___ >
\/ \/|__| \/ \/It finally happened: I bought an Android.
Last Tuesday, I went to CeX (short for "Complete Entertainment Exchange"; literally pronounced "sex") to sell a load of old DVDs and a few games, receiving a whole £4 for the entire bag and then buying a copy of Resident Evil 4 for £5. I was about to leave, when the tech in the window caught my eye.
As someone who is more privacy-conscious than the average enby, I had been meaning to try out a de-Googled Android ROM for quite a while. I looked at the wall of phones, their cameras pointed at me, and decided "£200 for that piece of shit‽ No chance". I then turned to the tablets, and found a device with decent specs and a lower price tag: a rose gold Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 for £110. My current tablet, nicknamed "Peridot", was a cheap piece of shit I had bought from Argos which ran Android 7, and which I only got any use out of by moving slowly and using the lightest software available (the trick is to look for stuff from Android 4 and use Termux whenever possible).
Anyway, the A7 was missing the original packaging and docs, which made it a grade B by CeX' standards and must have been the reason for the lower price tag (for comparison, a brand new Galaxy Tab A9+ costs £239 from Currys). A quick searx told me that it was compatible with LinegeOS and /e/, so I bought it.
After I got it home and played with it, I found that the tablet checked a lot of boxes for me:
And so I got to work installing a ROM.
The first and most obvious question is which ROM to go for. I checked all of the popular ones, but found that the Galaxy Tab A7 is only supported by LineageOS (deGoogled stock Android) and /e/ (Lineage with a nice skin, a different launcher, more apps, and further deGoogling). I was initially on the side of /e/, until I found out that it sometimes takes months to receive updates from upstream; LineageOS, meanwhile, only takes a few days or weeks. From a security perspective, there is a clear winner here.
A couple of users on Lemmy recommended this table, which I found very useful.
The installation of LineageOS was not something I had done before. Unlike GrapheneOS and CalyxOS, Lineage does not have a WebUSB installer. Rather, you have to mess around with ADB and stuff to install a custom recovery and then sideload the OS. A bit more complicated, but completely doable. Except I decided to buy a Samsung.
You see, Samsung (in my opinion) are sort of a wannabe Apple. As such, they have their own proprietary bits and pieces that make custom ROMs tricky. For one thing, ADB Fastboot does not work to install the recovery image; instead, you need to use a tool called Odin.
Odin is a proprietary tool created by Samsung for internal use, which was leaked and is now available for download. It also only runs on Windows, so that made life even more difficult for the FOSS-loving Linux user you read before you. There used to be an open-source clone of Odin, called Heimdall, but it hasn't been updated since 2017 and does not support my device at all.
I knew that flashing a custom recovery would be a delicate process, so I didn't want to risk using Wine. I also didn't try emulation, as Windows 10 always ran particularly sluggishly on my machines. And then I discovered Tiny10.
Tiny10 and Tiny11 are stripped-down versions of Windows 10/11 Enterprise, meaning they have absolutely no bloatware and actually run rather well. So well, in fact, that I decided to keep Tiny10 installed on my spare hard drive instead of wiping it once I was done.
Anyway, things went smoothly from there. I installed Mullvad Browser and NextDNS, activated Windows using the script from massgrave.dev, installed the tools and drivers, downloaded Odin, and flashed the recovery, which booted flawlessly and even respected the tablet's orientation (landscape; not portrait). At last, I opened a command prompt and entered the ADB command to sideload the firmware, rebooted the tablet... and something had gone horribly wrong.
Rather than the LineageOS boot animation, I was greeted by a teal-coloured splash screen, informing me that my tablet could not boot on account of unrecognised software. I looked back over at my laptop, and realised my complete and utter idiocy: I had jumped the gun. The LineageOS package was barely even halfway downloaded, so I had just flashed an empty zip archive. The reason for my not noticing could have been anything, but I'd blame the Smirnoff Ice I had been drinking.
"No biggie", I thought. "I can just try again". I turned the tablet off and held the buttons in the right manner to enter download mode again... only to be greeted by the same screen. I tried again, and again, and again, until it dawned on my that it simply wouldn't go. I had soft-bricked my tablet.
So, what could I do? I turned back to the internet of course, and after a few minutes of searxing I eventually came across a thread on XDA Developers. In the tablet's OS-less state, plugging in the power cable did exactly the same thing as pressing the power button, so I could seemingly trick the device into booting to download mode by holding the volume keys and then plugging it in. It only bloody worked.
Of course, the tablet gods weren't finished with me quite yet. When I tried to re-flash the recovery image, it failed, so I turned back to the internet and found another XDA thread that explained my problem. I needed to enable USB debugging or something, and check that OEM unlocking was still enabled (which it would be anyway, but every guide says to double-check). As my tablet had no OS, I obviously couldn't do that. I needed the firmware back.
Finding the correct One UI firmware was a lot harder than expected. Most of the sites I visited were full of ads (at least, according to uBO) and definitely seemed like the sort of thing a government would set up to try and distribute spyware. A lot of them also wanted to charge me for the files, which I was not prepared to do. Finally, I found a site that seemed okay, and (after figuring out which region code I needed) downloaded the firmware, which weighed in at a whopping 4GB.
I went through a couple of cycles of reflashing the firmware and re-bricking the tablet, but I eventually got it and managed to flash the recovery again. Paying close attention to the LineageOS install guide, I lined up the command, went into sideloading mode, and hit enter.
The counter hit 100% and the recovery returned to the home screen, and I double checked everything to ensure I hadn't made another silly mistake, before finally rebooting. My memory has been on the fritz for the last five years (give or take), so I don't recall much about what I did next, but I do remember praying. I'm not religious in any sense, but I thought it might help me mentally to quietly utter "If there is a deity of any description, just give me this one". I opened my eyes, and I was greeted by the boot animation.
After that, I took a photo to follow up a Mastodon thread I'd written and pretty much went to bed. I would be travelling across the UK on the following day, so I needed to sleep. I rooted around in a junk box for the 10" tablet case I had made from leather back when I was 12, took my MacBook out of my rucsac, put the tablet in, and turned out the light...
...only to pull out my phone and look at Pinterest and Tumblr until 2AM, as is traditional for depressed queers like myself. All the same, I felt proud of having finally achieved some degree of mobile freedom, and having had my perseverence pay off.
First Published 2024-08-04 23:50 BST
Last Edited 2024-08-05 12:23 BST
text/gemini; charset=utf-8This content has been proxied by September (3851b).