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Korean variants of Galaxy S2 works with Replicant 6.0

Added by Jude Nam about 5 years ago

https://imgur.com/a/mxgU6Jh

The picture shows the model is I9100, but it's actually M250S (as you can see, the baseband version is M250SKSJMI1)
All Korean variants M250S/M/L use Exynos processor and have very similar (or equal?) hardware specs, so it should work for other two models too, but I haven't tested them myself.

First I flashed leaked I9100 firmware from XDA:
https://forum.xda-developers.com/galaxy-s2/development-derivatives/firmware-leaked-samsung-4-1-2-xxlsj-t1996714

This firmware didn't include modem.bin, so my baseband version remained with the original Korean mobem.bin image.
I also repartitioned it using I9100's stock 2GB pit file provided by Grim Kriegor:
https://github.com/GrimKriegor/Misc/tree/master/Replicant/PartitionTables

For some reason, Lineage OS's (which Replicant is based on) setting app kept crashing when I tried to format my SD card, so I booted into the I9100 stock rom just to reformat my internal memory. Then I flashed Replicant I9100 recovery image using heimdall and followed the installation process. After waiting a while, the installation succeeded. It took a while, so I thought it was frozen, but it was actually working.

Then I flashed 3.1.0-0 version (any newer versions of it didn't seem to work well with S2) of TWRP for I9100 just to make a nandroid backup since the Replicant's recovery didn't have option for creating nandroid backup (or I'm just too stupid to find it)

At first, I thought TWRP would still work installing Replicant zip, but I guess it doesn't work that way.

Telephony works (unless it's carrier locked). The S2 in the picture is connected to T-Mobile US.

Now I'm waiting for TPE-N150 to arrive.


Replies (7)

RE: Korean variants of Galaxy S2 works with Replicant 6.0 - Added by Fil Bergamo about 5 years ago

Hi, Jude Nam.
Welcome to Replicant!

Thank you very much for reporting your successfull experience!
It seems like the Korean version you mention is actually very similar in its hardware to the I9100.
It's worth to have a search into details, to see whether they are indeed the very same hardware branded under different codenames or they are actually two different boards in different flavours.

If the latter is the case, it would be helpful to write a wiki page about the model you tested, following these guidelines.

Thank you again, and happy hacking!

Fil

P.S. I've deleted your original post as you wished (the one you have moved here)/

RE: Korean variants of Galaxy S2 works with Replicant 6.0 - Added by Jude Nam about 5 years ago

Hello, Fil.
I've received an OTG adapter and a compatible USB Wifi device and ran into some issues.

The original Rep Wifi app installed in R6.0 was version 0.5 (which is really buggy and unstable) and I can't update it from F-Droid for some reason. The new version shows as incompatible (the description says android 4.2 or newer which R6.0 should qualify).

I tried downloading directly from the website and tried to install it and it just fails. Maybe it's because it's a system app. I could just live with 0.5 version, but it keeps disconnecting for some reason.

Not sure what's causing the problem though. I haven't tried everything yet.

Also I'm having a problem with browsers. I tried Fennec but it closes itself right after launching it. I wonder if anyone else is having similar issues.

RE: Korean variants of Galaxy S2 works with Replicant 6.0 - Added by Andrés D about 5 years ago

You can't update RepWifi 0.5 because it's signed by Replicant, and F-Droid's is signed with a different key. You would need to manually uninstall it (is adb the only way?) and then install it with F-Droid. The goal is to remove the need for the (welcome) hack that repwifi is, there is already a very good looking patch for this. Until then the plan is release the f-droid signed package: https://redmine.replicant.us/issues/1887

About browsers, it's a problem with the lack of complete OpenGLES. Recent versions of browsers based on firefox and apps using a recent webview need a more complete opengles implementation than the default software-based that Replicant has. The best solution will come when hardware 3d acceleration is supported, until then the only solution is enabling llvmpipe as the software renderer. But with llvmpipe the Replicant GUI is very slow (I mean, it's very slow on i9300, but maybe not much worse on your i9100 because of the lower resolution), specially the lock screen and the launcher Trebuchet. Also, although more apps work with llvmpipe than with libagl, with a few (specially old apps in my experience) it's the other way around. I updated webview to the latest Google's "Android System WebView" apk (with yalp app, it's in Play Store) and it works with llvmpipe, but if you go back to libagl you would need to uninstall the webview update or Replicant's browser will no work.

https://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/GraphicsResearch

For switching between llvmpipe and libagl, with adb and root for adb enabled in your Replicant settings, do (as suggested by wiewo):

adb root
adb remount
adb shell "grep -q "ro.libagl=1" /system/build.prop && sed "s/ro.libagl=1/ro.libagl=0/" -i /system/build.prop || sed "s/ro.libagl=0/ro.libagl=1/" -i /system/build.prop"

RE: Korean variants of Galaxy S2 works with Replicant 6.0 - Added by Fil Bergamo about 5 years ago

As Andrés D already explained very well, you cant' update RepWifi because of different signatures.
Please follow Andrés' suggestion to update to the latest RepWifi release.

As for stability..
I'm very sorry but I think you won't gain much wifi stability by upgrading RepWifi.
I9100 (Galaxy S2) is well known for behaving bad with external dongles and unfortunately it's not a RepWifi-related issue.
It's almost certainly related to the relatively high current required by compatible dongles, compared to the low-power battery in i9100. As such, the wireless interface gets often removed unexpectedly, causing network loss problems.
That's probably solvable by patching the driver somehow, so that the adapter requires less current to work, but that's too far from my programming skills.. as always, contribution are welcome, if anybody has skills and time to work on that.
If WiFi is a priority to you, i9300 and n7100 are much better machines in this field.

As Andrés said, there is a patch for using Wifi through the native settings GUI: it's confirmed to be working at least on the i9300, and it's currently under review to be pushed into next Replicant release.
In the meantime, I can provide unofficial developer builds of Replicant that integrate the patch if anybody is interested.

RE: Korean variants of Galaxy S2 works with Replicant 6.0 - Added by Jude Nam about 5 years ago

Thank you for your detailed reply!

I've followed the instruction to update RepWifi, and indeed the Wifi adapter doesn't seem to work well with S2 in anyway.

Well I tried multiple other solutions such as OTG ethernet which didn't work either. It seems it was Lineage OS's issue, which according to older posts, seems doable but I didn't try it. I've tried USB reverse tethering and followed the instruction:
https://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/ReplicantUSBNetworking
I connected through a Windows 10 machine (the only accessible machine I had at by that time) and after fidgeting around with some network settings, I was successfully able to connect to the internet(and it was really slow for some reason!), but that wasn't really what I wanted. So using S2 as a stable phone doesn't seem to work well at the moment.

Luckily, I had a spare Galaxy Note II to test with, which was also a Korean variant(SHV-E250S), with LTE support. Which means the device's hardware specs are closer to N7105 than N7100. Unfortunately, N7105 uses different modem, so it should have some compatibility issue, but I tried it anyway.

E250S is known to behave well with N7105 roms, so I assumed if N7105 works with N7100 ported Replicant(which is pretty much unknown), it should also be work too.

I followed the instruction to install R6.0 and as I thought, the modem doesn't work. IMEI is also gone. I highly doubt the modem does anything useful at this point. I think it's safe to say that N7105 will also behave in the same way E250S does when Replicant is installed.

Anyway other than modem, everything works fine including the Wifi adapter.

So in conclusion, if you ever wanted a Replicant-installed wifi-only tablet, I think this is an option.
In general, I'm happy with the result.

P.S. One more thing to mention, there are three Korean variant of Galaxy Note II: SHV-E250S/K/L. E250S and E250K are known to have similar specs where E250L's status is rather unknown. I couldn't find any useful information about that one.

Also last question.
Do you have any suggested browsers that works well with Replicant? Firefox-based browsers don't work and I heard the default browser and Lightning browser have some security issues.

RE: Korean variants of Galaxy S2 works with Replicant 6.0 - Added by Kurtis Hanna over 4 years ago

Thanks for letting us know that Replicant works on the E250S! We should add that to our documentation. We likely won't be supporting 4G on the device in the extremely near future since we are going to focus on adding 4G support for the i9305, n7105, and i317 first. You can follow the project on that front here: https://redmine.replicant.us/issues/1945 Regarding the OTG ethernet support, there has been some progress on that issue here: https://redmine.replicant.us/issues/1889 Regarding the browsers that work well with Replicant, we have new experimental Roms available that enable Firefox-based browsers to work. You can test them at link link in this post: https://redmine.replicant.us/boards/9/topics/15369?r=15374#message-15374 Sorry it took so long to respond to your post. I hope this message finds you well.

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